Author: naomiorgdesign

There's a phrase painted along the corridor wall, on the way to the cafeteria, of a building I frequent. I'm assuming it's read by lots of people, walking by it to buy their lunch, although when I pointed it out to someone the other day she said she'd never noticed it.

I think it's supposed to be motivational or inspirational but I'm not sure. It reads 'Purpose is better than hope'. I find that a deeply puzzling and somewhat disturbing statement. Each time I go past it I wonder why purpose is better than hope? How is it better? What makes it better and in what circumstances? I wonder who painted it on – were they following instructions, who chose the phrase, what did they intend by it?

In my organisation design work, I often begin with asking 'what is the purpose' of what the organization does or should do. Simon Sinek talks about this as 'start with why'. He says:

'By "why," I mean: What's your purpose? What's your cause? What's your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care?'

And I get the need for purpose. Indeed, I think it would be rather difficult to design without knowing what is important and what matters. I've also found that usually getting to some common understanding of an organisation's purpose takes time and effort and is less of a thought process and more of an experiential process – how does what we are doing or aiming to do contribute to what we believe matters? ('If it doesn't why are we doing it?' is the next design question). Getting to purpose is a try-it-out somewhat emergent process, as activities in the book Designing Your Life demonstrate.

What I don't get is why purpose is better than hope. That's the bit I find disturbing. What is the comparator about? It seems malign as if purpose tramples on hope and I think we need hope. I'm with the thought attributed to poet Emily Dickinson that 'hope inspires the good to reveal itself'.

A while ago, I read Rebecca Solnit's 'Hope in the Dark'. It's a marvellous manifesto on the power of hope. More recently I read an essay by her. In it she quotes from Michael Foucault: 'People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.'

This suggests to me that purpose is not better than hope. They are at least on a par – interdependent and inextricable one from the other. If you think purpose is better than hope then there is a danger that you are not looking at potential consequences of your purposeful actions and, perhaps, that you are not designing with the intention for good.

In organisational design, it is our responsibility to consider the hope inherent in the purpose and really take a look at how we can make the attempt to set things up for good outcomes even though we know that no matter how many business cases we write or how much risk mitigation or stakeholder engagement, or impact analysis we do, the work does not have certainty or certain outcomes.

In Solnit's words 'we need not only to embrace uncertainty but to be willing to know that the consequences may be immeasurable, may still be unfolding … Think of hope as a banner woven from those gossamer threads, from a sense of the interconnectedness of all things, of the lasting effect of the best actions, not only the worst.'

The 'lasting effects' of organisation design work we cannot know and there are usually huge tensions and contradictions in the work. Think of someone whose job we eliminate or automate in our downsized designs – what impact does that have on that individual? Does that 'matter' if we have created different jobs for others? (Read the book 'Would you kill the fat man?', David Edmonds).

At best, we work in the hope that our methods, approaches, and mindsets work in favour of the humanistic values (see my blog on this), that colleagues I work with aspire to.

Solnit puts this position well, saying, 'I use the term hope because it navigates a way forward between the false certainties of optimism and of pessimism, and the complacency or passivity that goes with both. … Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written. It's informed, astute open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we may play in it.'

I'm minded to scrub out the phrase on the wall and substitute the phrase. 'Live with purpose and with hope.'

How do purpose and hope inform your organization design work? Let me know.

A while ago, in our daily stand-up, one of our team said she was going to have a 'bunker day'. You may know that, 'A bunker is a defensive military fortification designed to protect people or valued materials from falling bombs or other attacks. … Bunkers can also be used as protection from tornadoes.

First, off we misheard and thought she said she was going to have a bonkers day. Since most days feel pretty bonkers we weren't sure why she'd called it out but when she told us she'd said 'bunker', we all got her image immediately.

It meant she was going to hole herself up not allowing any interruptions or distractions. She was going to shield herself from organizational tornadoes, attack by heaven knows what email demands, phone calls, text messages, What's App, Lync, interruptions, and so on. She was going to protect her day, keeping it totally clear for reflective time, regrouping, thinking things through. There's a French phrase for it 'reculer pour mieux sauter' (to draw back in order to make a better jump).

We've adopted the term – and the action – into our team vocabulary now, and it's quite a favourite. We all now have 'bunker days' and, I think, benefit greatly from them. We don't advertise the fact beyond our team. (Although we may get brave enough at some stage to put up an out of office notifier saying 'your email will not be answered as I am taking a bunker day'.)

