January 2018 – Naomi Stanford

Organisation design masterclasses

One of the frequently asked questions I get is about organisation design training. Where to get it, what it’s about, is it accredited and various similar things. I’ve written about it before, but it seems timely to add a bit more to the topic, especially as I’ve been asked to facilitate a series of organisation design masterclasses.

I paused for a moment as I typed the word ‘masterclasses’ wondering if it is a gender-neutral word or is there some equivalent that is more politically correct if it is not gender neutral?

The pause extended somewhat as read a few things on the topic of gendered language – some of it completely incomprehensible e.g. this extract from Feminist Visual Culture: ‘It is about the language of public critique, where there is a Deleuzian libidinal economy at work which values the process of reaching different plateau in design, in contrast to the prevailing emphasis on the orgasmic end-product, or what Akis Didaskalou has called the ejaculatory mode of the design masterclass.’

I’m fairly certain that the design masterclasses I facilitate will not be in the ‘ejaculatory mode’ but …

Moving on. We’re planning a series of seven two-hour sessions (I’m now avoiding the word ‘masterclass’ just in case) that build on the foundation of a two-day overview of organisation design of the sort many providers run. (See the CIPD one here). Each session is designed to take a closer look at a specific aspect design work, building more knowledge on an area that is usually only touched on in a foundational course. Here are the topics.

1: Skills development for organisation designers

Organisation design is about understanding how people, processes, work, and culture interact within and across organisational boundaries. Much of this interaction is mediated though technologies including social media, automated processes, and robotics. This session looks at three skills and knowledge areas – design thinking, data analysis and interpretation, behavioural science – that organisation designers should develop to help them design with these complex interactions in mind. (We’ve assumed some systems theory knowledge).

2: Designing across organisational boundaries

As organisations becoming interdependent – through supply chains, contractual agreements, technology platforms – it becomes harder and harder to know where the boundaries of an organisation are. Design work must, as Rob Cross notes, ‘be virtually continuous and requires the ongoing creation of direction, alignment, and commitment within and across organisational boundaries.’ This session explores organisational boundaries: the technology of organisational network mapping, using data to see patterns of interactions, and identifying the business processes that cross organisational boundaries. Being able to ‘see’ workflows in operation leads to better design and design outcomes.

3: Networks and why we need to think about them

Organisations comprise numbers of different networks of people both formal and informal. These networks are not visible in a standard organisation chart but their health or ill-health are critical to organisational operation. This session discusses the social networks found in organisations and proposes that organisation designers need insights into network theory as applied to social systems in order to understand and improve the organisation’s design. Participants will learn how to apply these insights into their work.

4: Self-managing teams their design and organisational value

Changes in social structures, access to information, technologies, and other factors are challenging traditional organisational hierarchies, based on hierarchical leader power and authority. Self-managing teams are increasingly being seen in organisation. This session examines what they are, how they work and the reasons for introducing (or not) self managing teams into an organisation design or redesign.

5: Designing and redesigning culture

It is hard to know whether culture can be changed by conscious design, or whether it can only be nudged, or shaped by design work. This session looks at the question ‘Can culture be designed?’ And, if so, what aspects of it to focus on. Should it be the behavioural aspects – language, norms, values, and practices more commonly associated with organisation development, or should it be the business processes, systems, policies, and rules, related to the formal organisational architecture, or should it be both? Participants will look at the various ‘levels’ of culture: organisation, business unit, and day-to- day and consider six conditions that foster the likelihood of designed culture change succeeding:

6: Developing credibility

External organisation design consultants are commissioned to work on design projects largely because organisational leaders feel they do not have the internal capability to deliver the work. Thus external consultants come to an organisation already credible and perceived to have expertise. However, internal organisation design consultants, often have to earn credibility, in order to be commissioned either to do the work, or work as equal partners with external consultants. This session offers some techniques and insights to help develop credibility.

7: Organisation design toolkit

Any craft requires the tools of the trade, and organisation design is no different. There are a bewildering number of models, approaches, inventories, diagnostics, ‘canvases’ and assessments. Additionally, these are available for myriad different ‘audiences’ – leaders, executive teams, board members, managers, supervisors, front-line staff, and others. The difficulty for a practitioner is knowing what tool to choose for the purpose in hand, and then how to apply it in order to get a successful outcome. In this session there will be opportunity to review a number of tools, skim some useful resources, and learn how to build a personal toolkit.

