Author: naomiorgdesign

This week I started reading Aurora, a sci-fi novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. I hadn't read anything he'd written before but I got intrigued when I read an interview with him in which he was talking about positive futures. His view is that 'the stories we tell have the power to shape our future'.

That struck me as relevant as we (more or less) confidently tell ourselves the story that if we (re)design the organization then we will get positive outcomes – otherwise why design or redesign?

In between reading Aurora, I am writing a chapter on evaluating organisation designs for my forthcoming book. So, I'm asking myself how do we know what our design work is bringing, has brought, or will bring, in terms of positive futures such as efficiency gains, quality improvements, problems solved, or opportunities seized. Can we actually ascribe changes in any metrics we are tracking to something we've done in our design work?

It's the story told in Aurora. People design a spaceship to transport citizens from the now- unliveable-on Earth to likely-to-be-liveable-on Tau Ceti, aiming to get there 170 years after launch.

As the years progress, the metrics being tracked start to tell the astronauts that something is wrong – but the astronauts don't know how to find out what is the root cause of the problem – a flaw in the physical design of the space ship, something in the systems and processes, something in the way the astronauts are evolving themselves, normal wear and degradation? And thus, they don't know how to adapt the design. A reviewer remarked:

It [Aurora] is, for one thing, superbly insightful on the way entropy actually works in complex systems; how things break down or degrade, the stubbornness of the cosmos, the sod's-lawishness of machines. … The fixes are desperately costly of labour and resources. The ship is increasingly subjected to bodge jobs, and so liable to further breakdowns.

In Aurora, the ship's leading scientist is urging the AI system to tell give her the information needed to help her solve this problem. She asks for it as a narrative. But the AI system is stuck responding, questioning itself: 'How to decide how to sequence information in a narrative account? Many elements in a complex situation are simultaneously relevant. An unsolvable problem: sentences linear, reality synchronous. Both however are temporal.'

The scientist urges the AI to 'get to the point' and gets the response; 'There are many points. How to decide what's important? Need prioritising algorithm'. I almost burst out laughing, this is so akin to my world. If only I had the prioritising algorithm to hand.

Unfortunately, there are no prioritising algorithms and the AI muses that 'in the absence of a good or even adequate algorithm, one is forced to operate using a greedy algorithm, bad though it may be.' and in the Aurora case the AI has been programmed to have enough intelligence not to want to go down the greedy algorithm route. Organization designers take note. We, also, don't want to, and should not want to, select greedy algorithm approaches:

Greedy algorithms are simple and straightforward. They are short-sighted in their approach in the sense that they take decisions on the basis of information at hand without worrying about the effect these decisions may have in the future. They are easy to invent, easy to implement and most of the time quite efficient. Many problems cannot be solved correctly by the greedy approach.

The AI warns of the danger of using greedy algorithms as they are 'known to be capable of choosing, or even be especially prone to choosing, the unique worst possible plan when faced with certain kinds of problems.'

Exactly. If only we could inject more complexity recognition into in organization design work. It's too easy to focus on one simple and not necessarily relevant element e.g. the organization chart, or a customer satisfaction score, not acknowledging or understanding the complex and simultaneously relevant elements that the metric doesn't come even close to representing.

We look at various organizational metrics – see a list of The 75 KPIs Every Manager Needs To Know – and as these change over time, don't know whether our design interventions are causing change, whether our designs are solving current problems and/or if they are creating future problems because we can't identify what elements are 'simultaneously relevant' to look at/address, and the metrics can be interpreted in multiple ways.

Not only that, the metrics are not the whole story, John W Gardner explains:
What does the information processing system filter out? It filters out all sensory impressions not readily expressed in words and numbers. It filters out emotions, feeling, sentiment, mood and almost all of the irrational nuances of human situations. It filters out those intuitive judgements that are just below the level of consciousness. So the picture of reality that sifts to the top of our … organizations … is sometimes a dangerous mismatch with the real world. We suffer the consequences when we run head on into situations that cannot be understood except in terms of those elements that have been filtered out.'

This thinking didn't get me very far in writing the chapter on evaluating organization designs – but I am enjoying the sci-fi novel, so take comfort in the value of this displacement activity. (ED NOTE: What is this measured by ???)

How do you avoid the dangers of greedy algorithm thinking in your design work – doing it or evaluating it? Let me know.

Someone sent me a note asking 'I wonder if you are interested in writing a blog for the resource pack for the Culture tool? It is missing a few stories about how others 'do things'. I thought of you for the bit on empowering.'

The Culture Tool is a discussion diagnostic where teams talk about various questions and then rate themselves. When all the questions have been rated a radar chart is generated and the group then decides what, if anything, they want to do to change the picture. The question on empowerment reads: 'To what extent do you feel your team/ group are confident/able to empower people?'

Thinking about this, it seems to me that the question behind that question is about the relationship between power/control/autonomy and empowering. The nature of the statement 'able to empower people' suggests that empowerment is a gift given by those with power to those without power, and if that is the case then the gift could be withdrawn as part of a control system.

