October 2017 – Naomi Stanford

What are the ‘first principles’ of organization design?

I’ve found Mumsnet, I’ve read two ‘how to be a grandmother’ books, and I’ve looked at the bewildering array of baby products – My breast friend topping my list on this score!

My daughter now has a 6-week old baby, and I’m rapidly learning that everything I knew about bringing up two children myself – who have both turned into wonderful adults – has changed and I better get learning, rapidly. Things are different now. But surely, there are some first principles of child rearing – if so, what are they? (Elon Musk says, “First principles are a kind of physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, ‘What are we sure is true?’)

This flashed through my mind when I was on a call to colleagues at the Organization Design Forum (ODF). We were discussing 3 questions: ‘What are you noticing about the theory and practice of organization design today? What are the implications for practitioners? What can/should ODF be doing to help support practitioners given these trends?

These are three big questions to cover in an hour with about 15 people. I found the call somewhat troubling and during it I was struggling to think why. But now I’ve had some time to reflect it seems to be related to the child-rearing thought.

One of the early comments made by colleagues was that many people working in organization design don’t understand the ‘first principles’ of it. I think they were thinking that there are some ‘fundamental truths’ from which to do organization design. I’m not convinced that there are.

Similarly, I don’t think there are any ‘fundamental truths’ about child rearing. For example, in the world of child-care there is no fundamental truth that ‘the baby’s sleeping position most always be with the head pointing due north’ although it was the way to do things in 1878. And, funnily enough, we do seem to have the notion today that organizations must be guided by their ‘true north’– in both cases, these are fads determined by culture and context.

As practices, resources, research findings and theories evolve in child-rearing so they do in organization design, the idea that there are fundamental truths underpinning organization design is as much a fallacy as believing there are some fundamental truths in child-rearing. (See the book Raising Children: Surprising Insights from other Cultures.)

Certainly, my child-rearing practices differed from my mother’s, as do mine from my daughter’s. However, what I think my mother and I found helpful, and I suspect my daughter will too, was applying some guiding principles, e.g. that we should bring up healthy – mind, body, spirit – children, in the context of understanding that children have rights.

This combination of guiding principles (not fundamental truths) and children’s rights enabled us to child-rear effectively in a way that matched our particular time and place.

A similar approach could work for organization design. There are already some principles around ‘good work’, see for example Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet or Good work: the Taylor review of modern working practices that has just been published in the UK.

This report suggests that good work ‘is work that is engaging, gives people a voice, treats them fairly, is good for their wellbeing, and helps them to progress. It should be positive for individuals, but also lead to wider positive organisational and economic outcomes: higher levels of productivity and output, and greater innovation and adaptability.’

These are quasi principles that could be used in organisation design and these, combined with local employment rights, would give a useful framework for organisation design, leaving the way of doing it open to various approaches. Alternatively, there are several sets of design principles for ‘good design’ we could use e.g. Dieter Rams’.

Returning to the three questions we were discussing, ‘What are you noticing about the theory and practice of organization design today? What are the implications for practitioners? What can/should ODF be doing to help support practitioners given these trends?’ I’m thinking that as there are no ‘fundamental truths’ about organization design we could propose some principles for good work or good design, encourage organization designers to look at the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, help people look at organization design practice in new and innovative ways that make use of critical thinking and not faddism, and abandon some of our sacred cows around ‘how to do it’.

What’s your view? Do you think there are fundamental truths around organization design? Do you think there are ‘good work’ or design principles and employment rights the ODF could support practitioners using? Let me know.

Image: http://bit.ly/2iMKvyk

What’s in a conference?

Who would have thought that a conference could be energising, fun, and generative? Often, they’re over-powerpointed, drab affairs (albeit well-organized) in windowless ballrooms of chain hotels. This European Organization Design Forum one was different.

Why? Like classic conferences it had keynote sessions – five over the two days – so not much difference there. But then it also had three per day concurrent interactive learning sessions, and two streams per day of open space sessions. Plus, it was held in the magnificent DASA museum of work: its past, present and future. If ever a venue matched the conference theme – next generation organization design – this was it.

Even better, the keynotes took place in the light, bright, Energie Hall – we were enveloped with information, artefacts and interactive displays on generating energy. We couldn’t not feel energetic. We felt the power of physical design and environment on productivity and motivation.

DASA was open to the public as well as to the conference and seeing the child ‘brikkies’ outside doing a very realistic house building job – a terrific exhibit – as we walked to and from the various session rooms was fun, as was the naming of rooms – for the conference only – after organization design luminaries: Edgar Schein, Jay Galbraith, Peter Senge and so on (Note: where are the women?).