Jennifer Porter's article 'Make time for self-reflection' in Harvard Business Review reinforces the notion that reflective time is important, offering as evidence, some research done in call centres finding that 'employees who spent 15 minutes at the end of the day reflecting about lessons learned performed 23% better after 10 days than those who did not reflect'. (If your organisation has call centres, it's worth reading the full research paper).

Porter observes that, 'The most useful reflection involves the conscious consideration and analysis of beliefs and actions for the purpose of learning. Reflection gives the brain an opportunity to pause amidst the chaos, untangle and sort through observations and experiences, consider multiple possible interpretations, and create meaning. This meaning becomes learning, which can then inform future mindsets and actions. For leaders, this "meaning making" is crucial to their ongoing growth and development.'

Others come to similar conclusions. Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, INSEAD Distinguished Professor of Leadership Development & Organisational Change, remarks in his paper 'I have learned from experience that many people would be better off if they did less and reflected more. Perhaps the biggest problem we have today is not doing too little but trying to do too much. … In our present networked society, introspection and reflection have become lost arts. Instead, we are at risk of becoming victims of informational overload. The balance between activity and inactivity has become seriously out of sync' . Others have noted that this can have severe negative consequences including 'significant personal and mental health problems'. Additionally 'productivity can actually decline' (see an article on this latter aspect).

Some organisations do recognize the value of contemplative time. Kets de Vries tells us that 'Companies such as 3M, Pixar, Google, Twitter and Facebook have made disconnected time, or contemplative practices, key aspects of their way of working. The objective is to increase their employees' self -awareness, self-management and creativity. They want them to work smarter'.

My experience, too, is that reflective time is a great investment. What I've seen come out of our team member's bunker days are things like well thought through and argued reports, creative ideas (that we've acted on), energy re-loads, application of new ways of doing things, increased curiosity, and higher levels of resilience to continue tackling obstacles but from new/different angles.

We haven't formalised bunker days – as in 'you can have 5 bunker days per year'. They are an ad-hoc 'when you need one, take one'. Neither have we coined the phrase 'without bunkers we'd go bonkers' but I think that's the case.

How are you designing 'bunker' time or days into your organisation? Let me know.

Last week I accepted an invitation to have a Smart Meter installed to monitor my electricity usage. At pretty much the same time I got an email with an info sheet about the privacy aspects of smart meters. I learned that 'Gas and electricity firms will be able to use smart meters to collect information about how customers use energy as frequently as every half hour'.

Oddly, that week I was in the middle of an activity recommended in the book Designing Your Life asking me to monitor my personal levels of energy every half hour to help me find out what activities led me to feel at my most energetic. The authors provide a paper work sheet for this (rather than a smart-meter – but no doubt the time will come – or even, has come, when we can meter our personal energy smartly).

Exactly as the utility companies, I was measuring my top energy giving or draining activities then noticing the patterns, then asking 'What relatively accessible changes can I make to improve my energy flows?'

I did wonder whether I could compare and correlate the electricity usage with my personal energy levels to find out, for example, if boiling a kettle led to a spike in my personal energy as I then made and drank a cup of tea. But I didn't do that.

This energy theme continued, as later in the week I got an email from an academic asking if we (the organisation I'm working with) would like to participate in some research on energy use. He was talking about environmental footprint, sustainability and energy savings/expenditures as in furniture choices that reduce carbon footprint, energy savings made (measured via utility bills) e.g. by fitting motion sensors for lighting, by fitting blinds that respond to outdoor light levels, …

Because I already had in mind individual household utilities-type energy and personal energy, and now I was being asked about organizational utilities-type energy, I got curious about organizational energy in terms of the workforce. Sure enough – there are theories related to individual employee energy: see, for example, Energy Management of People in Organizations: A Review and Research Agenda and also there are theories of organizational energy linked to employees as a collective. Bruch and Ghoshal authors of the 2003 paper Unleashing Organizational Energy consider that organizational energy often starts with the energy of a few key figures, saying, 'Research suggests that the best leaders first mobilize organizational energy, then focus it.'

Like others, the authors, have difficulty defining this collective energy, saying 'But how to define a force like the wind, both invisible and powerful? Organizational energy is seen only in its effect: the force with which a company functions. Just as burnout is said to have three dimensions (emotional, cognitive and physical), so is organizational energy considered the interplay among a company's emotional, cognitive and physical states.'