I found several discussions on this as I started to explore my line of thinking. For example, an HBR article by Robert Simons, Control in an Age of Empowerment. He wrote it in 1995, and although I'm not keen on the mechanistic language, I found he has interesting and topical ideas around types of control 'levers': diagnostic, beliefs, boundary and interactive.

He says it is the 'Beliefs systems [that] empower individuals and encourage them to search for new opportunities. They communicate core values and inspire all participants to commit to the organization's purpose', but in Simons' view participants (employees) are only empowered within 'boundaries [that are'] in modern organizations, embedded in standards of ethical behavior and codes of conduct, and are invariably written in terms of activities that are off-limits. … Telling employees what not to do allows innovation, but within clearly defined limits.'

Another (1998) discussion talks about two types of empowerment: structural, and personal. Structural empowerment dealing with authority expressed as 'pushing the decision making down to the lowest level'. And personal empowerment expressed as the ability for the individual to develop and apply autonomous* decisions and behaviours.

The relationship between the two suggests that 'the only power of hierarchy is to limit it (autonomy) not to give it… Management can prevent but cannot grant power … organizations and societies often create environments which takes away the potential choices an individual can have.' It is Simon's boundary discussion from a different angle.

So 'empowerment' is the extent to which organizational boundaries enable the ability of groups and individuals to make autonomous decisions and choices. In other words, autonomy is organizationally bounded. (Dan Pink, author of Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us, thinks 'empowerment' is a control mechanism somewhere on the spectrum 'between meaningless and insidious – fundamentally flawed').

So, I am back where I started with the thought that where notions of empowerment in organizations seem to get tangled is in the tensions of power/control/autonomy. We speak about 'empowering' but it's always within the context of the organisational structures, processes, and risk appetite.

However, if we really do want people to assume more control, ask forgiveness not permission, and believe that managers would like staff to make sensible decisions and choices off their own bat, which many organizations say they do want, then what needs to happen? A prescription, or copying from how others do things, won't work because different contexts will respond differently to it. But maybe some questions could stimulate a discussion.

• Why is 'empowerment' being seen as desirable for the organization? (What does it look and feel like in practice?)
• What is the outcome leaders are hoping for when they say they want to 'empower' employees?
• Who does the 'empowering' to whom?
• What are the boundaries of 'empowerment' and how does it relate to 'autonomy'?
• What are the control tools and devices that reward or punish to much or too little evidence of 'empowerment'? And are they consistently applied?
• How will people know when they are 'empowered'?

If we do want to know how others do things, Spotify, a digital music service, is lauded as an example of how to 'empower' and how 'autonomy' works in their organization. They talk about 'autonomous teams – fully empowered to fulfill their mission'. In one of the many, many articles about Spotify we learn how Spotify 'balances employee autonomy and accountability, balances freedom to innovate versus following proven routines, and balances alignment with control.'

This HBR piece is worth reading because it offers insight into how one organisation grapples with the relationships between empowering/power/control/autonomy. It confirmed my view that empowering is a control device, and it how it is used that makes the difference between enabling degrees of autonomy and being, in Dan Pink's words, fundamentally flawed.

Do you think empowering is a control device? Let me know?

*Autonomy is "the ability to make informed choices about what should be done and how to go about doing it. This entails being able to formulate aims and beliefs about how to achieve them, along with the ability to evaluate the success of those beliefs in the light of empirical evidence"

My daughter is expecting a baby. I remember when I was expecting her, I was very taken with a Louis MacNeice poem Prayer Before Birth. I read it again last week. The stanza

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine ..

made me shiver. We're dangerously close to designing a future where if we are not exactly cogs in machines, machines may increasingly be cogs in us: for example, we already have brain implants used to help manage Parkinson's disease, and an artificial retina to help people with retinitis pigmentosa.

This rapidly developing field of designing human performance enhancement (HPE), that makes use of the 'convergence of nano-technology , biotechnology , information technology and cognitive science is creating a set of powerful tools that have the potential to significantly enhance human performance as well as transform society , science, economics and human evolution.' (James Canton)

Advanced technologies like these change the relationship between humans and the way we interact with the world, (described well in this short video). Read Never Let Me Go or some of the many other dystopian sci-fi novels that describe the various worlds our yet-to-be-borns will live in. All chillingly touch moral and ethical issues that we are still far from getting to grips with. (If dystopia is not for you there is a list of utopian sci-fi novels too).

It's not just HPE that has moral and ethical implications for society. Anything and everything designed does. Each time we design something – product, service, organisation, etc. It comes, as Sebastian Deterding says 'with certain values embedded in it. And we can question these values. We can question: Is it a good thing that all of us continuously self-optimize ourselves to fit better into that society?'

I had this in mind, when I got an email asking me to 'share your insights on the topic "Designing for the future: trends we need to consider now".

In my view, the design trend that is most pressing for us to consider now is that which explores, debates, and confronts the moral and ethical dimensions inherent in both our designs, and in our methods and approaches to designing.

Some say that 'ethics and mores are being established on the fly' rather than through considered societal discussion. But I see a distinctly emerging trend suggesting that morals and ethics are rising up the design agenda.

