Month: September 2016

This week I got these questions:

• What are you noticing about the practice of organization design recently? What are the implications?
• How would you best design a corporate centre for a new organisation which doesn't have 100% clarity on what its delivery arms will be specifically doing yet?

It seems to me that taking a stab at the first two questions might help with the third question. So here goes.

I'd already given a bit of thought to the question 'What am I noticing about the practice of organisation design?' in prep for a conversation over the weekend with Organization Design Forum colleagues on it and their views both changed and added to mine. I'm noticing:

a) An accelerating desire to learn about organisation design i.e. there seems to be recognition that it's more than re-jigging the traditional organisation chart. I mentioned in an earlier blog that Deloitte in its Human Capital Trends 2016 has organisation design as its top trend. (But think through why you want to follow a trend). People are looking for skilled organisation designers. I first started facilitating organisation design programmes for the CIPD in 2007. That year we ran 1 course and it was undersubscribed. When I stopped teaching it in 2014 there were 5 or 6 courses running per year, all fully-subscribed. That may not count as evidence of accelerating interest in the topic but it is an indicator.

b) Digital technologies are rapidly changing the way organisation design can be done and also the way that we think about organisation and organisations. Look, for example, at Alex Pentland's work on Social Physics and you begin to get the scale of the possibility – it goes beyond social network analysis and data visualization. Some of the people on the call started talking about socio-tech and I've just found my 2003 folder full of info on it. There do seem to be some interesting and relevant-to-now lines to follow from that theory. See this 1999 paper on it.

c) Organisation design working with other types of designers – graphic, service, business, product, user experience, etc. They offer similar but different skills and perspectives. Working on a design issue or opportunity together and with other disciplines is a fruitful way of looking at organisational possibilities. In my 2-years with nbbj, an architecture and design firm, I learned the value of thinking 'design' and not just 'organisation design'.

What are the implications of this? These 'noticings' leave me thinking:

• That the 'models' we use in organisation design e.g Burke-Litwin model, Galbraith's 5-star model, Nadler & Tushman's congruence model and so on, have probably had their day. Maybe the way we think about organisations has also had its day?
• We (organisation design practitioners) could learn a lot from fast prototyping, test and learn, and other iterative ways of designing that other types of designers use.
• We can't design for any predicted future because the predictions won't hold – digitalization is moving too fast to keep up even if predicting were more accurate than it is.

So for the person who asked 'How would you best design a corporate centre for a new organisation which doesn't have 100% clarity on what its delivery arms will be specifically doing yet?' I suggest:

One approach is to work on the basis that you'll never get 100% clarity, so:

• Develop some design principles – I enjoy Dieter Rams' principles as a discussion point for organisation design work.
• Work on what you do know and what you can find out about the current direction.
• Look not just at your own organisation but the context in which it is operating.
• Watch what is happening to the design of the organisation without you doing anything and see how things are forming.
• Use data and visualisations to help free up your thinking and head towards 'what-if' mode e.g. why are you assuming a 'corporate centre?'
• Work with things that seem to be working in the 'right' known direction and help adjust those that aren't.
• As things become clearer review and iterate the design –view the work as ongoing and not as a project with an end point.
• Start now even if it's only 5% clear.

How would you answer the three questions? Let me know.

On Tuesday I went to a discussion on 'Bringing Purpose to Life'. I was attracted by the ambiguous title. Was it about bringing purpose into our personal lives, as in 'The Purpose Driven Life', or was it about how to turn a company 'purpose' from a statement like into something 'alive' and inter-actable with? Or was it something else? It turned out to be a bit about both and more.

Pete Burden (@peteburden) facilitated the conversation. His view is that 'Purpose is an important topic. It comes up regularly in leadership and management conversations. Having a purpose can help, but it can also be tricky.'

What is 'tricky' about purpose? Pete gave a rich introduction well-laced with references. Purpose is often abstract, static, and reified. You see purpose statements on laminated plastic credit-type cards as wall posters. What makes a purpose 'come alive' is not the statement itself but the constant interplay of subjective, emotional, relational, social conversations – both formal as in 'Steering Groups' and informal as in 'gossip' related to what people think the purpose is. He suggested that 'meaning is internalised via dialogue' and 'actions related to purpose are contingent on the situation.