What masterclasses would you offer organization designers? Let me know.

Image: Masterclass icon

We have come a long way. We have a long way to go. In between we are somewhere

Sometimes I read in newspapers people talking about their week. Monday – this, Tuesday – that. Here’s one of the week in the life of a travel blogger. And sometimes I read about the Quantified Self movement where people measure and track every aspect of their daily life. So, this week I thought I’d try a bit of sort of thing – triggered, in part by the question I’m attempting to answer each day (new year’s resolution!) ‘What did I learn today?’ Here’s some extracts from a working week, 15- 19 January, 2018, in the life of an organization designer.

Monday

Home from work, I finished the book 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s packed with insights on how organizations, communities, and societies form, interact, die. That led me to thinking about sci-fi as a lead into org design, and I came across the article Using science fiction and fantasy to shape organizational futures which I now have and will be reading at some point this week. I also have a list of all the music referenced in the book (a lot), and have started to play down it – I’m new to music in almost every form so that’s a learning. As is the vast number of references he makes to philosophers, scientists, anthropologists and others – I found myself constantly reaching out to look things up.

This looking up included finding out about Reinhold Messner, a person I’ll mention in a talk I’m giving on bravery, and to whom Robinson attributed the quote ‘We have come a long way. We have a long way to go. In between we are somewhere.’ Which seems to me to be apt for anyone in organization design work. I may adopt it as my motto.

Tuesday

We started to discuss developing a change sensitivity/heat map for the organization I am working with. It would be on the lines of one generated by Just Giving. We think it would be useful as there is a lot of change going on: planned large scale change projects, smaller planned change projects, business area change – re-design, new process flow, etc., general day to day change as staff leave, join, take vacations, and so on.

Our plan is to develop an updateable visualization drawing on a range of data that could alert us to potential hotspots. Currently we’re thinking of staff turnover, productivity drops/gains, sickness rate, project schedules, local change, additional activity that goes on e.g. mandatory training, and so on that will tell us where the volume of change may be causing stress and/or risks to business continuity. With this information we could take action. For example, we could make changes to programme implementation scheduling, or reduce the change load. We’re in early thinking on this.

Wednesday

We continued design work on the HR function. There are numbers of interesting reports on new design for HR. The one I found this week is HR with purpose: Future models of HR. ‘The report is based on research carried out by Professor Chris Brewster, Mark Swain and Dr Liz Houldsworth of Henley Business School, in collaboration with a number of other leading figures in the HR world.’ It’s interesting on the role of HR BP’s (see my last week’s blog) and offers lots to work on if you’re rethinking the HR function (and/or whether to have one).

Thursday

I headed into a discussion on change immunity. Is there such a thing? I’m a bit sceptical as people are changing all the time – think new tech kit, for example – but maybe not in the ways that ‘the organization’ would like. However, I dug out my Kegan and Lahey book Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization, one of their articles, The Real Reason People Won’t Change and some handouts I have on the topic based on their book How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation.

Friday

This was a day of bouncing around ideas on digital transformation. It’s fascinating from a design perspective and challenges much of the traditional thinking on what an organization ‘is’ and how it operates. It’s a whole territory for which I think we are ill-equipped in all sorts of skills, behaviours, systems, processes, policies and ethical codes. We are not learning quickly enough to keep pace with the technology possibilities. Read an interview with Jaron Lanier for some insights on this. Or (back to Monday) read some of Kim Stanley Robinson’s sci-fi books and learn what we may need to learn.

Do you think science fiction can inform organization design? Let me know.

Image: Infinity rooms

HR Business Partners or not

Which job roles will change/be created/cease to exist in 2018? There are lots of predictions on this. See, for example, MIT’s thoughts on five roles that will see increasing numbers of people required to fill them. Or the BBC’s ‘will your job be automated?’ predictor – where you enter your job title and it gives the automation likelihood. The page is dated 2015 so I suspect the likelihood of some of the jobs listed being automated is increasing. A more recent (March 2017) paper from PWC reports ‘Specifically, based on our own preferred, methodology, we found that around 30% of jobs in the UK are at potential high risk of automation and around 38% in the US.’ Generally, there’s as much dissension as agreement on what jobs will be automated. Where researchers do seem to have agreement is that the work ‘that taps into our social drives’ will not be automated. Andrew McAfee, one of MIT’s academics and IT expert, says: I just don’t see anyone, even really great innovators, coming up with technologies that could just substitute for the people who are currently doing those very, very social jobs.

