Month: November 2018

What I talk about when I talk about structure

In many of the organisation design meetings that I attend where a client has an issue they want to address, their request is for a re-structure.  Closer questioning reveals that by ‘re-structure’ they actually mean they want a differently arranged traditional organisation chart.  They are of the view that, once people are in the configuration shown on the chart, a revised chart will solve the issue and are surprised when I ask questions about work flows, value streams, customer journeys and so on.  There is almost no recognition that ‘structure’ and ‘re-structure’ mean more than a different organisation chart.

Asking people what information an organisation chart gives us, and what information it doesn’t give us alerts them to the possibility that the information it doesn’t give us could well be useful in thinking how to achieve the re-structure purpose (assuming we are clear on  what that is) but that recognition doesn’t translate into ‘let’s look at that too’.  Providing the article ’10 principles for organisation design’,  where principle 3 is ‘Fix the structure last, not first’,  is given polite nods before people return to drawing boxes and lines.

What I talk about when I talk about structures is not organisation charts.   I am not against org charts (see my 2011 blog) and they are usually one of the outputs of design work. But organisation design charts do not represent the totality of organisational ‘structure’.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines structure as:  the way in which the parts of a system or object are arranged or organized, or a system arranged in this way, giving some examples:

  • the grammatical structure of a sentence
  • The structure of this protein is particularly complex.
  • They have a very old-fashioned management
  • Some people like the sense of structure that a military lifestyle imposes

You can see from the examples that ‘structure’ comes in many forms.  Over the years my views on what I mean by structure has developed.  My 2012 blog on the topic almost does equate ‘structure’ with ‘chart’ (but not with ‘design’).

But now,  I think of structure is a way that is much more akin to Richard Karash’s view.  In his blog  ‘How to see structure’ he discusses structure in the way I now think of it.   He says, ‘Structure is the network of relationships that creates behavior. The essence of structure is not in the things themselves but in the relationships of things. By its very nature, structure is difficult to see … much of what we think of as structure is often hidden. We can witness traffic accidents, for example, but it’s harder to observe the underlying structure that causes them.’

Karash explains the traffic accident at three levels:  the events level, the patterns and trends level, and the structural level.  As he points out, these levels are interdependent.  The structural elements – road layouts, traffic flow regulators, road surface design and so on interact along with non-structural elements to shape driver behaviour.   (I don’t agree that structure ‘creates’ behaviour, but I do think it shapes and directs it).

The various elements of  ‘structure’ that comprise the structural building blocks of ‘design’ include:

  • Hierarchies, layers and spans, with stated decision and authority levels
  • Lateral linkages and interdependencies
  • Work process, flows and business capabilities
  • Organisational performance management and governance systems
  • Individual performance management systems, pay and reward mechanisms, job design, career paths.
  • Templates, frameworks, models and methodologies
  • Information and communication flows
  • Policies, procedures and standards

So, when I talk about structure, I talk about those things, and these are the things I consider in the organisational design work.  This more comprehensive view of ‘structure’ is sometimes problematic if I don’t explain and explore it carefully with clients and stakeholders, because typically they do equate – and use interchangeably – ‘structure’ and ‘chart’ and also refer to the chart as the organisation’s ‘design’.    (The ’10 Principles for Organisation Design, mentioned earlier, also equates structure with chart, but not design).

Maybe I’m out on a limb taking a more comprehensive view because when I Googled ‘organisation structure’ and looked at the images from this they were pretty much all of organisation charts.   But I’m simultaneously reading blogs and articles telling us that the organisation chart is dead.   See for example The Org Chart is Dead,  and The End of the Org Chart and To Sir, With Love – Compliance and the End of the Org Chart and It’s Time to Kill the Org Chart

There are many organisations, particularly those moving towards ‘structures that enable self-organizing teams to organize and collaborate through internal networks’, that do not have an organisation chart of the type shown when you Google organisation charts/structures – but they do have many of the other structural elements on my list above.