One research paper finds that 'Organizational energy is related but not identical to the sum of the energy of individuals. Individual energy, especially of leaders, influences organizational energy, and the energy state of the organization affects the energy of individuals.' And this idea that leaders can generate energy in the workforce is taken up in another research article: 'Transformational leaders are traditionally considered as energizing: the idea is that transformational leaders are able to inspire others and change the way people work toward a common goal'.

So now I have several perspectives on energy use – its dissipation, and generation. I have a utilities one related to carbon footprint for both individuals and organizations, an organizational one related to leaders generating energy, and an individual one related to activities that energise.

The interesting thing is that these perspectives are interdependent – there's lots of research, for example, on how light levels, controllable temperature ability, and types of furniture/paint constituents can contribute to levels of individual energy.

On this, see Ben Waber's et al article Workspaces that Move People which notes that 'Spaces can be designed to favor exploration or engagement or energy to achieve certain outcomes'. It is often leaders who make building design decisions, and if we believe the research it is also leaders who, through their individual energy, help generate organizational energy 'without which a company cannot achieve radical productivity improvements, cannot grow fast and cannot create major innovations'.

So how are you designing to generate organizational energy whilst minimizing environmental footprint and measuring your efforts as you go (without invading privacy)? Let me know.

Note: a company very successful at all of the above is Patagonia, a clothing company. Read the story here.

Someone said to me that he was yak shaving and I had to look up the phrase. It turns out to be:

'Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on.' origin: MIT AI Lab, after 2000: orig. probably from a Ren & Stimpy episode.

It's a great phrase and, sadly, I think I'm in the position where it could become a much-used phrase in my vocabulary, now I know what it is. I seem to have spent a lot of time this week on seemingly pointless activity. A lot of it to do with form filling and compliance with process demands. My favourite was filling in a form on a Word document to attach to a web page. Before submission I had to fill in, on the web page, the identical information that I'd just filled in on the attached form. I couldn't submit just the word document or just fill in the web page. I could only complete the process by duplicating the information. (What is the cost of that?)

In order to fill in the Word form I had to look up a whole raft of information from a variety of sources – it wasn't all housed in the same location. The actual task could be very straightforward were it not for the layers of process.

This is all a long way of saying I enjoyed reading Jeff Bezos's 2016 Letter to Shareholders that just came out. In it he urges people to avoid becoming a Day 2 company.

Bezos tells us that he spends time making sure Amazon stays a Day 1 company. Because becoming a Day 2 company means '… stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.' He offers us 'a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.'

It's the skeptical view proxies that caught my attention. Read what he says and you'll see why:

As companies get larger and more complex, there's a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it's dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.

A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you're not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you're doing the process right. Gulp. It's not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, "Well, we followed the process." A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It's always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it's the second.

The other points in his letter are equally useful to anyone trying to design a more effective organisation – and at this moment it is hard to argue that Amazon is not a trailblazer or successful in its design. (That doesn't mean it is also faultless as this article reminds us).

What Bezos says has echoes in a piece by Rosabeth Moss Kanter who discusses nine symptoms of corporate decline. One of which is 'Initiative decreases' : this symptom looks like 'Discredited and demoralized, people become paralyzed by anxiety. Believing that nothing will ever change, people go passive, following routines but not taking initiative even on small things, and certainly not seeking innovation or change. Policies and processes are perceived to be ingrained and inevitable, shutting off new ideas. ' (my bolding)

Fortunately, and I agree with her, Moss Kanter says that these symptoms are reversible. 'Leaders can guide productive, inclusive, and empowering actions that build winners' habits. Even when the signs of decline are all around us, it's still possible to shift the culture. Heeding the warnings is a good first step.'

What's interesting is that heeding the warnings is more than just noticing them. It is doing something about them. That's more difficult and she offers a list to help including, for example, 'Work on reducing inequities and status differences.'

I think one of the roles of an organization designer is to notice the un-necessary yak shaving, and help organizations think 'Day 1'. Even if you've already hit 'Day 2' a turnaround is possible.

How do you tackle the symptoms of 'Day 2' and the activity of organizational yak shaving? Let me know.

Last weekend I was in Villajoyosa, a Spanish fishing port, 'birthplace of the fishing net industry'. Walking around the harbour and seeing the nets all piled up started me thinking about what was caught in the nets and what escaped through them.