A job that I’ve been looking at over the last several weeks is the HR Business Partner role. It doesn’t seem to be on any automation list, so it may be a social job, but, depending on whose view you are reading, it is predicted to:

Grow stronger, but only if the role is ‘strategic’ HR partner which is currently ‘at best unquantified, at worst ill-defined and poorly understood.’

Grow weaker, as the roles ‘evolve from the initial concept of HRBPs to a new generation of HR roles that will help the function formerly known as Human Resources better contribute to the deployment of the business strategy, bring more value to the organisation, and take advantage of the possibilities offered by technological innovation.’

Change, because ‘business partners have become so embedded in the business and so distanced from central HR that they’ve taken the business’s typically much more short-term-orientated demands to heart to the extent of ignoring or overriding the overall business need for strategic change.’

Die, because ‘HR doesn’t seem to think of itself as an integral component of the business. HR people are not even trained anymore to understand the mechanics of business at work.’

This is all very confusing – particularly if you are an HR Business Partner, someone who thinks they’d like to be an HR Business Partner, an HR Leader re-designing their operating model, an employee wondering what products and services to expect from HR, a CEO deciding whether or not to ‘give HR a seat at the table’ (8 million google responses on the inquiry ‘HR seat at the table’), a consultant advising on the yes/no/maybe of HR BPs in an HR operating model.

Or perhaps it is not so much confusing as complex. Because there isn’t a right answer. And this is the one thing that the various writers and researcher on this topic agree on. They all are of the view, exemplified in this comment from the CIPD that ‘there is not one model for delivering HR that is suited to all organisations. How an organisation should structure is HR functions depends on its organisational strategy, wider organisational structure and the requirements of its customers and the organisation it is supporting.’

In considering the merits, or not, of an HR BP role, each HR leader with his/her colleagues has to work out first what’s best, or at least ‘good enough’ operating model for the combination of factors in their particular circumstances, and then whether or not HR Business Partners feature in the delivery of the operating model.

One place to start determining the right HR model for your organisation is to read through the differing perspectives presented in the UK’s CIPD paper Changing Operating Models. It’s 3 years old (February 2015) but a lot of it is still relevant and points to still to be explored aspects of HR including models for networked organisations. And it contains a piece from Dave Ulrich, attributed with introducing the HR BP model.

Another place to start is the IES White Paper, (2015) HR Business Partners: Yes Please or No Thanks. In this one there is the common-sense suggestion that to get to the ‘right answer’ on both HR operating model design and HR BPs ‘What we probably need instead is better internal dialogue between stakeholders on what the optimum balance might be between HR’s role and line managers’ responsibilities. HR for its part needs to consider its structure in the light of this debate’.

Specifically, on HR Business Partners the IES notes that: ‘whilst organisations have to decide whether business partners are worth the investment, they also have to settle on their conception of the role and make sure it fits business needs, manager requirements and their own staff capability. If this critical thinking is not done there is the probability of continuing customer and colleague frustration and frequent questioning of the value of the role.’

What’s your view on the HR BP role? Let me know.

Image: What do applicants say about your firm?

Gratitude: a missing business capability?

It’s just over seven years since I last wrote about gratitude (November 2010). In response to those two blogs someone recommended me Angeles Arrien’s book Living in Gratitude, which I then went out and bought.

It’s a book of ‘gratitude practice’, ‘designed to carry you through a full calendar year, month by month. Each month presents a theme and then offers reflections and practices to ‘foster increased understanding of how the chapter’s concepts are at work in your life and to inspire you to cultivate gratitude through action.’

During 2011 I worked through the book, and this year I’ve decided to do so again. Why? Because I’m intrigued by the ongoing research that suggests that ‘gratitude and other positive emotions [bring] benefits ranging from personal and social development, to individual health and well-being, and community strength and harmony’ (Barbara Fredrickson).

