Benoit Mandelbrot, a Polish mathematician, pioneered fractal geometry, spending most of his career at IBM and Yale University. We can apply fractal concepts to tech services organizations to increase accountability and business performance.
Fractals are geometric patterns that exhibit self-similarity (they look the same at different magnifications). Snowflakes, coastlines, or lung structures appear in nature in these forms.
Applying fractal concepts in an organizational setting could mean replicating similar structures at different levels of the organization. For example, if a tech services company has a tag team of two (two-in-a-box) covering accounts, this recursive approach could be implemented at all levels of the organization to push decision-making to the edge and increase agility:
Overall (company level): CEO; COORegion (geographic divisions): Americas SVP; Americas SVP, OperationsPortfolio (groups of accounts): BU Managing Director; BU VP, OperationsAccount (single customer): Account Manager; Project Manager
The two-in-a-box framework can be extended to three-in-a-box or other configurations that better suit the company specifically (i.e., CEO, COO, CTO). The key is to define the customer impact the organization seeks and to establish responsibilities and a reporting structure that optimize it.
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