Earlier in the week we'd been discussing a paper by Niels Pflaeging on Organizing for Complexity where he outlines three types of organization structures: formal hierarchy, informal network, and value creation network. In this he argues that, 'value creation is never the result of individual action: It is a team-based process of working interactively, "with-one-another-for-each-other".'

The idea of networks of empowered teams as a new organizational model is one that we're hearing a lot about. Deloitte (a consultancy) describes, 'This new mode of organization-—a "network of teams" with a high degree of empowerment, strong communication, and rapid information flow' as integral to value creation.

But as Anne-Marie Slaughter, talking about her new book, says, 'Network theory is a whole branch of science, but it's relatively new in terms of the last 20 or 30 years. We haven't had a chance to take all that theory out of the universities and apply it to ask, "What kinds of networks should we build, and for what purposes?" '

She raises a good point as there are many types of networks of people: Deloitte discusses team networks, Pflaeging informal and value creation networks, an academic paper small group networks, a blog small world networks, and so on. Then there are various infrastructure networks.

Alex (Sandy) Pentland in his book Social Physics discusses current understanding of social networks and his work in trying to add value to them. For example, using sociometric badges he was able to find out why some call centre teams performed so much better than others. As a reviewer reports, Pentland found that ones that had the most social interaction had the highest productivity and 'suggested the introduction of team-wide coffee breaks, designed to encourage mingling. The increase in speed was so dramatic that Bank of America did the same at all of its call centers, generating a fifteen-million-dollar increase in annual productivity (and, presumably, some newly quantifiable amount of good cheer).'

Understanding social physics, Pentland asserts, lets people "tune" social networks and obtain the results they want, just as radio engineers can tune a receiver to a desired frequency. This allows certain aspects of human life-—from how companies operate to how cities work-—to be "re-engineered" to make them more efficient. See him talking about it in this 5 minute You Tube clip. This raises the possibility that organisations can design value creation networks. But as Pentland found, and Pflaeging states the informal networks and the value creation networks are interdependent and have to be designed/'tuned' simultaneously. Pflaeging explains as follows:

'[In] understanding organizations as value creation networks, underfed by informal structures, and not as command-and-control pyramids, you will stop caring much about formal hierarchy (which is actually "trivial", from the point of view of complexity thinking). You will instead care a lot about value creation streams, and on supporting peer pressure and emergent networking patterns. Organizational robustness comes from the quality and quantity of the interconnections between humans and teams – not from rules, bosses, or standards.'

Deloitte offers some characteristics of these networks of social/value creating teams:

• They set their own goals and make their own decisions within the context of an overarching strategy or business plan, reversing the traditional structure of goal and performance management.
• They share integrated information and identify connections between team activities and desired results via shared information centres.
• They are organised around mission, product, market, or integrated customer needs rather than business function.
• They are able to work across teams, using techniques like "liaison officers" (the US military), "hackathons," open office spaces that promote collaboration (Apple Inc. and Cleveland Clinic), and job rotation to give teams a common understanding of each other.
• They move from team to team as needed-—similar to the way experts come together on Hollywood movie sets or in global consulting firms-—and then ensure that people have a home to return to once a team-based project is done. This changes the concept of a "job description" to that of a "mission specialist" or "technical specialist."
• They focus leaders on roles related to planning, strategy, vision, culture, and cross-team communication.

It seems to me irrefutable that each of us lives in many networks. The organisation design challenge is less to recognise the concept and value of networks and more to know how to develop or encourage their 'knotting' them in a way that nets what's of value and lets the rest slip through.

However, my feeling is that infrastructure networks are as critical as the social networks in creating value and thus are integral to any network design activity – though this is not discussed or made explicit in the info I read on the topic.

Back to the fishing nets – are the fishermen the network or are the nets the network? Where is the value creation?

How do you design and develop organisational networks that create value? Let me know.

'To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly'. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

One of the words that has not yet come into common organizational usage is 'astonishment' and I'm just wondering why. As Lucy Kellaway points out we have a vast language of words that have become debased into corporate guff but 'astonishment' fortunately has not yet reached this point. So, while it is still untainted by being included in a competence framework or list of essential applicant capabilities let me suggest why it is a valuable characteristic to nurture.

'Astonishment' has appeared a couple of times this week in my in-box, once in the quote above and once in a Brain Pickings email in which poet, Wislawa Szymborska, argues that not-knowing, 'is the seedbed of our capacity for astonishment, which in turn gives meaning to our existence'.