Look, for example, at the Reilly Centre's annual top 10 list of ethical dilemmas and policy issues in science and technology. They span many design fields: this year's includes: brain hacking, automated politics, and the self-healing body. The Centre invites people to participate in the moral and ethical debates on these and offers tools and resources to generate discussion.

Or look at the relatively recently established (2003) Oxford University Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics with its mission to help guide people to make good choices about 'novel problems and challenges, for which our traditional institutions and norms were not developed'.

Designers are beginning to acknowledge that designs are 'moral mediators' and ask what can we do with that knowledge as a designer?' Educator Peter-Paul Verbeek suggests three possibilities:

• You could simply anticipate the mediations that are involved when you design … , just to make sure that nothing might happen that you would not want to happen.
• You could systematically assess the mediations by going through all the potential mediating effects, and do an ethical assessment of them.
• You could actually really try to design (moral) mediations into the design.

These three points are relevant to organization designers. We could use them to help us determine how far we wanted to go in designing moral and ethical organizations.

Suppose we wanted to consciously design organizations for 'good work' i.e. work that is "fair and decent, with scope for development and fulfilment". What moral and ethical dimensions would we have to consider? They would have to include the discussions of the automation of work, the organizational structures that inhibit or foster ethical and moral behaviours, the use of HPE in the workforce, the use of big data, surveillance and monitoring of employees, and so on. How far would we go in designing good work amidst the tensions and competing voices of stakeholder value, efficiency, and customer expectations?

We haven't come anywhere near to addressing the moral and ethical dimensions that the accelerating technologies, combined with new designs of societal and organizational interactions that the technologies facilitate, could have on our future. But we can, and must, participate in the trending groundswell of discussion on this. Without doing so, we will not get to designs that yield a future where we can provide those not yet born:

With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

What's your view on the moral and ethical dimensions of organization design? Let me know.

Note: "This blog post is a part of Design Blogger Competition organized by CGTrader"

Roughly a year ago, I facilitated a session on designing organisational culture. One of the slides I showed suggested that there are various methods and tools that aid culture change. I gave some examples of each. So, under 'methods' I listed: Developing supportive infrastructure, changing the context to change the habits, shaping group norms through incentives, relaxing or removing 'old' rules and controls, you and other leaders and managers demonstrating 'new/desired' cultural attributes.

And under 'tools', I listed: incentives, policies, symbols, feedback, communication, education and development.

A couple of weeks ago someone emailed me the slide back asking if I'd facilitate a 'deep dive' session exploring what I'd put on it. I called him and we agreed I should cover: What are tools? What tools work? How can we use them? (A tall order in 90 minutes. Note to self: be careful what I put on PowerPoints!).

To get myself thinking about this I google imaged 'what are tools?' to see what came up. The first screen showed a lovely range of things – a construction site helmet, a questionnaire, a hammer, some instructions, a reporting dashboard, some desktop icons, a mind-map, and so on. So, that got me heading towards answering the question with 'tools are shaping devices'.

I guess I was prompted in that definition as I'm doing a FutureLearn course on the Philosophy of Technology . It's packed with questions and discussion on the role of technology plays in mediating human interaction with the environment. It seems to me that technology – at least the form discussed in the course – is one type of tool. And, as we learned, tools/technology 'shape all kinds of relations between humans and the world, and in doing so, they influence practices and the ways in which we perceive the world.'

In trying to shape organisational culture or 'manage change' we are selecting tools that we think will do that.

So, I started the session testing the premise that tools are shaping devices. To stimulate thinking we looked what tools are in use that encourage drivers to stick to the speed limits, i.e. that shape driver behaviour. There are multiple tools to do this, including speed bumps, vehicle activated electronic speed signs, driving regulations, penalties for speeding, in-car speed limiters, and so on.

This led onto the discussion of which of the tools we came up with 'work' to shape driver behaviour. We initially felt that using several tools simultaneously would get drivers adhering to the speed limit more effectively that just one being used on its own. But then I got out the Creative Whack Pack a wonderful tool for stimulating creative thinking. The first one I picked up said 'Do the unexpected'. Someone suddenly remembered some traffic calming experiments that remove several of the standard tools for restricting speed and instead allowed drivers to 'self-police'.

From this we got to a point where we felt that tools that work have to be:
a) Relevant and current. Many of the tools in use have a 'shelf life'. For example, a policy doesn't stay relevant over time. And, it appears, neither do speed bumps!
b) Simple and trusting of the user rather than over-controlling
d) Selected for the context and purpose – what works in one context may not in another.

Our discussion also led us to propose that:
a) There can be unintended consequences of any tool used. For example, speedbumps are exciting challenges to skate-boarders. And what might be intended as an enabler could become a disabler. (Sadly, I've forgotten the actual example given on this)
b) We had a fairly limited view of what a 'tool' is and we should extend our thinking on them. For example, person suggested that the way classrooms are laid out constitutes a tool
c) We don't know what tool will work till we try it out

With these ideas to hand we went on to look at what tools we could use to encourage building strong communities, and failing fast and learning. (Two statements of 9 from a wall chart about the culture we want to foster). I'd brought some paper-based tools along as examples to try out.