I noticed a lot of laughter during the two-days. That’s not something you typically associate with a workplace. Here, people really seemed to be enjoying meeting old friends, exchanging notes, meeting new people, telling stories and learning from each other in a relaxed convivial way.

What makes for that, I wondered? Clearly, the setting was a contributory factor. Watch colleagues become part of a radio antenna, or play Brainball to see a whole playful side of people you wouldn’t normally see.

Could we replicate that style in a workplace and still meet the objectives and targets we are expected to? It’s not as if the conference had no objectives – we were there ‘strengthening our practice’ as one participant put it. And we did this whilst having fun. It’s the first conference I’ve come away from thinking I must change my sock purchase habits. Both days we were shown the latest sock choices – brightly coloured, rich design, etc – of the facilitators. Maybe it’s something to adopt as a small gesture of workplace rebellion against suits, ties and ‘business dress’. (However, see what one style guide says).

Onto the keynotes. They’re hard to get right. None of the five speakers revealed the inevitable trade-offs, down-sides, politics and stumbling blocks that beset organization design work. (Or am I making an assumption on this and, for some, it really is as smooth and glossy as the presentations portrayed?)

Nevertheless, it was good to hear Rudolf Stark Head, Transmission Business Unit-Powertrain Division at Continental AG say that changing a business model meant all the interdependencies changed, and Chris Worley clearly define ‘agility’ and reduce some of the confusion that this word causes as we try to design ‘agile organizations’.

Of the six interactive sessions on offer, I spent my two choices on digitalization – one on digitalization of the book industry and the other on digitalization in relation to organization design approaches. Both sessions made use of a ‘digitalisation canvas’, inviting us to discuss the classic (traditional org), combined (classic+some digital org) and digital (pure digital org).

It was great to come away with some ideas, tool and lines of exploration on whether/how/if classic organizations can become truly digital.

The open space slots enabled anyone to propose and lead sessions and the range of topics put forward by participants was wonderful, 18 contending topics – meaning 15 you couldn’t get to as they ran concurrently across three time slots. They illustrated the breadth of a community of organization designers united by a common ‘discipline’ but with not a trace of group-think on what it is or how to do it. In my three session choices: on ethics in organization design, on scaling organization design, and on design innovation, the diversity of perspectives, insights, reflection and interests made for depth and richness of discussion that is often missing from my day to day work.

What did I come back with? Feeling refreshed by a stream of new ideas I can play around with, and buoyed up knowing there is a community of enthusiastic, creative, challenging and supportive practitioners – willing to lend a hand to others in the field.

How important is a community of practitioners in your field to you? Would you go to a conference to meet them? Let me know.

What should future leaders be learning?

I had a conversation the other day with someone who asked ‘What should our management trainees be learning now, to equip and prepare them for leading 10 years out?’ He thought that if, 10 years ago, we’d been able to predict and teach them about design thinking, systems thinking, working with augmented/artificial intelligence, robots in the workplace, behavioural science, the ethics of technology – then they would be better able to manage the leadership roles they are now in.

It’s a good question, and one, I feel, is very hard to answer as what will be useful now in terms of leading ten years from now involves crystal ball gazing and futurology which do not always yield good yardsticks, as the Lyapunov exponent that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, demonstrates.

But just to test this, I took a look at what The Economist was predicting for 2007. They asked the question: What will be on the leader’s agenda? Their answer: climate change, managing shifts in global power, ‘responding to a sense that, in crucial areas, progress that until recently had been taken for granted has stopped or even gone into reverse’, the internet’s transformation of business, the growing connectedness of people, and new tools to search for things.

Their predictions for 2017, ten years later, are very similar, but more pronounced: authoritarians will be ascendant, far-right parties will surge, ‘European politics will be dominated by scaremongering’, more terrorist attacks, financial shocks, and ‘Brexit negotiations will be slow, complicated and cantankerous’. However, on the more optimistic side, ‘Technology is forging global connections whatever the backlash against migration or trade’

The Economist closes its 2017 predictions with a question: ‘The question is not whether the world will turn back towards openness, but how soon—and how much damage will be done in the meantime.’

What does this mean for future leaders? Should they be preparing for more of the same reversal of progress over the coming ten years, or for a growing return to open-ness? As we talked this over we asked, what would give them ‘grip’ or enable them to get a grip on, a situation of either further closure and/or more open-ness, and manage it effectively?

Looking at the predictions for 2007 and 2017, it seems to me that rather than develop knowledge of specific domain content, in order to be able to ‘get a grip’ management trainees should be developing timeless skills useful for pretty much any situation –practicing these through various methods, including scenarios, case studies, action learning, gaming and provocation sessions.

Four timeless skills I think would stand future leaders in good stead, gathered not from rigorous academic research, but from my organizational experiences over many years, are: diplomacy, kindness, critical thinking, and curiosity.