I really liked that idea of 'not-knowing' being of huge value but, unfortunately, in most organizations it is something to be avoided at all costs. As an example, a few years ago, I was involved in a major piece of change work and was asked how many workshops I'd be running 2 years from the point I was being asked. I said I didn't know as I had no idea where things would be in the project in two years. The person asking me insisted I give him a reply so he could put a number in his spreadsheet for costing purposes. After some to-ing and fro-ing when he wouldn't accept 'I don't know' as an answer, I said 'OK, 72' and he went off satisfied and I went off astonished!

In design work not knowing is really helpful – it offers more than one possibility. I'm working through 'Designing Your Life' and the advice the authors keep giving is don't accept your first idea – be astonished at the range of possibilities you can generate. They encourage the reader to 'Remember, there are multiple great lives within you. You are legion.' What a terrific phrase.

And it's the same in organization design – typically leaders (or a leader) come up with an idea for a re-design and want to implement it without testing or prototyping or having generated options to their idea. They seem to be in thrall to the need to know, to measure, or to get things done quickly.

What would be different if they said 'We don't know how to best organize?' and started to explore the legion of possibilities. They might get more engaged employees, more trust in their approach, more people offering a range of suggestions and insights, and more options to test.

Their 'not knowing' could lead to astonishing positive outcomes. But, as Maria Popova says, 'to live with the untrammeled openendedness of such fertile not-knowing is no easy task in a world where certitudes are hoarded as the bargaining chips for status and achievement – a world bedeviled, as Rebecca Solnit memorably put it, by "a desire to make certain what is uncertain, to know what is unknowable, to turn the flight across the sky into the roast upon the plate."

It's interesting the description of the roast upon the plate, because a colleague of mine, when presented with an organization chart and asked to 'get on and implement' it, laments that she has been presented with the 'oven-ready' version.

Maybe the desire for the known 'oven-ready' is a response to a leader's exhaustion. Graphic designer Milton Glaser suggests that sustaining interest over a long period is hard because, 'You sort of get tired, and indifferent, and, sometimes, defensive. And you kind of lose your capacity for astonishment -— and that's a great loss, because the world is a very astonishing place'.

How can we challenge the anxiety about 'don't know', and/or leader exhaustion in sustaining interest and open the way to finding or re-finding astonishment? I think we'd have healthier organizations if we accepted that there are many design options and it's worth the time taken to explore them?

One approach to achieve this is through impro(v) techniques. There's a great list of activities that could be adapted/used in participative organisation design workshops. Another approach is adapting some of the techniques of agile (see the free book Agile for Dummies sponsored by IBM), a third is to open the question 'how shall we re-organize' to a hackathon. They're all worth a go.

As we work in organizations should we let up on the need to know (or show we know) and instead be open to not knowing and allow astonishment?

What's your view?

NOTE: Look at the video clip of graphic designer Milton Glaser when he was 83, as he talks about his work, his life and his continuing astonishment.

I watched Crimson Tide last weekend. It's a terrific film on all things leadership with a strong theme on the 'moral courage' shown in it by two men who take opposite views and hold on to them. Watch the film to see what happens.

One researcher explains that, 'Moral courage involves acting in the service of one's convictions, in spite of the risk of retaliation or punishment … that moral courage also involves a capacity to face others as moral agents, and thus in a manner that does not objectify them'.

The same week I came across a research paper on 'intellectual humility', defined as 'the opposite of intellectual arrogance or conceit. In common parlance, it resembles open-mindedness. Intellectually humble people can have strong beliefs, but recognize their fallibility and are willing to be proven wrong on matters large and small.'

This set me wondering on the relationship between moral courage and intellectual humility and how they get played out in organizations and with what effect. One writer notes that 'In organizations, some of the hardest decisions have ethical stakes: it is everyday moral courage that sets an organization and its members apart'. I asked a few people what they thought.

Chris Rodgers came back with the following which is well worth sharing and he's agreed I can. So now it's over to him.

As regards your 'challenge', re the relationship between "moral courage" and "intellectual humility", I've only been able to give it some brief attention. So make of this what you will!

Both characteristics can clearly have value in their own right; yet they might be viewed as running counter to each other and not easily able to co-exist.

