Why the future of work needs a different kind of organisation with Perry Timms

In this episode of LEAP Listens, Sara and Roger are joined by internationally recognised HR thinker and transformation expert Perry Timms to explore the idea of the 'polymorphic organisation' a business designed to adapt, shift and evolve as the world around it changes. Drawing on decades of experience across HR, organisational design and change, Perry explains why companies need to balance the demands of today with the realities of tomorrow, and why rigid structures are no longer enough.

From agile working and self-managed teams to future skills, leadership and employer brand, the conversation explores how organisations can become more adaptive without losing stability.

LEAP Listens is brought to you by LEAP Create, an award-winning people communications agency.  Find out more at leapcreate.co.uk

Transcript

Welcome And A Small Talk Rant

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hello and welcome to Leap Listens, the People Communications podcast from Leap Create. I'm Sarah, and with me is Roger, our creative director. Hello. In this series, we're talking to industry experts about workplace culture, employer branding, and how to communicate with the people that matter most, your candidates and employees. These are bite-sized episodes, short enough to get to the point and learn on the go. If you're new here, welcome. We're heading towards a hundred episodes, and you can find them all on our website, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

SPEAKER_02 0:35

Hello, Rog. Hello there, Sarah. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_01 0:39

I'm really good. How are you?

SPEAKER_02 0:41

I'm very well. Although I keep getting surfed up these things on Instagram about small talk, and it says, never, ever, ever say how's your weekend? And never, ever, ever say how are you? And it's things like that. It's like, well, what what what am I doing to say? Yeah. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Thank you. I'll start with that instead.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

Yeah, start with that.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

It's not as good as mine, but no, of course.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

No.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Right. Who are we talking to today?

SPEAKER_02 1:12

Um, you do know, don't you? Is that with you?

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Yes, I do know. All right.

Meet Perry Timm And The Theme

SPEAKER_01 1:18

I was trying to do my small talk.

SPEAKER_02 1:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Um Perry. Yeah, Perry Timm. So we saw Perry Timm speak recently about uh something called the polymorphic organization. And now you're thinking, what's that? Um, and it's essentially an organization that can shift shape depending on what's needed. And I'm sure Perry will give a brilliant explanation about what that is. So, yeah, just to give you a little bit more about Perry, um, he's been ranked the most influential HR thinker in the UK and has spent his career helping organisations transform. So today we're going to be exploring exactly what polymorphic means, how it changes the way we think about transformation and also recruitment and employer branding.

SPEAKER_02 2:08

Shall we get stuck in?

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Shall we? Welcome to the podcast, Perry.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Oh, thank you. Great to be here.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Excellent. Well, it's great to have you. So, Perry, tell us a little bit about you and the work that you do.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

So I'm in year 24 in the HR profession, and I sometimes say to people, don't hold that against me. Uh, because we're not always the most popular people in rooms, right? But um, I get to do some amazing work about the flow of work, the design of organizations, and almost like the energy that should come from a really positive working experience. So, yeah, I get to uh operate across a number of different sectors, sizes, but all the time the kind of problems people are asking me to help out is how can I get better at this and how do I get more from it?

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Brilliant. So we saw you at um a conference and you did a fantastic talk, and you talked about um the polymorphic organization, and it'd be great to understand a little bit more about that and what it is, and um yeah, how how that all works.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