Positive psychology researchers like Martin Seligman, Robert Emmons , Barbara Fredrickson and their colleagues in related behavioural and neuro sciences have broadened our knowledge of the value that feeling and expressing gratitude brings.

See, for example, Neural Correlates of Gratitude (2015) that sought to test the hypothesis ‘that that gratitude ratings would correlate with activity in brain regions associated with moral cognition, value judgment and theory of mind. And notes that their findings ‘may provide important insight into the means by which gratitude is associated with improved health outcomes (Huffman et al., 2014), benefits to relationships (Algoe et al., 2008) and subjective well-being (Emmons, 2008).’ – all useful attributes in a workplace.’

Or another piece, Why a Grateful Brain is a Giving One on the neural connections between gratitude and giving – which suggests that ‘gratitude seems to prepare the brain for generosity.’

What effect has the research and the publicity around the benefits of gratitude had in the workplace? It seems, at best, minimal. ‘Research has also found that people are less likely to feel or express gratitude at work than anyplace else: On a given day, only 10 percent of people say “thank you” to colleagues—and 60 percent of people report that they never or very rarely express gratitude at work.’

A 2017 Academy of Management Review article, (published online 2016) The Grateful Workplace: A Multilevel Model of Gratitude in Organizations the authors concluded, their well-researched paper, saying:

Most people believe that gratitude is a desirable positive emotion (Gallup, 1999). Nonetheless, there is a fundamental lack of attention to what gratitude “looks like” in organizations and to the organizational practices that enable employees to experience gratitude on a daily basis. As noted by McCraty and Childre (2004), “In the absence of conscious efforts to engage, build, and sustain positive perceptions and emotions, we all too automatically fall prey to feelings such as irritation, anxiety, worry, frustration, judgmentalness, self-doubt, and blame” (242). By making gratitude a fundamental part of the employee experience, leaders and managers can leverage the benefits of gratitude for employees and the organization as a whole.

This type of finding led to the Open Ideo/Greater Good Science Center to launch a challenge with a $40k prize for ideas on ‘How might we inspire experiences and expressions of gratitude in the workplace?’ (Their prototyping kit for this is useful irrespective of the challenge)

A challenge is one approach to encouraging gratitude in the workplace. Another is to think of it as a business/organizational capability. In my 2010 blogs on gratitude, I noted that ‘Although there’s a certain amount on ‘happiness’ in organizations. There’s very little that I’ve found so far on the topic of gratitude as an organizational capability.’ Having spent the last week working on a ‘map’ of business capabilities – a topic I’ve also written a blog about – it’s striking that there are none expressing capabilities outside the realm of a business process. For example, the ‘map’ that I’m looking at, under the broad business capability ‘People Management’, lists workforce planning, people & talent management, internal communications, and some others. But doesn’t ‘people management’ need some capability around empathy, compassion, or gratitude?

The many definitions of business capability allow for capabilities that are more people and less process oriented. Take this definition, which says:

A business capability (or simply capability) describes a unique, collective ability that can be applied to achieve a specific outcome. A capability model describes the complete set of capabilities an organization requires to execute its business model or fulfill its mission. An easy way to grasp the concept is to think about capabilities as organizational level skills imbedded in people, process, and/or technology.

A ‘complete set’ of capabilities could (should?) include some mention of the less documentable capability that is inherent in people.

Gratitude is one to consider, but not the only one. Norm Smallwood and Dave Ulrich in their article Capitalizing on Capabilities discuss the key intangible assets:

‘organizational capabilities … You can’t see or touch them, yet they can make all the difference in the world when it comes to market value. … They represent the ways that people and resources are brought together to accomplish work. They form the identity and personality of the organization by defining what it is good at doing and, in the end, what it is.’

They say there is no magic list of these capabilities: their 11 include collaboration, learning, efficiency, and learning.

What’s your view on gratitude as a business capability? Let me know.

(The Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley, has an interesting ‘Grateful Organizations Quiz’)

Image: An outlook of gratitude may lead to better health

All knowledge is provisional

‘All knowledge is provisional’. I read the sentence last week and instantly wrote it in my notebook, and have been pondering it since. It rings true and I feel a certain face-value in it. Or maybe it is apposite for me at this point as I learn that everything I knew about baby rearing is being up-ended by everything my daughter knows about it.