We could, though, think of them as existing in a paradoxical relationship around the central notion of ideas and beliefs. On the one hand, moral courage implies sticking to one's strongly-held beliefs, in the face of open challenge from others and/or unspoken social pressure to conform to some other, established norm. On the other hand, intellectual humility implies that there is an apparent willingness to take account of the ideas and arguments of others, and to flex one's own beliefs to accommodate their contrasting views.

What comes to mind is a book called "Paradoxical Thinking" by Fletcher and Olwyler. I referred to it in Informal Coalitions. Using their terminology, we might then think about these characteristics in terms of what they would call a "core paradox" around people's response to the beliefs that they hold. They would tend to look for paired characteristics in which one "pole" was perceived as negative and the other as positive. So, in this case, I might be stretching their 'model' a bit, given that they both tend to evoke positive reactions. However, one or other of them might be seen as constraining progress in a particular case.

Anyway, given the core paradox of moral courage and intellectual humility, the next step is to look at the most negative and most positive expressions of each of these. According to their theory, peak performance (or best outcome, perhaps?) is achieved when both 'poles' are expressed in their most positive terms. The worst of both worlds (or "nightmare position", as they call it) exists where people oscillate between behaviours that reflect the most negative expressions of each pole.

The aim of the approach is to stimulate dialogue about how the particular characteristics are manifesting themselves in relation to a particular issue, and to identify ways of moving closer to the "high-performance" position.

By way of illustration (off the top of my head!) the high-performance position might be something like principled (moral courage) pragmatism (intellectual humility), say. Or, a term that I've used elsewhere, flexible (intellectual humility) rigidity (moral courage). The latter might translate, for example, as a willingness to flex the means of achieving a particular end, even if this runs counter to one's own view of what and how things should be done. But, at the same time, being unbending as regards the outcome sought and also, perhaps, the ethics of getting there.

At the 'other end' of "Fletcher's Pendulum", (try the activity here) the nightmare position might be one characterized by behaviour that oscillated between fundamentalism, say, (moral courage) reflected in blind adherence to a rigid belief set; and 'what do I know?' behaviour (intellectual humility), in which one's own knowledge and/or position are cast aside without a whimper, to accommodate the views of others.

My specific examples/labels might not make any sense at all, of course. But, hopefully, you get the idea.

=============

How does your view of moral courage and intellectual humility reflect in your organization design work? Let me, or Chris, know.

During the week, I was contacted by someone I used to work with – I'll call him Bill – asking for help on a piece of work he'd just been asked to manage. Briefly his manager had asked him to develop a Business Plan for the Unit (comprising around 4000 people) along with an overarching narrative on proposed design changes.

This was no blank page. Bill told me that there's much work going on but in disjointed pockets. He mentioned: one piece looking at the core Unit functions, another at business processes that traverse his Unit and other Units, a third looking at a wide-reaching re-design of a different Unit but one that his Unit is interdependent with, and a fourth piece aimed at ironing out some overlaps and inefficiencies looking at a newly formed group within the Unit. Additionally, there are some small bits of redesign work in discrete work areas. The Unit as a whole has to make a headcount reduction, control costs, drive value, and manage any potential operational risks.

He was concerned on four points:
a) that people, without the necessary OD skills, are squeezing in design work when they are also under intense pressure in their 'day jobs'
b) the local design changes going on may not add up to anything that looks 'joined up' at a Unit level or aimed at the same strategy/delivery outcomes when they are completed
c) that people doing design work in one pocket are unaware of, and haven't tested, the possible consequences and knock-on effects in another part of the Unit, or elsewhere in the organisation
d) that the cultural and behavioural changes needed to work in new technology-enabled ways is being lost in the desire to deliver 'numbers'

Of further concern to him is that he has to pull together a report with recommendations very quickly and doesn't feel he has the requisite skill set himself to do this. (Hence the call).

Most OD consultants have found themselves in Bill's situation at some point. There's rarely a clean canvas to start work on and there are many possible ways forward. These include:

• Pulling all the pieces together, rescoping, and redirecting into an overarching 'programme' that includes the cultural and behavioural elements (Purist)
• Assessing the common ground between pieces of work and actively helping shape consistency towards heading in the same direction (Pragmatic)
• Letting people get on with the designs they're working on but identifying the main risks being incurred and encouraging them to address these collectively (Potentially risky)

Given things have to be 'sorted' quickly I'd go for the pragmatic response but in a participative way. (If you're interested in Socio-Technical Systems Design there's a good explanation of the Participative Design Workshops the practitioners of the approach advocate).