There

What A Polymorphic Organisation Is

SPEAKER_00 3:09

is a long story, but I'll keep it as tight as I can. So in the early 2000s, when I was at work, I sort of got the little bug for agile. By that I mean stand-ups and scrums and backlogs and retrospectives. So I'd worked in tech projects for a while, and this was a breath of fresh air because it was so non-lumbering, it was all participative, and then it led me to find out about organizations that were self-managed. They they kind of got rid of bosses in a way, and they were all very much autonomy-led. So I've been on a mission to kind of research that for quite some time, and there are lots of books that talk about this as a potential next stage evolution of work, and I kind of hung my hat on that. Covid happened, political turmoil, conflicts around the world. It didn't look like it was going to happen, and I got a little bit dismayed by it. But I found some solace in the fact that actually my thinking was changing into maybe an organization shouldn't completely abandon everything it's got because some things keep it safe and strong and steady, and other things are necessary for pioneering exploratory, adventurous forms of work. So I thought, what might that look like? And in object-oriented design or object-oriented programming, there's this concept within called polymorphism, which is where an object in a computer program does different things depending on the data it receives. And I thought, that sounds like how an organization should behave. So I probed it, played with it, started to look at it, and found it was also a biological term. So, like an octopus is pretty polymorphic, changes colour, changes shape, all that kind of thing. And I just went on this rampage of research and assembly of what could polymorphic organizations actually mean. And it's the best of both, really. It's the best of traditional, it's the best of stable, it's the best of pioneering, the best of exploratory. And it just kind of captured me thinking this is how it should be. So I started to look around and I found there are tools that have been around for decades that actually help us create that sense of polymorphism, like a learning organization that doesn't just abandon the whole concept of learning, but it doesn't try and squeeze it into programs of courses either. So I thought this is one of those things hiding in plain sight. And I've been writing about it since the end of June, and I've got now 31 chronicles, I call them, on Substack. And I've even built my own bot on Lovable that helps people understand what it is. So that's the kind of story behind it. Essentially, an organization that can handle its legacy and its future, change its logic, change its structure without it feeling convulsive and dangerous.

SPEAKER_02 5:39

Yeah, that's a good explanation.

Can Hierarchies Flex Under Pressure

SPEAKER_02 5:41

And do you see that working for any type of organization? I'm just kind of thinking about organizations that are innately hierarchical. Do you feel like that's something that could apply or at least elements of it?

SPEAKER_00 5:55

Yeah, so I think uh let's call the hierarchy an entity, right? So if the hierarchy is an entity, I think it thinks it's impenetrable, it's going to exist forever, but I think it kids itself because I think we dismantle the hierarchy a little bit gently all the time. So in organizations that are even the most robustly constructed thing, if there's a crisis or there's a surge, guess what? They abandon all of that formality and that structure and even that power dynamic, and they go to the surge and they do whatever they do, and then they solve that problem and they stabilize again. So I think it's that I think it can apply everywhere. But I think you will find resistance, uh Roger, in terms of how some people would go, that's too frightening for me. I've got too much power, I don't want to let it go. So there will be like human resistance and system resistance. But I think more companies, if they started to really, really look at how they operate, would realise they are a collection of individuals with a mission in mind and stories that bind them, and that doesn't necessarily need the strong, almost like asphyxiating structures that they put around it. So I think it applies anywhere. I think it will apply to some industries more than others, ones that are a little bit more adaptive already, um, and ones that are in a kind of almost like flux of change because of the nature of the way the world's going. Think of the automobile industry and EVs and hydrogen power. But you're gonna have to be very polymorphic to do that.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Yeah, you're right. And

Leading Today And Tomorrow Together

SPEAKER_01 7:21

something you said, Perry, when we were on stage, um, really stuck with me. Um, and you said leaders are running two businesses, one for today and one for the future. Can we just like talk about that and unpack that?

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Because I think there is always a kind of rear view mirror in organizations. So let's just take even their performance reporting, right? Their performance reporting is almost like what happened yesterday and a lot further back. They very rarely look at but what are the potential opportunities for us? And they might build a strategy and they might think that does it, but it doesn't feel real enough. It's a story, but it doesn't have enough credence for people to sort of detach from the backward-looking side of things. But that backward-looking data gives you a sense of not just the comfort that we're hitting some numbers, but almost like, what but what problems haven't we solved yet? That actually the future cells of us should do, we should solve them, we should resolve them. I'll give you a really hot example at the moment. Graduate hiring and entry-level jobs. So the backward report would tell you that last quarter we hired less people. The forward look says, but what does that do to our talent pipeline? How do we become an organization that can rely on internal capability when we've just reduced the size of our intake, therefore eliminated some options for future stars, future specialists. So we don't do enough of the forward looking. And I think that's the thing that I want to kind of really press on this to your point, um, Sarah, which is that if an organization wants to be serious about its future, it ought to think about it more realistically than it does now. It's not just a pipe dream for five years' time, it is literally tomorrow, next month, and uh next quarter. Not disrespecting the legacy though. So don't anchor yourself in the legacy, don't ignore the future, so don't abandon the legacy. Bring the best of the legacy into this continuous momentum towards a future that's better, sharper, smarter, quicker, brighter, more inventive. And that is two entities that you're managing at once, not just a bit of one and a bit of another. Leaders don't realise it, and then they worry why they're so busy and they're so unclear and confused.