Corporate Rebels reports that these chartless organisations ‘have evolved themselves from structures that look like static slow-moving pyramids to something that looks more like a flexible and fast-moving swarm of start-ups. We have witnessed them in all kinds of shapes and sizes, all called slightly different. Spotify talks about squads and tribes. Buurtzorg about self-governing teams. Stanley McCrystal about a team of teams. Finext and Incentro about cells. And FAVI calls them mini-factories.’  Look too at the article on Haier in November/December 2018 HBR

If we only equate ‘structure’ with traditional types of ‘org chart’ we lose sight of the many other, possibly better, ways of organising work and workers.   No organisation chart does not mean no structures.   And having an organisation chart requires acknowledgement that it represents only one structural element and one that neither defines nor represents the design of the organisation.

What do you talk about when you talk about structures?  Let me know.

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(I got the title from a book by Haruki Murakami ‘What I talk about when I talk about running’)

Image: New York and Erie Railroad organisation chart from 1855 © Geography & Maps/Library of Congress

Chapter sampling

So far this year I’ve downloaded sample chapters of 20 non-fiction books to my Kindle.  In 2017 I downloaded 34.  I don’t think I’ll be downloading another 14 this year, but probably I’ll download 2 or 3 more.

I download chapters of books that either I’ve read a review of that I think sounds interesting and relevant to the work that I’m doing, or that people have recommended – in response to something I’ve said I’m working on.  So, reviewing the chapter list I can review my year at work.  It’s a variant of a personal diary, except I’ve done the reading not the writing.

At least, in theory, I’ve done the reading.  In practice I have not read all the sample chapters all the way through, and I don’t know if Amazon is keeping track of the sample chapters that I convert to buying the whole book – probably they are, so I’m expecting a nudge on the lines of  ‘People like you download 25 sample chapters per year and then buy the full book of 20 of them.’

Amazon may not have the AI (yet) to report that my starting to read a sample chapter invariably invokes my personal a ‘fail fast’ system, and may be running their sample chapter operation on the premise that I will read the sample and buy the book.  But I don’t.  If I want to read it, I borrow it from the library.  (Libraries are a very necessary part of community life and are under increasing threat.  I’m a confirmed library user and delighted to see how the campaign is growing to save the UK’s libraries from closure).

I wonder what nudges, reprimands or penalties Amazon will invoke when they get the pattern. What proportion of readers really are like me and don’t buy the book?   Will Amazon to redesign my process or make me see it from a different perspective because I stop their purchasing a few pages in?  I see Amazon’s Alexa now has Hunches, will she/he sense my preference for library borrowing and urge me to buy the book instead or will Alexa be biased in favour of libraries?

Enough on Alexa and Amazon. The books I haven’t bought during 2018 are a mixed bunch:

  1. Happiness Quantified: A Satisfaction Calculus Approach, Bernard van Praag and Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell.
  2. The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology that Fuel Success and Performance at Work, Shawn Achor
  3. Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management: Organizing For Innovation And Growth, David Teece
  4. The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level, Gay Hendricks
  5. The Tyranny of Metrics, Jerry Z Muller
  6. Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery,  Sriram Narayan
  7. Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience,  Mary Helen Immordino-yang
  8. Deviate: the science of seeing differently, Beau Lotto
  9. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth,
  10. Small Arcs of Larger Circles: framing through other patterns, Nora Bateson
  11. Simple Complexity: a clear guide to complexity thinking, Neil Johnson
  12. Notes on a nervous planet, Matt Haig
  13. GDP: a brief but affectionate history, Diane Coyle
  14. Twitter and Tear Gas: the power and fragility of networked protest,  Zeynep Tufekci
  15. Networks of Outrage and Hope: social movements in the internet age, Manuel Castells
  16. Doughnut Economics: seven ways to think like a 21st century economist, Kate Raworth,
  17. Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking, Concepts, and Tools,  Richard Paul
  18. Metaphors in Mind: transformations through symbolic modelling,  James Lawley
  19. Moral Courage, Rushworth Kidder
  20. Bullshit jobs, David Graeber

Applying my human sense-making to the list and attempting to see a pattern in it, reveals that through the year I was looking at four categories:  employee experience (1, 2, 20), designing systems (3, 6, 10, 11, 18), operational context (5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16)  and brain stuff (7, 8, 4, 9, 17, 19).