Build strong communities. The Scottish Community Development Centre has a set of good-practice principles and guidance notes designed to support and inform the process of community engagement. Back this up with the Community Engagement Toolkit that we also looked at, and you have some tools to start building a strong community with.

Fail fast and learn. We had a go at taking Fail Forward's comprehensive Intelligent Failure Assessment. In this case the discussion revolved less around 'fail' – not a word we warmed to – and more around 'learn' and we got some useful and usable ideas to immediately put into practice.

Further, towards the end of the discussion we came to a view that failing fast and learning could also be an integral element of building a strong community.

And so, a final idea was born – the group in the room could select and use a wide range of tools to design and build their own strong community that has all the hallmarks of the changed culture they are working to develop in their 'day jobs'.

What's your view on tools for culture design? Let me know.

We went walking in the Scottish Highlands last week. The idea was to take a holiday: to get away from organization design stuff, book writing, work pre-occupations, and all the normal business as usual of life.

Holidays are supposed to make you more productive when you get back to work, because you've had time for rumination, reflection, mind-wandering and all the rest of the reasons we read about that tell us taking a holiday is a good thing

Whether or not it's actually true I'm not sure, and neither are others . Maybe I'll find out during the coming week when I re-enter the digitally enabled networked world: not easy to be part of in the areas we were walking.

Although it was the Scottish Highlands which is mainly sea, sky, wild open green and/or rocky spaces – very different from an office in central London, I didn't find myself quite free-wheeling away from organization design stuff.

Like the man we met at Loch Achaidh na h-Inich who told us he was a professional prawn fisherman, also fished for fun (which is what he was doing when we met him), and went to the River Severn for fishing holidays, I found myself continuously placing my holiday experiences in relation to organizational design approaches. It turned out I was on a busman's holiday.

That sounds ridiculous but here's several reasons I couldn't – or, some who shall be nameless said, wouldn't – escape.

The first day, we walked past numerous info boards telling us the history of the area we were walking in. Many, in fact most, of them detailed aspects of the Highlands history of clan conflicts and other fights between various factions over territory and resources, power struggles, wealth disparity, seizing of resources, and so on.

In a small snatch of internet access I managed to get, I looked up what I remembered of Louis Pondy's theories of organizational conflict. His classic paper categorizes 3 types of conflict: bargaining conflict (competing for scarce resources), bureaucratic conflict (conflicts in the vertical dimension of a hierarchy), and systems conflict (lateral conflict amongst the parties to a functional relationship). Yes, they were all reflected in the clan conflicts. So the next day I found myself pondering methods of reducing conflicts through design work.

Second, we walked into Plockton. It's a village with 350 people (now). Here's a snippet of its history:

Originally called Am Ploc, the settlement was a crofting hamlet until the end of the 1700s. As in so many other parts of the Highlands this all changed when landowners found it was possible to make much more money from their estates by letting their land to sheep farmers: and to make room for the sheep they simply cleared the crofters from the land, people who in many cases had lived there for generations. Many had little choice but to emigrate, and Plockton soon became a port of embarkation for those displaced during the clearances.

In the early 1800s the landlord, Sir Hugh Innes, decided he could increase the value of his estates further by giving tenants cleared from inland areas an alternative to emigration: instead they could resettle in a new fishing port he developed under the name of "Plocktown". New streets of houses were built, many with small crofts, pieces of land that the residents could use to supplement the income they derived from fishing. This was the era of the "herring boom" and Plockton rapidly grew to accommodate over 500 people, many living two families to a cottage.

But the herring boom simply ended when the fish changed their migration patterns, and the area was also severely affected by the potato famine of the late 1840s. Before long Plockton became known as Baile na Bochdainn, or "village of the poor". It saw a resurgence following the arrival of the railway in the 1890s, but large-scale fishing never resumed.

Since then it has had more ups and downs – being used as a location for a TV series turned it into a victim of its own success. But now it appears to be a thriving tourist location with upmarket gastro pubs serving haggis, neeps and tatties in tasteful arrangements, a high school with 300 pupils and a well organised community .

Plockton's story, mirrors many organizational ones, and triggered in my mind questions on agility, adaptability, and thriving. I wondered why is it Plockton is thriving and other villages with similar histories aren't?

There's an interesting blog on community thriving by Bettina von Stamm here. She discusses a range of factors that seem to need to be in place to enable a community to thrive. Several of them Plockton has. Her piece is related to cities but she wonders if the same factors are applicable to networks and organizations – so the following day found me musing on engendering thriving organizational communities.

Third, we spent time (in various pubs, sipping wee drams) reading print books: a wonderfully relaxing way to end a day's walking. I was reading John Le Carre's novel, Absolute Friends, even then I couldn't stop myself highlighting – not in a library book in case you're wondering – the paragraph, 'Promotion, Teddy, I would say, is in inverse proportion to knowledge. … The butler knows more than the lord of the manor. The lord of the manor knows more than the queen.'

