People Systems

Organisational Design

Toby Sinclair has produced a great summary of some of the key points raised by Dave Snowdon and friends.

[https://www.tobysinclair.com/post/organisational-design-principles-that-embrace-complexity]

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Here’s my take. Whether you are proactively thinking how your organisation can move to a next normal or have been forced into an entirely different way of working, our organisations need to be better able to flex, bend or even elegantly break to survive and thrive. The concept that we can create a blueprint or engineered design to manage complexity is akin to using finger paints for a paint by numbers of the New York skyline – you will go outside the lines and it will get messy.

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Traditional Organisational Design is Dead killed by the wrong motive, mechanistic method and missed opportunity. Whether you are looking to restructure due to the impacts of COVID, going through a merger, attempting to scale agile practices or implementing “working from anywhere” you need to think differently.

Motive
Be honest about your motivation. There are genuine reasons to be more resilient, promote agility, innovate or focus on customer value. However, using organisational design to merely shift the deckchairs, generate short term financial savings or go lean / agile (often in name only) will not empower your people. 

Having been through major restructures, large mergers and structured organisational design I have yet to see effective change imposed from the outside without significant unintended consequences. Conversely teams given the right direction, sensible boundaries and an incentive can readily be become more effective. 

Assess your motivation for organisational change. It may simply be that improving communication, getting the right people in the room, listening to the mavericks or just stopping the dumb stuff is sufficient to achieve positive change.

Method
Before you cut a cheque to the large consultancy/ OD specialist, buy into the latest pyramid scheme framework or apply a technique that worked at a company that bears no resemblance to your organisation - take a deep breath.  Do some sensemaking, capture the good, bad and ugly stories from your teams, get a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities first. Conduct some safe to try / fail experiments and get some feedback. Spend some time with both formal and informal networks and listen. 

If you then feel that a scaled agile approach is right in your context then do it well (picking your advisors with care). If you don’t have the cult of Toyota maybe don’t try the Toyota Flow System but that doesn’t mean you cannot apply lean principles or team science to your process. 

Opportunity
The opportunity you miss by using a blueprint / template / engineered approach is tangible. You will miss the invisible requirements, the influence of informal networks and opportunities for innovation. If you are looking to build a customer centric organisation and your customers are ignored whilst you debate the merits of matrix vs flat hierarchies, you are doomed to fail.

Think in terms of Organisational Empowerment. 

• You will need a command and control structure available in times of crisis, make sure this is clearly and concisely communicated. 

• In a crisis deploy an innovation team alongside to capture opportunities

• Encourage cross team informal networks, look after the gatekeepers

• Teach people negotiation skills, not every issue needs to become a drama requiring escalation

• If you are doing scrum / lean / agile / etc do it properly

• Set boundaries and constraints as required, then get out of the way

• Manage by objectives and principles 

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To conclude
You don’t want to “meet the new org, same as the old org” and be fooled again.  

Why not try organisational empowerment rather than design. 
No one thought their entire organisation could work from home pre COVID, most did. 

 

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