Fellow Eamonn Molloy OBE Publishes New Book About Self-Driving Organisations

We are delighted to share that Pembroke Fellow and Tutor in Management Studies Dr Eamonn Molloy OBE has published a new book titled Traversing the Spectrum of Organisational Autonomy: The Path to Self-Driving Organisations.

In a world increasingly driven by technology, how can organisations balance human decision-making with automation? This is the question Dr Molloy’s book seeks to answer. Apart from AI and machine learning, automation, blockchain, and the Internet of Things are all transforming organisations. These advancing technologies go beyond merely automating a task, instead beginning to run an organisation.

“As decision rights migrate from people to systems, the familiar building blocks of structure, reporting lines, roles, accountability, and control, no longer hold their shape,” explains Dr Molloy. Organisations will be forced to consider how much of their own decision-making they are willing to automate, and on what terms. 

In his book, Dr Molloy develops a theoretical framework to help guide organisations and their leaders towards achieving genuine self-direction. He offers a six-level model, the Spectrum of Organisational Autonomy (SOA), which helps an organisation understand where they currently stand between fully human-centric governance and genuine self-direction, and decide where they want to be. He explores how humans and machines can work together, examining AI-driven operations and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), and drawing on examples from defence, governance, and the wider organisational world. 

“Each step along the spectrum forces a redesign of who decides what, where the human sits, and how authority and responsibility are distributed when the organisation is increasingly running itself,” Dr Molloy shares. “Designing for autonomy is more than substituting existing process technology within an existing structure, it changes what the organisation does, and how it does it. In other words, it’s strategic.”

You can find out more here.