The list reflects the way I work with organisation design.  I do think it’s about designing structures, roles, processes and systems that yield a positive employee experience.  In doing that we have to be alert to the constantly changing environment (internal and external) and take thoughtful, often courageous action.

In each of the categories I find that, even if I have not either bought or borrowed the book, I have taken info from the sample chapter and used it in my work – an example from each category:

Employee Experience Category:  Bullshit Jobs,  which discusses the ‘possibility that our society is riddled with useless jobs that no one wants to talk about’, because as he observes, ‘Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem to the outsider, to really do much of anything’.  It did good service in alerting me to be more rigorous and critical in my work on job design.

Designing systems category:  Simple Complexity – The writing style of the author irritated me so I looked for other sources of info and was recommended David Snowden’s 3-minute video How to Organise a Children’s Party which explains simply and brilliantly.  I’ve now shown the video many times in workshops.

Operational context category:  The Tyranny of Metrics – not only did I borrow the book, from the library, and read it all, I also wrote a blog on it

Brain stuff category:  Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking, Concepts, and Tools – I wrote a blog on this too and I’m also now using the tools, frameworks, and info available on the Critical Thinking Foundation website – so well worth the download.

Have you read all or part of any of the books I downloaded sample chapters of?  If so, what did you learn from them?  Let me know.

Image:  Kindle logo

Ten questions

Most Tuesdays, work permitting, I take a writing class at my local adult education centre.  The first part of the class is a 20 minute or so writing assignment.   Although I didn’t make the class last Tuesday (work commitment) Paul, the tutor, sent me the task.

Based on The Guardian’s Q & A in which ‘Public figures supply the answers to our searching questions’, Paul sent a list of 18 questions with the instruction: ‘Answer 10 of the questions with single sentences and then pick one to write on it for 10 mins.’

Thinking about the assignment, I realised that each week, at the end of my blog, I ask a question.  So, rather than using Paul’s list, I decided I would take 18 of my questions and, as instructed, answer 10 of them with a single sentence, then pick one of them – one of the 10, I think, but he’s not here to clarify that – to write about for 10 minutes.  Paul is very strict on timekeeping and we all obediently stop writing when he calls time, so I’ll do the same.  (Normally I spend at least twice as much time looking at interesting links as I do writing.)

I decided to take the first eighteen weeks of 2018 – which took me to Mid-May – and use those questions.  (If you want to look at the related blog, go to my website and filter by month/year).   I’ll answer 10 of them with one sentence.  Here goes – I’ve listed the 18 and put my chosen ten in bold, with my answers in italics:

  1. What organization design knowledge do you think is provisional?  I’m not sure we have organisation design ‘knowledge’ only theories, practices, assumptions, and methods.
  2. What’s your view on gratitude as a business capability?
  3. What masterclasses would you offer organization designers?
  4. Do you think science fiction can inform organization design?(There’s another sci-fi question a couples of weeks later so I’ve omitted the second one).  Yes, definitely and it should as it offers the prospect of states beyond those we typically imagine in an organisational setting.
  5. What’s your view on the HR BP role?
  6. What’s your view on hostile design?I think there’s an unfortunate tendency for organisation designers to be ‘servants of power’ rather than ‘owners of power’ which in many cases does result in hostile design.
  7. Do you think employees need to share organizational values?No, I did think that at one time, but I have changed my views on organisational values which often times are not adhered to even by those who promulgated them in the first instance.
  8. What toolkits are in your [OD] toolkit?
  9. What are you making sense of this week? I’m trying to work out how we can measure the additive impact, if any, of planned change on people’s normal day to day workload.
  10. How would you assess the degree of complexity in a business function and what is manageable for one Director?
  11. What do you think you can expect as you move from an internal to an external OD & D consulting role? (Or vice versa) A very different power dynamic – an internal consultant, regardless of expertise, can only influence while an external consultant – also regardless of expertise – is viewed as authoritative and worth paying attention to.
  12. What are your project do-ability criteria? My main criterion is to have a very good project manager working with me, because without one the whole piece of OD work could easily remain at the design stage and never make it into implementation.
  13. Do you think that the outcomes of OD & D work can be identified and then converted into useful proxy measures to show ROI? Yes, I’m sure they can and I’m still not sure quite how to do that –  it’s something that I’m still working on.
  14. What are your OD sacred cows?
  15. What’s your view of business v digital transformation?
  16. How would you, or are you, bridging the academic/practitioner organization design gap to help ensure elegant organization design?
  17. Do you think advancing technologies will impact organisation design? Yes and we are already seeing that both in the way we ‘do’ organisation design and in the way organisation designs are changing.
  18. It’s very easy to ‘unsee’.  It is less easy to stop unseeing, but I think to stop unseeing is a skill to be practiced. What’s your viewing on unseeing and stopping unseeing? Unseeing is not noticing what is happening in the context and being alert to the possibilities, challenges, opportunities, understanding that really seeing would offer – too much of organisational life is blinkered by assumptions and legacy.

Now I get 10 minutes to write on one of them and I’ll put the links in afterwards.  It’s 15.03 timer is set!   The question of hostile design is one that becomes increasingly relevant as working contracts change and technology encroaches more and more deeply into the design of organisations.   Take a look at the gig economy,  zero hours contracts, employees having microchip implants (albeit voluntarily at this stage), and human job roles being superseded by automated processes. One of our design dilemmas is how to work with the increasingly complex tech/human interface.

In the CIPD workshop I facilitated last week, I posed 4 scenarios (thank you Paul Levy for letting me use them) one of which was ‘organisation designers working in a world where they are facilitating cyborgs, developing implanted employees, meeting inside the matrix and led by robotic leaders’.  This may sound far fetched today but we see the seeds of it already e.g. in cyborgs , implanted employees, and robo work-allocators.  Tech can feel/be hostile to people – look at the twitter trolls where the tech is mediating the hostility, but this doesn’t have to be the case. How do we design organisations that manage the tech human interface in a way that values the humans?

Ok – that’s 10 minutes of pure writing.  Now I’m going to go back and put in links to some of the points in the 10 minutes worth.

If you were given this list of 18 questions which one would you choose to spend 10 minutes writing on?  Let me know.

Image Just Questions 10, Mark Fearn

What about critical thinking?

This week I’m facilitating a workshop at the CIPD conference I submitted the presentation and materials a few weeks ago and now I’m looking at them to develop thinking I had then. (One of the issues of living in the VUCA world is that it’s very easy to forget things in past given the swirls of more things coming in).   Anyway, I’m relieved to see that I mention critical thinking and reflection as two of the necessary OD & D/change skills needed.

Critical thinking and reflection seem to me to be in short supply in many organisations.  In two forums last week I came across the puzzlement OD&D consultants feel when they realise that their clients are not interested in any ‘lessons learned’ discussion on projects. (See this article on organisational learning .  The consultants were equally puzzled by clients looking for ‘the answer’ when, in most cases, there isn’t one but several possible answers.  Each of these possible answers has pros and cons which require thoughtful discussion on what trade-offs to make in order to arrive at a wise choice given current understanding of the situation.  Sadly, the consultants said they didn’t feel that clients would invest time in this type of discussion, and several of the consultants said they wouldn’t feel confident challenging the client on this.

The question that came out of those forums was – how do we encourage critical thinking in organisational life?  It’s the right question to ask, I think.

I just read an article ‘Elon Musk is raising an important question about job titles:

‘This week, in a classic Muskian publicity stunt, Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla, announced that he no longer had a job title at the electric-car manufacturer.

He had deleted his honorifics from his Tesla bio page, where he previously had been listed as chairman, product architect, and CEO, he said in a tweet . “I’m now the Nothing of Tesla. Seems fine so far,” he wrote.’