I read the sentence in Henry Marsh’s auto-biographical book Admissions. Curious about the sentence, I looked it up and found it a topic of philosophical debate. Many philosophers, including Popper, Dewey, Rorty, picking up on it. … Another field for me to explore! But, meanwhile, I’ll take the phrase as it is.

Marsh is a neuro surgeon and in the book, he looks back on his almost 40-year career in the field. He reflects on his continuous learning, what he’s taught to others, how the field has changed during his time in it, and why he is of the view that all knowledge is provisional.

Obviously in neuro-surgery there have been massive technical advances, and to continue to be expert has meant he has had to keep on learning. And also teaching. Part of Marsh’s role of consultant neuro-surgeon is to teach trainees in the field how to do it. He tells several stories of his careful and thoughtful teaching methods – and the successes and failures of them.

This led me to return to a question I’d read earlier in the week in Work magazine (for a reason, unknown to me, not readily available to read on-line). The question asked in one of the articles was, ‘How can we help leaders to be better teachers?’ It’s a good question. I don’t know how many leaders are good teachers. But from my observation, not very many and maybe it’s for the reason the article suggests: leaders want to control what people learn rather than giving people the freedom to learn for themselves.

But maybe it’s because they don’t see their knowledge as provisional. Maybe leaders can only be great teachers if they are also great learners, who, as the Work piece says, ‘approach work with humility and the desire to learn’.

It’s not just hierarchical leaders who need to be great learners in order to be great teachers – and with this, better leaders. Thought/expertise leaders need also to work to the principle that all knowledge is provisional and put their learning energies into expanding their field – not sticking with what they ‘know’. That’s where Marsh is interesting. He is a leader of neuro-surgical teams, he is an expert in his field, and he believes all knowledge is provisional. In his book he demonstrates that he is a learner as much as a teacher. (See 9 reasons why great teachers make great leaders).

Turning to organization design – what in that field is provisional knowledge and where will (or should) organization designers be putting their learning energies during 2018? Here are three suggestions:

Picking up and testing Rob Cross, Chris Ernst and Bill Pasmore’s ideas put forward in their article A bridge too far? How boundary spanning networks drive organizational change and effectiveness, in which they put the point of view that, ‘Twenty-first century challenges can’t be solved with 20th century change methods. Unfortunately, many leaders are still relying on top-down approaches in the face of current crises. Problems are complex, interconnected, and not easily managed by people separated by levels and silos. Promising advances are taking place in accelerating change by activating hidden social networks in organizations, systems, and cultures and enhancing their boundary spanning capabilities. Leaders who activate these networks greatly expand their organization’s capacity to manage change, since change efforts do not rely on vertical channels alone to adapt to emergent issues.’
Working through, and applying, the concepts of ‘self-managing’ teams that aim to flatten hierarchies and give local autonomy, as described in Lee and Edmundson’s article Self-Managing Organizations: Exploring the Limits of Less-Hierarchical Organizing. They conclude their article: ‘A growing number of organizations are seeking ways to organize less hierarchically in the hopes of becoming more innovative, nimble, and enriching places to work. A select few are not content to simply experiment within the contours of the managerial hierarchy, but aim instead to radically depart from it. The time is ripe for renewed and focused research and theory to better understand and guide these efforts. Despite the varied streams of organizational research that relate to the theme of less-hierarchical organizing – from both macro and micro perspectives – none adequately captures the distinction between radical and incremental approaches. We hope that by more clearly delineating a specific and extreme class of efforts to organize less hierarchically, we can encourage and guide future research on this important phenomenon.’
Assessing the theories underpinning systems thinking and design thinking and seeing whether, beyond the hype, there are practical, valuable, and durable applications of a conceptual framework that unites the two as proposed in the article Systems & Design Thinking: A Conceptual Framework for Their Integration. Their conclusion? ‘In today’s business world Design Thinking and Systems Thinking are being considered disjointedly. Specifically, the role of ‘design’ in either approach is not transparent. For all of us the challenge remains how the ‘design thinking’ community can learn from the ‘systems thinking’ community and vice versa. We believe that systems thinking should be intentionally integrated with design thinking to enhance the chances of creating the right designs.’

What organization design knowledge do you think is provisional? Where should organization designers be putting their learning energies to expand the field and teach others about it? Let me know.

Image: Hypothesis