SPEAKER_02 9:28

I um I'm gonna try and ask a question wrapped up in a very long ramble. Go on then. I'm loving the thought of it already. So

Recruiting For Now And The Future

SPEAKER_02 9:40

a lot of the work that we do is around we call it, let's call it employer brand, but it's everything to do with the employment space and everything in that life cycle of work from attraction and recruitment through to onboarding, internal communications, um, all of that stuff. That that world you know extremely well. And what you've said does resonate in that you've got industries that are changing extremely rapidly, let's take sort of construction for instance, and you've got a need now, and then you've got a need for where's the construction industry going, what's the um what's the talent that we're gonna need in the future? And I suppose what would your advice be, or how do you reconcile those two things of a very immediate business as usual? We need these people to do this thing for a thing that we're doing now, and projecting forward to, yeah, but if we're gonna be the organization that we need to be in the industry, um, how how do we kind of like do that too? How do we sort of most simultaneously recruit the people of tomorrow and the people of today, even though they might be different?

SPEAKER_00 10:49

Absolutely brilliant question because I think that is the thing that makes this all come to land, right? So, yeah, you were right to ramble it. Seriously, you were. So I I remember um uh there's a guy called Vijay Govindarahan who came up with the concept of a thousand dollar house, and what it was was a very rapidly constructed dwelling that had as much as anybody needed, but was aimed at solving housing crises. And so you kind of look at that and think, wow, that could really take off, couldn't it? But then if you're sat in a 10.8 million mansion in Kensington, it means nothing to you because it's not at all your market. So I think the answer to the question lies in are you creating a new market with a product, not just an adapted product. And if you're creating a new market, you absolutely will need to recruit new people, but also bring some experienced hands from the legacy into that because they'll bring institutional know-how, they'll anchor crazy ideas back into safety. So you would have to reassemble your organization and particularly your jobs and how you position them and get people to sort of know what they're there to do. So my answer is going to be a lot rambly as well. So so you would you wouldn't necessarily run them as a kind of parallel outfit, they would have an intersection, they would have an overlap, and that crucial overlap is where you need people who can navigate both dynamics. You want your future people pulling you forward, you want your legacy people holding you safe. But this little intersectional piece is where you want people who are literally polymaths, they're multiplicitous thinkers who can do both kind of tabulations. So, therefore, you are actually creating almost like three waves of your workforce. No organizations thinking like that, they're not they're not even structuring like it, but they do need to think about both the structure and then the almost like the psychological and intellectual context that people are in. That does require you to almost abandon some of the assumptions that you make about what people work and and how you lead them and so on, and have a real sense of emergence in one area, almost consolidation in another, so you're oscillating through those three kind of waves. That's a very different employment proposition. But how exciting is it that you can have people who can go, I could hold legacy as a thing of beauty, um, and not just you know, kind of holding us back. I can work in this kind of oscillating space, and or I can be pulling the organization forward. I can't think of many people who wouldn't find themselves in one of those three spaces. Good answer. Thank you. You fixed it. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

That's great.

SPEAKER_00 13:13

Thank you, man.

Start Small With A Problem Cell

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Um, for someone that's thinking about this and thinks, do you know what? That's a really great idea, but we're really stuck in today's business. Where would they start?

SPEAKER_00 13:27

Uh the short answer, and it's not glib at all, is small. So I think there is this thing about incremental, almost like um uh uh you know accruing senses of how this is possible. So I think that there's normally a problem that all organizations have been staring at and trying to fix for ages, and it hasn't worked. That doesn't mean you keep it where it is. I think you assemble a small group of people who've just got the stamina and the wherewithal to want to solve that problem, and then you go, what will you need to do that? And you put everything you need around them and you create almost like a little cell within. And you go, right, go fix that problem, do whatever you need to do. You've almost got a license to go wild and adventurous, and we'll make sure it doesn't disrupt our core because we need to keep the lights on. And then A, that's exciting for some people anyway, but B, that's going to be so revealing about how replicable that would be. So you don't have to run one cell, then you could run 10 or you could run a hundred. And that just requires you to re-architect your organization once you're confident in it. So that genuinely isn't a glib answer. It's like start small, but start with something that if people saw it solve, they would think, wow, that's significant enough to want to know what else we can do with this kind of model and approach and skill set. So that's that's the advice I'd give people.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Okay. And

Why Flywheel Teams Create Momentum

SPEAKER_01 14:39

what would that team be called? Like how would that what would yeah, what would a company kind of call them, yeah, those people together?