Many of us have heard of Elon Musk, seen reports of his tweets and behaviour, and formed an opinion of him.

In the same article reporting Musk’s action the author mentioned the Brightline Initiative’s Strategy@Work conference.  At this, Roger Martin outlined his view of several major shifts in the way we organize, or ought to organize, work.  ‘Let’s get rid of jobs,’ he told the audience, and instead give everyone a portfolio of projects.’ Someone in the audience asked Martin if this would just be a recipe for chaos.  ‘His response, in a nutshell: Companies already operate in chaos. They’re sprawling and multi-layered, communications break down between levels and departments, strategy becomes meaningless.’

Martin’s statement offers first, a challenge to the conventional idea of jobs (I’ve assumed a link to job descriptions and titles here, picking up on Musk’s action) and second makes a provocative point that companies operate in chaos.

It’s easy to respond to both Musk’s and Martin’s points with an immediate view, an opinion, or a soundbite response to either of these points. (See, for example, the responses to Musk’s tweet).

It’s much less easy to think, as the Foundation for Critical Thinking urges,  ‘open-mindedly within alternative systems of thought, recognizing and assessing, assumptions, implications, and practical consequences’.  It’s hard to explore open-mindedly Elon Musk or Roger Martin’s views if we cling on to our assumptions – the taken-for-granted beliefs about the world.

In their cases we might hold assumptions that job titles, and jobs/job descriptions matter, and that organisations are not chaotic.  As Stephen Brookfield says ‘Assumptions give meaning and purpose to who we are and what we do’.  He makes the point that we instinctively resist challenging our assumptions – ‘Who wants to clarify and question assumptions she or he has lived by for a substantial period of time, only to find they don’t make sense?’   (See also his article So exactly what is critical about critical reflection?)

In organisational life we are often busy leaping on or off burning platforms, looking across for blue oceans , trying to recolour ourselves teal and following north stars.   This activity not only doesn’t leave much time for critical thinking and reflection but also may well work against our own best long-term interests.

In his book ‘The Answer to How is Yes’ Peter Block shows that many standard solutions and improvement efforts, reinforced by most of the literature, keep people paralyzed. He ‘offers a new way of thinking about our actions that helps free us from being controlled by the bombardment of messages about how we should live and act’.

Both holding onto assumptions and jumping on bandwagons are blocks to critical thinking, and much of ‘normal life’ also omits critical thinking.  In the view of The Foundation for Critical Thinking, ‘much of our thinking, left to itself, is biased, distorted, partial, uninformed, or downright prejudiced. Yet, the quality of our life and that of what we produce, make, or build depends precisely on the quality of our thought. Shoddy thinking is costly, both in money and in quality of life. Excellence in thought, however, must be systematically cultivated.’

Given the context in which key socio-economic and earth system trends are ‘going exponential – for better and worse’.  (See the UN Global Compact Project Breakthrough )  we can’t afford shoddy thinking, but even as we recognise this we seem unable to do anything about doing enough criticial thinking in day to day organisational life to bring the adaptability, responsiveness, creativity, innovation and resilience to handle the exponential, messy, complex, and ‘deep craziness’ that we’re now in.

For well argued reasons why much more critical thinking is essential, listen to a BBC radio programme where ‘Mariella Frostrup and a panel of expert contributors discuss the value of critical thinking and how to nurture it in children and young people’.

As the BBC programme says, there is evidence that critical thinking skills can be learned and developed and there are many routes to this.  The Foundation for Critical Thinking has a series of miniature guides to it as well as a number of related resources.  FutureLearn offers short, free on-line programme Logical and Critical Thinking,  Coursera has Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age  Or rather than a coures, look at the five TED talks related to critical thinking.

Earlier this week a John Scharr quote dropped into my in-box.

“The future is not some place we are going, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made. And the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.”

We need deep critical thinking to create and make good paths.  Do we have enough critical thinking going on in our organisations?  If not, how do we get enough?  Let me know.

Image:  Critical Thinking, Ricardo Colugnatti