And on the next page, 'in a mammoth bureaucracy obsessed with its own secrecy, the fault lines are best observed by those who, instead of peering down from the top, stand at the bottom and look up.' Yes, a reinforcement worth bearing in mind when I'm trying to help sort out what's going on in a customer journey that isn't working optimally.

When I next logged on I reached for Barry Oshry's work on Tops, Middles, and Bottoms, and Frederic Laloux talking about Reinventing Organizations.

So, a complete break in some respects, and not a break at all in others. Do you take busman's holidays? Let me know.

We've had several discussions this week on 'single point accountability'. This sounds straightforward as a concept. Like financial accounting, 'accountability is about giving a reckoning of the actions taken-—and the actions not taken-—that led to the final outcome. Just like in accounting, where your balance sheet must add up correctly, there also has to be a balance in performance accountability'.

Unfortunately, mostly, we think of accountability in relation to assignment of blame (loss) rather than in relation to credit (profit). If you're accountable, you take the blame for what goes wrong. CEOs are usually held accountable for wrong-doing that occurs in their organization and in many cases resign as a result. Sir John Rose, formerly CEO Rolls-Royce, and Martin Winterkorn, formerly CEO Volkswagen are two cases in point.

While they were still at work, both Sir John Rose and Mr Winterkorn received accolades for their leadership and credit for rising sales and share prices. Now, they face pressure to explain why they should not be held accountable for the bad things that happened on their watch as well.

Resignation doesn't solve the issue of what causes something to go wrong: why has the loss occurred? It's often hard to find out. Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal by Jack Ewing, a new book on the Volkswagen emissions problem attempts to explain how that situation arose.

But, as in similar situations, he can't give a clear-cut answer. He cites a range of factors involved – tolerance for breaking the rules, lack of checks and balances, employees who had reservations about illegal software had no place to turn, and the personality of Ferdinand Piech – a demanding and fearsome boss.

Finding a single accountable person, close to the work process or issue involved, In this sort of situation is probably impossible, so the CEO takes the 'buck stops here' position.

Many organisational redesigns involve doing a RACI exercise (putting names against each of the four aspects of accountable, responsible, consulted, and informed with an emphasis that there should be only one person accountable) in order to mitigate the risk of diffused accountability. That is fine in some situations – for example a single process operating within obvious organisational boundaries. In most cases it is insufficient. There are few work processes which are not complex. Many cross organizational boundaries.

Take the fashion industry's supply chain which the Bangladesh Rana Plaza catastrophe highlighted. A 2013 Panorama programme, "Dying for a Bargain", review commented that '[It] again showed the total fallacy of factory audits as finish times for workers were falsified and workers locked into factories. Research also shows how many western fashion buyers base their calculations on misleading industry standards set on 100% efficient factories.'

In the networked situation, there are still people responsible for doing work for which they are held accountable by someone else but it doesn't work neatly in a hierarchy to the top single point of accountability. It's not like the nested Russian Matryoshka dolls.

Additionally. accountability is not only about the people: individuals and their relationships, but also about the processes, systems, checks, and balances that enable people to take accountability or to be held accountable. And, in my experience, these formal system aspects are rarely examined as part of doing a RACI analysis or other work to assign accountability.

Assigning accountability in networked organisations is hard. The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability notes that: 'In all networks, responsibility is shared, ruling out any single point of accountability and giving rise to intensified problems of "many hands". If no one person or body is formally in charge, nobody can be called to account for the network's collective outcomes or made to impose remedies in the wake of acknowledged failure'.

Our discussion on accountability was in relation to a work process that crosses several organizational boundaries – both internal and external. How do we make it work more effectively in the absence of any obvious single accountable owner, and the reality of assigning one?

Peter Bregman in an HBR article, The Right Way to Hold People Accountable, suggests five ways for ensuring people take accountability. He is focused on individuals but his suggestions are usefully extended into organisational policies, practices, systems and processes, within and across boundaries.

Clear expectations: along the work process which organisation is delivering what and accountable for it? Can this be stated and reinforced through contracts, service level agreements, or similarly formal arrangements?

Clear capability: do all the organisations in the work process have the right capability – technology, time, skills, money, data – to deliver what they are expected to deliver? If not, how can others in the network support or help reduce any gaps?

Clear measurement: is the work process being measured across the whole process and not just in discrete steps? How often are the measures reviewed? How transparent is the whole process to every organisation along it? Can each party clearly see at all times their contribution to the overall outcome?

Clear feedback: How quickly are the feedback loops operating in the case of failure? Does everyone have equal rights in highlighting and starting to solve any issues? Are the channels available to ensure rapid feedback? Are decision rights balanced to ensure the work process can work effectively all the time?

Clear consequences: What are the agreed consequences for failure in any part of the whole process? Are the consequences equitable along the process or is one part likely to be blamed more than another in the event of failure. Is there a better way to operate that avoids blame rather looks to collaborate and problem solve rather than to finger point?

There's much research in the field of networked governance that shows both the high value of good relationship building within the network and the formal ties of bridging and brokerage through systems and processes.