Diplomacy: ‘the art of advancing an idea or cause without unnecessarily inflaming passions or unleashing a catastrophe. It involves an understanding of the many facets of human nature that can undermine agreement and stoke conflict, and a commitment to unpicking these with foresight and grace’.

Kindness ‘the life lived in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others’ — is the life we are more inclined to live, and indeed is the one we are often living without letting ourselves know that this is what we are doing. … In one sense kindness is always hazardous because it is based on a susceptibility to others, a capacity to identify with their pleasures and sufferings. Putting oneself in someone else’s shoes, as the saying goes, can be very uncomfortable. But if the pleasures of kindness — like all the greatest human pleasures — are inherently perilous, they are nonetheless some of the most satisfying we possess. (See a lovely poem on Kindness here).

Critical thinking: ‘that mode of thinking — about any subject, content, or problem — in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking. It presupposes assent to rigorous standards of excellence and mindful command of their use. It entails effective communication and problem-solving abilities, as well as a commitment to overcome our native egocentrism and sociocentrism.’

Curiosity: the a strong desire to know or learn; having an interest in a person, thing, or experience that leads to making an inquiry. ‘Being curious can manifest itself in the activity of asking questions, but it can also be a position from which one approaches life. It keeps us learning, helps in decision making and can be useful in navigating arguments or confrontations. Todd Kashdan, author of Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life, believes that it is from our openness – and not our closedness – that we are able to develop ourselves and others.

How safe do you think it is to predict what leaders will be dealing with in the future – would we be better helping them develop timeless skills (which?) rather than specific domain knowledge? Let me know.

Image: Reggio Emilia approach

Business capabilities – addressing three confusions

Not for the first time in my career, I’ve come across a bit of confusion, in the last week or so, on the term ‘business capabilities’. People are confused on:

how to interpret a business capability ‘map’- they assume it depicts the organization’s structure
the connection between business capabilities and individual capabilities
the value of looking at business capabilities at all

When I mentioned this, someone pointed out to me that ‘Business capability is a very academic topic for most people and is likely to lead to confusion and a feeling that by working with them the programme team is insufficiently rooted in reality.’ They were arguing that business capabilities are the kind of internal workings that people didn’t need to know about, and should be ‘hidden’. My view is that having a good grasp of what business capabilities are and how they can be used acts to reduce the confusion.

Business capabilities are described as the ‘what’ of the organization. The Open Group defines them as follows: (Thanks to Tom Graves for alerting me to this)

‘A business capability represents the ability for a business to do something. A more formal definition is as follows: A business capability is a particular ability or capacity that a business may possess or exchange to achieve a specific purpose or outcome.’

You can watch a presentation on business capabilities from Open Group or download their whitepaper on the topic by creating an account.

Having identified an organization’s business capabilities, it is up to others – including organization designers – to convert the ‘what’ into ‘how’. As Open Group says ‘Critically, a business capability delineates what a business does without attempting to explain how, why, or where the business uses the capability.’

In trying to represent the ‘what an organization does’ the choice of business capabilities over value chain or process mapping, for example, is based on the premise that business capabilities are more stable than these other approaches (which also are more related to the ‘how’).

Typically, business architects develop capability maps. (Although I heard today that enterprise architects do too. But I’m not going to be drawn on the difference between business and enterprise architects).

For the most part business architects consider each capability as comprising a combination of strategy, process, people, information and technology. (Note that some architects use different elements and combinations of them). Developing the capability map can be a complex process – unless you buy off the shelf ones – involving close partnering with stakeholders and numerous iterations. (See one method for developing capabilities here, and look at Captera’s examples of a capability map here).

It is these maps that lead to the first confusion. The maps cluster the capabilities into what can be interpreted as a structure/organization chart, but the map is not the org chart. Open Group explicitly states that:

‘A common mistake is to transpose the organizational chart onto the frame of the business capability model itself. Quite often, multiple business units are involved in creating or delivering a single business capability. Organizational structures are also far more transient by nature than business capabilities. Avoid where possible a tight alignment between the functional names that denote business units, and the top-level business capabilities.’

A capability map is not the org chart because a capability is a ‘what’, and the org chart is part of the ‘how’. Take a capability like Recruitment Management, described, in Open Group’s paper, as ‘The ability to solicit, qualify, and provide support for hiring new employees into the organization.’ This capability (the what), can be operationalised (the how) in a multitude of different ways via various permutations of people, process, information and technology – depending on the organizational resources and strategy.

The ‘how’ do we do what we do is another set of discussions, decisions, choices and trade-offs from which an organization chart is one element that will ultimately emerge.