Following the theme of 'the situation' Pete mentioned Mary Parker Follett's work and I've just read her piece on The Law of the Situation (extract from The Giving of Orders). In this she's talking about giving orders saying that as situations changes then orders change (watch Charlie Chaplin working on an assembly line – a 3-minute clip). Similarly with purpose – it shifts and changes in action.

You can see how this works if you apply different situations to the purpose statement. Take this purpose "to refresh the world, to inspire moments of optimism and happiness, and to create value and make a difference." (Guess which organisation has this). Making this statement 'come alive' in Holland is likely to be very different from making it 'come alive' in Gambia.

Concepts in the statement – optimism, happiness, value – are interpreted and understood differently depending on the situation, the individual and various other factors. Here Pete tossed in Bourdieu and 'Habitus', Peirce (on semiotics) and Mindell on ProcessWork.

With a brief wash of the theory in mind we turned to small group discussion. Pete asked 'What do we think are the assumptions of those who developed the purpose?' and 'What do we think are our assumptions as we think about the purpose?'

So if we go back to the purpose statement I mentioned earlier "to refresh the world, to inspire moments of optimism and happiness, and to create value and make a difference." Asking the two questions indeed raises some tricky considerations.

'What do we think are the assumptions of those who developed the purpose?' For example are we assuming that those developing the statement had a view that moments of optimism and happiness can be inspired by a product or service? What are we assuming they meant by 'create value' – what type of value and for whom? Ditto 'make a difference'. Is there some implied assumption that employees go along with the statement, or is it ok to challenge it? How do these concepts change in a situational change? The answers help shape the design of the organisation.

The second question 'What do we think are our assumptions as we think about the purpose?' Once I did some work for a tobacco products company. I had a bunch of assumptions about the company and had to answer all kinds of bafflement from people, with their assumptions, who asked me why I was working for it. (It wasn't about the money). I wonder if we examine our own assumptions enough as we come to OD work?

By the end of the afternoon my curiosity that led me to attending had gained me:

• New (to me) writers and theories to explore
• Useful ideas to take into my organisation design work that 'purpose' is an on-going reflective process of enactment and not a static statement: as the situation shifts, the purpose shifts and the design shifts The image offered was of a Calder mobile, but my image is of a Janet Echelman moving interactive web.
• A reminder to examine the assumptions I bring to my OD work and an interest in the assumptions the other players in the work are bringing.

Do you think organisational purpose changes with the situation? Let me know.

I still haven't managed to cure myself of my habit of saying 'yes' instead of 'no'. There's lots of advice on how to say no which I seem unable to take, though I did manage it twice last week which felt as if I might be able to learn how.

In an alternative to saying no Adam Grant recently wrote a book called Give and Take which is all about the benefits and value of helping people. There's a compelling NY Times interview with him Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead? So maybe I can pat myself on the back for giving stuff rather than feeling overwhelmed by stuff resulting from my incapacity to say no.

Anyway this is what I tried to tell myself as I knuckled down over the weekend to meet the deadline of submitting the material for a one-day workshop I'm running in October. I looked at the now published, introductory paragraph I'd written months ago and was a bit shocked when I discovered I'd opened with the sentence 'Being on the knife edge of organisational change can be challenging'.

I wondered what that meant – my past self didn't seem to have left many clues for my current self to work on in a way that my future self could then deliver on the day. (Watch Dan Gilbert answering the question 'Why do we make decisions which our future selves so often regret?') The thought that I should have said no to the invitation to facilitate momentarily outweighed another thing I tell myself to do which is to give things a go.

As I reflected on how to learn to say no, what to give and take, how to make decisions that made sense in the future, I suddenly thought that these mirror the types of issues and dilemmas that challenge us in organisational design and development.

Take last week's news about Marks & Spencer, the UK retailer, cutting 500 staff from its head office and moving 400 others out of central London. Chief executive, Steve Rowe, said:

"M&S has to become a simpler and more effective organisation if we are to deliver our plans to recover and grow our business.
It is never easy to propose changes that impact on our people, but I believe that the proposals outlined today are absolutely necessary and will help us build a different type of M&S – one that can take bolder, pacier decisions, be more profitable and ultimately better serve our customers.
We remain committed to investing in store staffing and improving our customer experience and therefore our store colleagues are not affected by this proposal."