The ultimate aim is for everyone to feel accountable for the success of the overall process and be supported by systems, processes and policies which support this. In my view accountability is a design issue, perhaps more than a people/relationship issue? What's your view? Let me know.

I'm wondering whether the phrase '70% of change efforts fail' is down to not knowing how to get from a design to an implementation – so things stall at the point of a detailed, tested concept design. The 30% that don't fail may have cracked the process of a) planning to get safely from current to designed state and b) getting there. (Whether 70% of change fails is largely unproven but that hasn't stopped people thinking that is the case).

The topic came to mind when someone sent an email asking me to run a session with project managers where we 'delve deeper into the tools of change' which (in a previous workshop) I'd suggested included: incentives, policies, symbols, feedback, communication, education and development.

He asked 'from your experience what has worked, what's not – why to both, how can you use the tools in the project world, both internally to the project team (i.e. incentives to drive performance/change in behaviours, are there any lessons we can learn from the Agile delivery?) but also to the products of the projects'.

As I was pondering this I came across Ron Ashkenas HBR article We Still Don't Know the Difference Between Change and Transformation. He defines change management as 'implementing finite initiatives, which may or may not cut across the organization. The focus is on executing a well-defined shift in the way things work.'

He defines transformation as 'another animal altogether. Unlike change management, it doesn't focus on a few discrete, well-defined shifts, but rather on a portfolio of initiatives, which are interdependent or intersecting. More importantly, the overall goal of transformation is not just to execute a defined change -— but to reinvent the organization and discover a new or revised business model based on a vision for the future'.

This seems to me to be a useful distinction and I started to form a hypothesis that project managers confuse 'change management' and 'transformation'. And if they don't get the distinction between the two their transition plans and the implementation of them are going to lead to failure.

In my experience 'transformation' requires a good knowledge and understanding of systems thinking. (If you want to learn about this I recommend the short, free FutureLearn course Systems Thinking and Complexity)

My hypothesis began to morph towards a question – how much do project and programme managers know about systems thinking? Is there a tendency to treat transformation projects as change management projects? And if so, is that why projects 'fail'?

One researcher (2012) also asking how much project and programme managers are schooled in systems and complexity found that: 'Surprisingly, project managers do not seem to use simple systems thinking tools even though these provide unique benefits in framing and solving problems that arise from multiple perspectives and relationships.'

And in 2013, the Association for Project Management set up a group 'to promote systems thinking across the wider decision-making community in the UK in order to support the improved delivery of complex projects and avoid common pitfalls.'

The next thing to hit my inbox was a run of email exchanges about introducing the Spotify model of Product Development Units. This model involves functionally integrated, highly autonomous, self-organized, self-steering, teams, measured for performance at the team level. (See Niels Pflaeging's blog). The emails were discussing to how to effectively transition to them. An HBR article on this model discussed three challenges: balancing autonomy and accountability, balancing freedom to innovate versus following proven routines, balancing alignment with control.

If an organization is hierarchical, measures individual performance, has functional silos, and traditional management then introducing the Spotify model is not the change management Ashkenas describes as a few discrete, well-defined shifts. Because it affects the whole organization, it is the transformation that he describes as reinventing the organization and discovering a new or revised business model.

In this example, a typical change management plan to transition built around levers of change will not work. What's needed is a transformation plan – one which accommodates, what Ashkenas calls, the 'unpredictable, iterative, and experimental'. It requires not a 'tools and levers' approach but a systems thinking approach.

Now I'm wondering whether project and programme managers skilled and knowledgeable in systems (and complexity) thinking have a better track record of successful change and transformation delivery – because they can distinguish between the two and plan appropriately – than those who don't. Do you know? If so, let me know.

Hi Naomi, I was hoping that you'd be able to give me a bit of advice, as I'd like to get a diploma or other qualification on organisation design but I'm not sure which programmes/trainings would be best to attend. Do you have any recommendations? Natasha

Hello Natasha – thanks for your email. I can only give some general suggestions and can't recommend any specific programmes. My thoughts below don't give a comprehensive picture but are based on my slant on organisation design.

I guess that you're looking for something that is accredited by a university and/or professional recognised body? Here's three ways to approach your enquiry

• Browsing
• Trying out
• Asking others

Browsing
Look at the Design Research Society website. It is the 'multi-disciplinary learned society for the design research community, promoting excellence in design research globally.

• recognising design as a creative act common to many disciplines
• understanding research and its relationship with education and practice
• advancing the theory and practice of design'

You'll see how organization design is one strand of 'design'. You'll also see that the Design Management Academy Conference is next week (7 – 9 June 2017) with some interesting themes listed in an earlier call for papers. Three that caught my eye were:
Track 6.d Designing the Designers: Future of Design Education
Track 6.a Building New Capabilities in an Organization: A research methodology perspective
Track 4.a Changing Design Practices: How We Design, What We Design, and Who Designs?

Each track is led by academics and in a couple of the track description are indicative references to content.

Why am I telling you this? Because if you take a look at the courses in the universities involved you'll see many facets of design, most of them related to organization design in some way. Browsing through their offers will encourage you to think through what slant, in the organization design field, you are specifically interested in and why you might be interested in it. If I were starting over I might ask myself: Is it business design? Is it design innovation? Is it culture design? Is it socio technical systems design?