I recommend inviting the leads of the various pieces of work to a workshop, where they describe what they are aiming for. They then look at the Unit strategy and direction and its contribution to the organisational strategy/direction. The group could then do a consistency check of their pieces of work against a checklist or diagnostic. One, Alignment Matrix, that I have used is a good conversation starter. This would begin to show where there are gaps, missed opportunities, heading off in different directions, and so on.

Having done this, the group decides how to take the work forward. I think a wider participative process involving people who are actually doing the work being (re)designed is the best way. See my article A different way to tackle problems on ways for doing this, or download a great article Faster, Shorter, Cheaper May Be Simple; It's Never Easy.

This type of participative approach both helps disconnected pieces join up, and helps create conditions for collaboration and connectedness. It also starts to illustrate that organisation design work is multi-faceted and does not get good outcomes by working mainly to an organisation chart/top down approach. (See an article I was just sent that explores some of this by Niels Pflaeging).

How would you advise Bill? Let me know.

In a couple of work-shops I've been in during the last week we've started to explore 'politics' – both in a governmental sense and in an organisational sense. They're shorthanded as 'Politics' and 'politics', and they're both difficult to navigate, and when they're in the same piece of work the difficulties are compounded.

Gareth Morgan, in Reflections on Images of Organization, discusses organizations as political systems, saying 'When you start to explore organizations as political systems you quickly get into images of autocracy and democracy, Machiavellianism, gender, racial and social power imbalances, images of exploiting and exploited groups, subtle or crude power plays, and so on.' He asks, 'Isn't the stakeholder approach another way of exploring the relations between the interests, conflict, and power that lie at the heart of political analysis?' (Morgan, 2011)

A classic piece of work by management academic Henry Mintzberg suggested that: 'Politics and conflict sometimes capture an organization in whole or significant part, giving rise to a form we call the Political Arena'. He proposes four basic types of Political Arenas:

• the complete Political Arena (characterized by conflict that is intensive and pervasive)
• the confrontation (conflict that is intensive but contained)
• the shaky alliance (conflict that is moderate and contained)
• the politicized organization (conflict that is moderate but pervasive). (Mintzberg, 1985)

Most organisations that I've worked in have elements of the political images or arenas that Morgan and Mintzberg talk about. And it is in these arenas that political behaviours come into play. Other research has 'identified several areas in which employees engage in political behaviour, namely pressures for economy, management and sub-ordinates relationships, structural power struggles between configured groups such as unions and employers, conflicts between the workforce and management for construing agreements, uncertainty about standards and strategies of promotion, difficulty in linking reward with productivity … when there is uncertainty involved in decision-making procedures and performance measures, and when competition is present among individuals and groups for limited resources.'

The politics and political behaviours can be either negative or positive (or on some point in between). The negative play out can 'involve convenient and illegal behaviour, and the positive side which is a social function that is important for organisations to survive. Negative organisational politics are disapproved of because of the ethical dilemmas encrusted with them and the workplace conflicts that are generated, whilst positive organisational politics results from the amalgamation of shared goals and stimulating collaboration.' (Cacciattolo, 2014)

It seems to me that in order to navigate the political arenas, practitioners need finely honed political skill that is: 'The ability to effectively understand others at work, and to use such knowledge to influence others to act in ways that enhance one's personal and/or organizational objectives' (Ferris, et al., 2005)

Politically skilled people 'combine social astuteness with the capacity to adjust their behaviour to different and changing situational demands in a manner that appears to be sincere, inspires support and trust, and effectively influences and controls the responses of others.' (Ferris, et al., 2007). Influence or control can be used for good or ill (hence the phrase 'appears to be sincere') and it is to be hoped that organization design practitioners are using it for good. Nevertheless, there can be difficult conflicts. As this practitioner found:

One organization where I consulted was highly political. Cliques had formed. People slipped into each other's offices before meetings to share the latest offense of the out-group and to plan their revenge. In highly political organizations like this one, there usually isn't one person responsible for the climate. Political activity is relational -— even if only a couple of people are engaging in negative types, others get pulled and playing-along-to-get-along becomes the norm. (Reardon, 2015)

The challenge for the organization designer is to work out how to behave in a helpful way in this context, how to find out who the 'real' players are, what are the vested interests in it that may not be obvious, how easy will it be to do the work without compromising ethical and moral principles, or the management consulting code of conduct.