SPEAKER_00 14:46

Yeah, that you you'll see some examples of people who've done it before. So you've got like um you've got like Skunkworks at Lockheed Martin, you've got like red teams in in some innovative areas, and you've got Spotify squads, so like there there are lots of examples where they're used to departing from normal linguistic frames and different operating systems for them. I would actually call them a flywheel team. And the reason I want to call them a flywheel team is because flywheels are one of the things that have been around since Jim Collins wrote Good to Great book and have been largely ignored by the commercial world and the business world, but they're a much better way of saying what does performance look like, not just some fictional KPI. They are literally rotating kind of forms of energy that at points along this rotation they have different value creating inputs and outputs that keep it in a momentum-based approach. That when you get the to the top of the flywheel, where it's almost like it reinforces the reason you wanted the flywheel to track your performance in the first place, you're off to the next cycle of what improvements that looks like and benefits that looks like. So I'd call them a flywheel team because I think that's what they're doing. They are taking a piece of work, they're mapping it out, they're building momentum, they're testing and learning as they're going, but ultimately they are all about not getting stuck, not getting slow, speeding through this process sensibly to then achieve outcomes that aggregate into the ultimate thing you want to be there for. And I think that's so clear then to people that that's why they're there. I think they'd feel very different about the work they do.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Yeah, that's great. And then is that what you you do, Perry? So you go into businesses and and help lead that flight flywheel team. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

Yeah. I wouldn't have called it that even uh you know a year ago, but I would call it that now because I would want to assemble them around a specific topic. So I've got one client I I only started working with recently, and they really, really want to accelerate a new part of the organization from a human capital people perspective. And the business leaders are sitting on the hands of it, they're a bit cautious, but the HR team are wanting to power ahead. So we had a conversation about it, and they do need to bring people in who can get gain that momentum and really push the leaders to open the gates to it. That's a flywheel team because they will have a number of different denominating uh accelerants, I suppose you'd say, that they'll be working on as a team to present an outcome to that board structure to go stop getting in the way of this, we're ready for it. And I think that's the sort of momentum building that we need from almost like from bottom up.

SPEAKER_02 17:10

I think you should trademark perimorphic and that yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:18

I'm off to do that now, and I'll I'll kind of share the scores with you if it starts to add value, right? Because you came up with it. I love that, thank you. I've just written

AI Curiosity Plus Top Book Picks

SPEAKER_00 17:28

my own bot actually in Lovable, Polymorphic Bot, and I've called it well, Kirsten came up with a name, I've called it Poly. Um people can go into this bot and say, I'm interested in polymorphism, what does it mean? And you can spar with it, there are system scans, practices, reports in there. So it's literally a little bank of content that can help people understand through the questions that you're kind of raising with me. So it's like a bot version of me.

SPEAKER_02 17:50

Yeah, I would I would say it came across really clearly in that conference and chat to you afterwards how you've been a very sort of whether an earlier doctor or a real doctor of AI, I think you were kind of you know, even down to your note-taking and everything. So I was quite impressive to see.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

Yeah, thank you, man. Yeah, I've always been in this space where technology has led me to be curious about it rather than frightened about it or naive about it. So uh I I don't jump into the first wave, I kind of come in at wave 1.5 before it gets really big because I I do see what others do and I learn from them. They're the real pioneers, right? But I I would say I am a bit of an earlier. Is it that time, Sarah?

