Agile organizations should look to knowledge, not tasks

Managers who want to design agile contemporary organizations to solve new problems need to make sure the team has diverse skills, knowledge and experiences, concludes a new paper by University of California Riverside and Harvard Business School professors.

Theories of how organizations assign tasks haven’t changed much since the 1960s, when organizations were seen as self-contained bureaucracies and designed around compartmentalized tasks for workers to perform.

The focus was squarely on tasks and how those could best be allocated among the staff so as to reduce task interdependence. This appr...