How do you approach working in political arenas? Let me know.

References
Cacciattolo, K. (2014, August). Defining Organizational Politics. European Scientific Journal, 238-246.
Ferris, G. R., Treadway, D. C., Kolodinsky, R. W., Hochwarter, W. A., Kacmar, C. J., & Douglas, C. (2005). Development and validation of the political skill inventory. Journal of Management, 31, 126-152.
Ferris, G. R., Treadway, D. C., Perrewe, P. L., Brouer, R. L., Douglas, C., & Lux, S. (2007). Political Skill in Organizations. Journal of Management, 33(3), 290 – 320 . Retrieved March 4, 2017, from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0149206307300813?journalCode=joma
Mintzberg, H. (1985, March). the Organizations as Political Arena. Journal of Management Studies, 22(2), 133–154. Retrieved March 4, 2017, from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6486.1985.tb00069.x/abstract
Morgan, G. (2011). Reflections on Images of Organization and its Implications for Organization and Environment. Organization and Environment, 24(4). Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1086026611434274
Reardon, K. K. (2015, January 12). Office Politics Isn't Something You Can Sit Out. Retrieved March 5, 2017, from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2015/01/office-politics-isnt-something-you-can-sit-out

My blog topics usually arise from the week preceding Sunday – blog writing day. This week's looks in both directions. Back at last week's idea and forward into next week's event.

Looking forward: next Wednesday March 8 is International Women's Day and yesterday I opted to #BeBoldForChange ticking on their website the boxes that I would forge women's advancement and champion women's education. Both much needed.

Just after having done that I picked up a book, lying around the house, 'What makes great design: 80 masterpieces explained'. Hmm – a couple of thoughts crossed my mind as I skimmed through it: where are the women designers and how inherently biased language is. Look at the book title 'masterpieces'. That is a male word. There are no 'mistresspieces', and 'masterpieces' isn't noticeably gender neutral. Out of 80 'master designers' there are 6 women. That 7.5%.

Looking back: I picked up the book because last week we had the idea that we would see what the interest was in designing a multi-disciplinary 'design function' to work on organisational wicked problems: a flexible function that would include business architects, service designers, customer experience designers, graphic designers, strategy designers, organisation designers, and so on. Put differently, it would draw on anyone who could identify with the idea that they have design thinking skills developed through training and/or use in some field.

So, I was just generating my thinking on what typically comprises 'design' and how we might design and operate that function. Then I pulled out another book. Design: a very short introduction. It's one I recommended to students when I taught on the Design Strategy MBA.

Immediately I got from it a powerful statement on 'design' that is a touchstone for a design function. 'Design is … an essential determinant of the quality of human life. It affects everyone in every detail of every aspect of what they do throughout each day. As such, it matters profoundly.' Think about it. We are all working all the time in a designed world – keyboards, websites, door handles, business processes, organisations … the list goes on and on and on. Log everything you interact with in the next hour that has been designed and you get the picture.

And interestingly when we came to generate a list of names of people who might be interested in exploring the idea of a design function they were also predominantly male: it may be that we live in a male designed world.

Bridging the two weeks
So today I have in my mind some questions that bridge design and International Women's Day. Would our designed world look and feel different if there were more female designers in it? Where are the female designers by discipline? How can we design a useful design function that shows gender parity? Is the language of design gender biased – in favour of men?

I Googled 'women in design'. Two sites came up Women in Design, New Mexico, and Women in Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design, @WID_GSD. I'm sure there are others but I didn't delve beyond page one.

If I am serious in my ticking the #BeBoldForChange boxes on forging women's advancement and championing women's education, then the field of design and specifically organisation design might be a great start point.

One immediate way that I and all of us in the organisation design field could do this is by engaging our policy and finance colleagues in the idea of re#designing their processes and methodologies to include gender reporting and budgeting. This helps forge women's advancement. 'Gender budgeting is a way for governments to promote equality through fiscal policy. It involves analysing a budget's differing impacts on men and women and allocating money accordingly, as well as setting targets-—such as equal school enrolment for girls-—and directing funds to meet them'.

To champion women's design education I could work with education organisations to bring design thinking to change the way education is done. And/or I could mentor women who wanted to go into organisation and other design fields. For example, see how women are being encouraged into industrial design in Australia.

So, there are many possibilities. How would you bridge (organisation) design and gender equality? Let me know.