So here he is rather than saying 'yes' to the current organisational complexity he's saying 'no'. He's making future focused decisions now, and he's giving assurances to 'store colleagues' (albeit it in the context of a staff outrage at proposed pay cuts to offset the cost of the national living wage).

But this has left him on the knife edge of organisational change as his strategy is one in which success or failure are equally likely. I wonder if the colleagues and consultants who advised him feel that challenge?

I'm not in that 'knife edge' situation but as I thought about what I could have meant when I originally wrote the sentence I got some insights and ideas on the approach and content for the session, and learned quite a bit in the process as I researched the material. So maybe saying yes is ok and perhaps I should have faith that my future self will be able to cope with what my past self has initiated?

What does being on the knife edge of organisational change mean for you? Let me know.

I don't know why it's crossed my mind to count the number of organisations involved in taking the three of us on holiday. Here we are sitting in a hotel in Istanbul looking at the Marmara Sea from the hotel balcony. It's glorious.

But what has it taken to get us here? The list organisations with direct involvement includes: Megabus, Transport for London, Uber, British Airways, Expedia, Istanbul Transport, PayPal, First Direct, Passport Office, (for one-day expedited passport issuance as one party member didn't notice her passport expiry date), Insure and Go, and the Turkish evisa organisation.

The list of indirect involvement includes organisations behind various websites that we've consulted on currency exchange, weather, info on Istanbul, flight comparisons, hotel reviews, travel experiences, safety in Istanbul, and so on.

Then there are the add-on organisations who touched our travel in some way: suitcase manufacturers, telecoms providers – getting our devices working here, retail outlets in the airport , the third parties providing snacks on British Airways, the organisation making the check-in kiosks, air traffic controllers, security checkers, passport and border controllers, cleaners of locations …

Each of the direct and indirect 'customer touchpoints' comprise a web of systems, processes, policies, compliance, interactions, interdependencies and other connections that together make our holiday logistics work. Beyond these back office 'technical' aspects of it, are the 'human' aspects of making it work – how many people does it take to get one person safely to a holiday destination with luggage and connected mobile devices? I'm guessing that it must run into several thousand.

We've had a 'seamless end-to-end customer experience'. Everything has run smoothly and we're having a good time. It's easy to take that experience for granted. But I'm wondering if there would there be more value for me, and the people/organisations I've encountered on the way, in other responses, for example:

• Gratitude that it all works so well
• Recognition there is so much trust in 'the system' working
• Awareness that 'the system' is so complex that one tug somewhere and it could all come crashing down?

Gratitude: There's lots written on the benefits of cultivating an attitude of gratitude for both individuals and for organisations. Look, for example, at Charles Kerns article Counting your blessings or Dora Schmit's Effect of Gratitude on Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Customer Satisfaction both mentioned in a previous blog of mine on gratitude. If I were more consciously practicing gratitude what effect would it have on the people and organisations I encountered and would I feel differently too?

Trust: Arranging my holiday relied on me trusting the organisations involved and their proving trustworthy. For organisation proving they are trustworthy over time is essential to maintain customers. Look at the various examples of product recalls, most recently Samsung's and you'll see the damage done by trust breaking down. Whole industries can be decimated by consumer lack of trust. Tourism in Turkey, for example, has plunged 50% in the past year following terrorist attack and political unrest. Building and rebuilding trust (a lengthy process) is one set of activities. Maintaining it is another. (See one of my blogs on building trust here).

Complexity: The technology underpinning my holiday logistics is beyond comprehension, literally, as the author of Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension explains in scary detail. Would conscious awareness of this complexity bring benefits? In the day to day things like password protection, paying online, being alert to scams and so on are a necessary part of it. In organisations and society the value of knowing how to work with complexity might help mitigate risks and provide some consumer assurance.

Rather than just take your smooth running holiday logistics for granted what do you think a better response would be? Let me know.

PS: I am now home and all the logistics worked without hitch on the return journey and the human interactions were great too.