This Organization Is Dis-Organization

And move they do. At Oticon, it's hard to tell just who's working where. A marketing team writing product brochures sits next to software engineers writing code; the "chip-design center" (one of the largest in Scandinavia) is a cluster of workstations virtually indistinguishable from an audiology research group; a functioning machine shop, which builds the tools used in the company's Danish factory, sits just outside the cafeteria.

"When people move around and sit next to different people, they learn something about what others are doing," says Poul Erik Lyregaard, Oticon's R&D leader for 20 years. "They also learn to respect what those people do. It's hard to maintain `enemy pictures' in this company -- they're not `those bloody fools in marketing.' You know too much about what people do."

Oticon has embraced a number of technologies to support its dis-organization. One reason employees are free to move around is that they don't have to drag lots of paper with them. Every morning, people visit the company's second-floor "paper room" to sort through incoming mail. They may keep a few magazines and reports to work with for the day, but they run everything else through an electronic scanner and throw the originals into a shredder. The shredder feeds a long glass tube that empties into recycling bins on the ground floor -- unleashing a daily blizzard of confetti.

Telephones are important too. Since Oticon employees are always on the move, there's no place to take calls from customers and suppliers. That's why mobile phones have become such a visible part of the company's technology toolkit. They're small, sleek -- and a permanent appendage to the waists of Oticon's employees. People talk on their phones as they stand at the coffee bars or take calls as they stride from lunch to the lab.

Oticon's Think Tank applies technology to support shared creativity. The large, computer-filled conference room includes groupware systems for electronic brainstorming and electronic whiteboards connected to videoconferencing equipment. These tools "speed up our intellectual process by a factor of five," Kolind claims. "We can do in one day what we used to do in one week. We use them whenever we come to a critical decision-making point. We also use groupware for collective writing of technical manuals. It's fascinating to watch 10 people simultaneously working on one document."

It's hard to imagine a more dis-organized organization than Oticon. But even here, Kolind warns, it's easy to fall back into old habits. Last Christmas was such a time. The company had spent a year obsessed with releasing a new line of digital hearing aids -- a potential breakthrough product. The downside to this productive focus was a sense that long-standing project teams were hardening into something dangerously close to departments.

Kolind's response? "I exploded the organization."

In a rare top-down intervention, the CEO instructed people and teams to relocate based on the time horizons of their projects. Teams devoted to short-term business goals (sales, marketing, customer service) moved to the top floor. People working on medium-term projects (upgrading current products, for example) and long-term research went to the second floor. People focused on technology, infrastructure, and support moved to the first floor.

"It was total chaos," Kolind declares approvingly. "Within three hours, over a hundred people had moved. To keep a company alive, one of the jobs of top management is to keep it dis-organized."

Polly LaBarre (plabarre@fastcompany.com) is a senior editor at Fast Company. Visit Oticon (http://www.oticon.com) on the World Wide Web.