The second confusion is a related one – often an individual employee’s skills/competences are described as ‘capabilities’. Where you have a business capability of Recruitment Management, for example, remembering that the capability is a combination of people, process, technology and strategy – what exactly are the people’s capabilities required to work that business capability?

There isn’t a related individual capability of ‘recruitment management’, the individual capabilities are a bundle of things like social media savvy, networking, etc.

This confusion can be resolved by changing the language of the organization, to make it perfectly clear that capability refers to business capability and that competence, or skills, or attributes (not capability) refers to individuals.

The third confusion about why are we looking at capabilities when they are academic, theoretical, and hard to understand leads to other suggestions – can’t we just map processes, or value streams? The point here is that they are not either/or – they are different ways of looking at an organization. If you think of the capability as being relatively stable or static, but the process you use for delivering it as changing over time then you need both. Take recruitment management again. The ‘how’ it is done changes over time, but the what it does stays the same. William Ulrich explains the relationship between different organizational views very neatly.

Once the confusions are addressed, business capability maps can be a useful addition to an organization designer’s practice. Where do you stand on doing your organisation design work using business capabilities? Let me know.

Image: Capabilities Banner

Transitions and liminal periods

You know those diagrams that have ‘as-is’ written in a little circle on the left, and ‘to-be’ in a little circle on the right with the word ‘gap’ in an arrow heading hopefully between the two circles? Well I was thinking about them this week as the word ‘transitions’ came up many times in the week.

There seem to be some beliefs in play – that you can describe the ‘as-is’, that you can head towards a pre-defined ‘to-be’, and that you get from left to right by planning and undertaking activity that carries you across the gap. It’s rather like looking across a canyon and being able to sling a tightrope across it and successfully walk from one side to the other.

That activity looks straightforward – just walk across the gap. In the case of the tight rope walk there is a clear as-is and a clear to-be. You can see from one side of the canyon to the other and you know what you need to do to get safely across. Even so there are mishaps and unforeseen things to work through.

The film ‘The Walk’ shows what it took for expert tightrope walker, Philip Petit to get from ‘as-is’ to ‘to-be’ as he crossed the Twin Tower gap. ‘Guided by his real-life mentor, Papa Rudy, and aided by an unlikely band of international recruits, Petit and his gang overcome long odds, betrayals, dissension and countless close calls to conceive and execute their mad plan.’

Organizational life is not as straightforward as a complicated as-is/to-be tightrope walk, even if the diagrams make it look so. In organizations, we can’t meaningfully describe the as-is although we have a go. We can often create sentence or two describing a ‘vision’ of the ‘to be’ but this is usually couched in what amount to non-actionable terms. But, with these two elements ‘done’ we think we can work out the gap closing activity, present it in a plan and then action it.

However, this is overly simplistic and is a likely contributor to things not working out well. Suppose, instead, we considered the gap from ‘as-is’ to ‘to-be’ as a form of liminal period like the traditional ‘rite of passage’ from one identity or state to another.

This would yield a very different approach to gap closing. We know, as one writer says, that ‘Liminal times of the day and year have particular significance in many different stories and cultures. They lack fixed definition and thus a greater range of possibilities exists — possibilities that often violate or stretch our notions of reality.’

If we considered ‘gap closing’ in organization design work, as a liminal period with the attendant ‘range of possibilities’, we could then develop the threshold skills and concepts needed to work through the ‘messy journeys back, forth and across unknown terrain’ in an unstable space in which the travellers may ‘oscillate between old and emergent understandings’.

(There’s a whole body of research on ‘threshold concepts’ that came from the work of Erik Meyer and Ray Land in the early 2000s. See a useful introduction here.)

What’s interesting about the concepts of liminality and threshold is that they are recognized as being between ‘normal ordered cultural states’, which as one commentator says ‘raises the possibility of standing aside from social positions (while increasing the danger of a potentially unlimited series of alternative social arrangements).’ This seems to be encouraging exactly what we are looking for in organization designs aimed at ‘transformation’.

Some organizations are cited as succeeding with working with liminality concepts to achieve transformation. Read the HBR article Leadership in Liminal Times. The proposal there is ‘that many leaders themselves will need to experience liminality. If they are truly interested in seeing their organizations accomplish great things, many will have to make a transition from an immature mode of invoking hierarchy, territorial ownership, and formal positional power, to a more mature phase of gathering and channeling group energies with influence, engagement, and other elements of what I call open leadership.’

Do you think replacing the concept of ‘gap closing’ with its connotations of predictability and orderly progression with the concept of ‘liminality’ and that working with the HBR recognition that ‘times of liminality are disconcertingly chaotic’ would make a more successful transition from the as-is to the to-be? Let me know.

Image: Liminality, Iyvone Khoo.