University programmes like those hyperlinked above will give you solid groundings in the theory and practice of design related to businesses.

Many MBA programmes have an organization design related module. (I taught on the California College of the Arts Design Strategy MBA). Radboud University has a Master's specialisation in Organisational Design and Development.

Other sites to browse are: the Organisation Design Forum which has conferences, runs webinars and discussion events, and has a list of practitioners that do organization design training. The European Organisation Design Forum which accredits programmes, runs conferences, hosts networking events and operates a mentoring scheme. The Marshall School of Business which runs a Certificate in Organization Design. The Organizational Design Community that has an annual conference on design-related topics, and publishes the Journal of Organization Design. In addition, it has established an accreditation program.

Trying things out
If you're not sure what aspect of organization design you're interested in you can do some good, free, short on-line courses. Coursera offers Design Thinking for Innovation (a few hours a week for 5 weeks). Also their Competitive Strategy and Organization Design Specialization looks great fun – and promises laughter along the way. The module Strategic Organisation Design is 6 weeks of study 5.5. hours a week or look at Leadership through Design Innovation which looks at a 'new style of leadership to embolden and accelerate innovation. [For which] design offers a novel way to discover market opportunities, experiment to validate concepts and mitigate risk, and deliver value to all stakeholders'.

Futurelearn offers Philosophy of Technology and Design: Shaping the Relations Between Humans and Technologies. (I have registered for this one). And also, Designing the Future.

Ed-X offers Design Practice in Business.

All of the above are drawn from University curriculums.

Asking others
There are several groups on Linked In that discuss organization design. I follow the Organizational Design Community, The Organization Design Forum, The Organization Design Network, the Beta Codex group, the e-office Workplace Design Community, the Association for Strategic Planning, the Design Thinking Group. You could ask your question of them and see what they come up with. If you go to any organization design networking events ask people how they developed their skills and knowledge.

During last week, I randomly asked a few colleagues what courses they know of. I got a good range of responses including the French Diplome Universitaire Codesign, Roffey Park's short course Organization Design in Practice, Ashridge-Hult's short course Advanced Organization Design, the CIPD's Level 7 Advanced Award in Organisation Design and Development, the Design Management Institute's short course on Design Thinking, Cornell's 2-day course Organizational Design: An Essential HR Capability, and the Open School of Management module on organization design.

In summary – browse the field of organisation design, figure out what aspects interest you and why, try out some short courses before committing yourself to a longer programme, and ask around for what has worked for others. Hope this helps. Naomi

Readers: How would you answer Natasha's question? Let me know.

What I didn't know when until I got to Dubai last week, to facilitate an organization design programme, was that 'The UAE Cabinet, chaired over by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, endorsed the launch of corporate happiness and positivity initiatives in the UAE Federal Government.'

It came up in the discussion we were having, at one point, on designing for employee engagement and one of the participants mentioned the fact that there is a UAE Minister of State for Happiness. The same participant mentioned the book, Reflections on Happiness & Positivity that Sheikh Mohammed has written. I bought a copy to learn more about his thinking behind the happiness initiatives.

One of the stories he tells in it is the story of standing in the desert and asking the people with him what they saw. One replied 'a barren desert', when asked what he saw, Sheikh Mohammed said 'a great national treasure .. a fundamental pillar of our national economy.' He tells of how over the two decades since that point they have built a thriving economy attracting 14 million tourists each year. He suggests, in the book, that having the ability to realize a vision takes happiness and positivity.

Later in the programme we started to talk about how culture is expressed in organizations and this led us to talking about what we literally see in organizations as we walk around them e.g. the choice of photos and pictures, the furnishings, the work station layouts, the way people are moving around the space and so on.

We wondered if we, organization designers, pay enough attention to this aspect in our design work. If we recognize that people see the same thing differently (as in the desert story) and perhaps even see different things (or not see them) then should we be noticing and gaining insights about the organization from what we literally see. Does what we see shape how we act?

If we consciously looked, would what we see give us any surprises, any new perspectives, any instance where we could see coherence or jolting disconnects. For example, in an organization where the phrase 'everyone a leader' is heard a lot, does that synchronize with having only executive leadership team member photos in the reception area. Would a clearer, and more motivational consistency be a collage of the photos of all employees?

I remembered that years ago, I worked through the 12-week programme in the book The Artist's Way at Work. One of the exercises in it is 'Watch the picture without the sound'. The task is to 'photograph your workday. Document the people and places of your work world, quietly … This tool is intended to give you objectivity. What about this world would you like to change? What about it can you change?' I still have the pictures I took in that workplace.

Hearing about this exercise, the person who mentioned the UAE happiness initiative wondered if we could see happiness in the workplace, how would it be visually expressed? We pursued the discussion – several people worked in the hotel industry and talked about designing customer experiences that made guests happy and several of these had obvious visual elements.