SPEAKER_01 18:33

It is that time. I know I can't believe already we're um at time, and this is the the thing with the the bite size, but we've I think already just got some really great advice and information from you, Perry, on this whole um polymorphic world um and what companies can do. So, our final question that we always ask our guests is um what's your current top read or listen? Or is it it doesn't have to be your current one, it could be a great book or something.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

It could be crikey, yeah. That would be very vain of me to do that, wouldn't it? But in a bizarre sort of twist, writing that book actually, I think opened me up to thinking if I want to genuinely improve what the HR profession does for the world and I create a model that helps do that, it's futile if the rest of the machinery around it doesn't change. So that sort of gave birth to polymorphism. So my own book, the HR Operating Model, did do that for me. Um, uh I I will pick on a couple of um books that have meant a lot to me. Um, and the first one is Reinventing Organizations by Frederick Laloux from 2014 because he just spotlighted all these companies who went screw convention. We are just literally going to do a very humanist but powerfully viable way of running businesses that are not orthodox at all, and I loved that. So that was a massive turning point for me. Um, but I'll go back even further to the one that turned me onto self-management, and and now I'm actually working with the author of the book, which is almost like I say to people, it's like I'm right, I'm like I'm writing songs with Smokey Robinson. Um it's Ricardo Semmler's Maverick, because that just talked about this engineering company where he he fired all the bosses when he inherited it from his dad. And he said to the engineering teams, You run the business as yours, you have your PLs and your clients, and and he turned it into a much more profitable entity, and it's still going now, and it's spun out into all sorts of things. So Maverick and Reinventing Organizations are two books which literally are indelibly burnt into my mind and have become almost biblical forms. That's fantastic, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:41

It's a little bit like the um the the the guy, the Timpson's guy, isn't it? Who um yeah, his theory on kind of just um just don't don't don't put the money in the till, I think. And there was another, there was basically two rules, didn't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

Yeah, yeah. I love I love it because it's almost like how can you do your best for me if we don't trust you type thing. Isn't that an absolutely wonderful story? And and and that has been a business that I think everybody looks at and admires and never takes the learning into their own, do they? I think it's not for them, and it absolutely is so it's a great example, Roger. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 21:17

Yeah, fantastic.

Wrap-Up And Where To Subscribe

SPEAKER_02 21:18

Well, thank you very much, Perry. I hope you know I'd like to think maybe there'll be a part two, because I think there's probably so much more that we could I'd love that. We could we could so much more information that you could um impart. Yeah, have another round. Oh, brilliant, excellent.

SPEAKER_01 21:36

Well, thank you, Perry. It's been yeah, great to to speak with you.

SPEAKER_02 21:40

That was a good one. It was brilliant. What a nice chap. Very nice chap. Very I imagine he's quite good in a crisis.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:47

Feels like someone that you'd want around kind of could calm things down.

SPEAKER_01 21:51

Want on your side, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 21:53

Yeah, give you a a polymorphic solution.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

Pep talk.

SPEAKER_02 21:56

Um yeah, yeah. Which I and I I suppose it's uh there is I like doing these is because you do well, I do anyway, learn new stuff. Absolutely. Kind of think sometimes you're in the in the weeds of the work, aren't you? And it's quite good to have those people who are sort of bigger thinkers.

SPEAKER_01 22:15

Yeah, and he was brilliant, wasn't he, on stage? So he was, he was great, yeah. Yeah, really, really good. So if anyone ever got the chance to to see him, highly recommend.

SPEAKER_02 22:25

Yeah, but also I completely get where he's coming from. You know, I use that example of the the built environment, whatever. But yeah, thinking about organisations having these two parallel tracks of of what they need today and what they'll need tomorrow. And that's just I think the acceleration of that is quicker, isn't it? Because things are moving, moving fast.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 22:51

Cool, good. All right.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

Um so yeah, just to say, if you're working in HR and employer branding or even transformation, then this will actually give you quite a lot to to think about.

SPEAKER_02 23:03

So listen back. That's a good one. Shall we? Call time.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

Shall we? So just to say and subscribe whenever you can to our podcasts on Spotify.

SPEAKER_02 23:14

Yeah, all good book stores.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

Apple Music.

SPEAKER_02 23:17

Yeah, WH Smith's, Woolworths.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

All of those, all good bookstores.

SPEAKER_02 23:23

Yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

All of those will be there. Thank you for listening.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

Bye.