The Benefits of Unstructured Organizations

This summer I am completing a remote internship with a small consulting startup called Cavi Consulting. They specialize in management and strategy consulting, mainly focusing on helping companies visualize, improve, understand, and manage their processes. I am a part of a five-person intern team and the two founders of the company are the main points of contact for us.

The interesting thing about Cavi is that what we work on is entirely up to us. There is a list of projects and assignments, but we are allowed to pick whichever seems most interesting or that we would be most passionate about. When we assign ourselves to a project, it is then our job to reach out to the founders to ask for information or clarifying questions about the project. Their goal is for us to delve into the information and to ask for help and guidance once we start to hit some roadblocks and challenges. With such an informal and unstructured work process, the first week of the internship was a little slow to start. I struggled to get accustomed to this informal work structure and become comfortable asking so many questions. Personally, I don’t like to ask for help until I absolutely need it, so having to ask so many questions made me feel as if I was badgering the founders for information, a feeling that certainly had me out of my comfort zone. However, by the second week, it was becoming more familiar and the need for lots of contact helped form a relationship between my bosses and myself faster than it may have otherwise happened.

Another benefit of this system is that we are entrusted very quickly to complete important work for the firm and it gives us interns lots of freedom to approach and work on projects how we would like to. While our bosses provide advice and ideas, at the end of the day they give us the ability to work how we would like. Despite not having experience or any real training in this field, the Cavi leadership team has lots of trust and confidence in us from the very start, which only helps to build my confidence, even if I am not exactly sure how to tackle a problem. As an intern, I also trust that they will provide constructive and fair feedback on my work product and help me with any problems I encounter. While I was slightly dubious of such an unstructured work environment, I think it is the most effective way to conduct business, especially in a remote setting. In a very short time, my bosses and I have become much more comfortable with each other because of the amount of trust each of us has given the other.