Indeed, in the hotel I was staying in, under each staff member's name on their name badge was a small point about them 'I like jazz' or 'I enjoy playing my guitar'. When I started chatting to them about what they had on their badges they did seem happy in their talking about it. Their happiness tagline did seem to spark a happy conversation.

Our organization design group moved on to a discussion on whether happy employees made for happy customers and how you would see this in the workplace. I am not sceptical about the value of designing 'good work' (see my book on Organizational Health) but I am sceptical on the simplicity of the employee happiness = customer happiness (or productivity) correlation. I think happiness is a complex construct related to an individual's world view and various other factors.

We agreed to pass on whether happy employees = happy customers, instead focusing on how we might see happiness reflected in the workplace. We knew that it is through much more than just taglines on badges it's a whole raft of design inputs some of which are outlined in the article Creating the Best Workplace on Earth: 'In a nutshell, it's a company [designed to be one] where individual differences are nurtured; information is not suppressed or spun; the company adds value to employees, rather than merely extracting it from them; the organization stands for something meaningful; the work itself is intrinsically rewarding; and there are no stupid rules.'

But how these aspects would be visually obvious we were less sure of – we retreated to happiness indicators like those presented in the annual World Happiness Report. Yet, going back to the looking at the desert story, I'm intrigued to know if several people could look at the same organizational landscape and see different things in it. Would someone see happiness and another see something else?

Look around your organization. See if you can see happiness – what does it look like? How do you design to achieve it, or can you? Let me know.

Last week I was reminded of my aeons ago primary school experience of having to bring in something for the 'nature table' and then being made to stand up and show it to my classmates and tell them about it. I liked the clump of sheep's wool I'd pulled off some barbed wire complete with all the claggy bits of mud and twigs – but I got no takers to my offer of giving them some of it to show their mums and dads.

Nowadays this type of thing is called a 'show and tell' which Netmums tell us 'is a key part of the school day and an important part of your child's learning development, as it helps them to organise information and builds their confidence.'

The 'show and tell' (aka sprint review) that I was in was somewhat similar: a valiant presenter and polite audience. These 'show and tell' events are a key part of agile methodology giving the team the time 'to present the work completed during the sprint. The Product Owner checks the work against pre-defined acceptance criteria and either accepts or rejects the work.' A show and tell, however, 'is not a meeting designed to criticise or for the team to take further actions for improvement to the product.'

Skills in organizing information are useful and so is confidence particularly if you can see your work isn't going down that well, and what's interesting about the 'show and tell' approach is that it is designed to be largely one-way – there isn't a whole lot of interaction. I get that show and tells have a purpose and a place in organizational life.

But in some organisations, they are the way of life – demonstrated in management style, in cultural and performance expectations, and in interpersonal interactions.

We were mulling over this during the week in a different meeting as we started to talk about collaboration and how to develop expectations of 'ask and listen' in our predominantly 'show and tell' world.

Pixar, known for computer animated films, is reportedly good at asking and listening. Ed Catmull, co-founder Pixar, tells the story of their 2-hour Braintrust meetings: 'Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid.' They now do this well.

But getting to that point where 'Everyone is fully invested in helping everyone else turn out the best work. They really do feel that it's all for one and one for all,' meant developing guidelines designed, among other things, to remove the power structure from the room, because what Catmull's found is that 'while the creative process thrives with a high level of horizontal diversity, be extremely wary of the inhibiting effect of vertical diversity.'

In organisations where show and tell is the dominant operating mode, removing from the room the hierarchical (vertical) power structure to problem solve and collaborate is really hard. It's like taking the teacher out of a traditional classroom.

Then, in our meeting on getting better at collaboration, Alastair asked us a really great question, 'What are the holding patterns in the organisation?' He elaborated: 'What is held-up (either as a stoppage or as something to emulate)? What is held-back? What is held down? What is held out? What is held over? What is held on to?'

The whole idea of holding patterns fired our imagination and our thinking. We began to explore whether our organisational culture is in the holding pattern of 'show and tell'. If so, are people holding back on what they want to say? Are we holding onto notions of hierarchy that are unhelpful? Are we holding down actions for change and holding up the status quo? And so on.

Most of us had been held in a 'holding pattern' in an aircraft over Heathrow at some point and know that to break out of a holding pattern something has to change. Glenda Eoyang, Human Systems Dynamics Institute, has some interesting and useful ideas on how to change holding patterns. She suggests that, 'To see patterns in the world around you is to know your world and to understand something about that world. You make sense of the world by recognizing the patterns around you.'

Once you recognise the patterns, you are in a better place to shift them by, first naming the conditions that frame that pattern, second identifying a way to shift one condition, third taking action and seeing if that brings you closer to the results you want.

She reassures that it doesn't have to be a long analytical process to recognise the patterns, and gives several examples of how 'Increasing, decreasing, or introducing new differences will shift the conditions and change the emergent patterns in a system.'

However, she recognises that 'while it's simple to say that some of your greatest challenges in your family, community, organization, and society are "just" patterns, it's also a recognition of the complexity of those challenges.'

So, to get to collaboration we're going consider the holding patterns that challenge it and then design and try out some shifts. Have you got examples of successfully changing your organisations holding patterns? Let me know.