Author: naomiorgdesign

Last week we were asked to develop career paths in organisation design. Career paths show what 'a prototypical career looks like in terms of sequential positions, roles, and stages. They outline common avenues for moving within and across jobs in ways that facilitate growth and career advancement'.

Our discussion revealed that it is difficult to describe a 'prototypical' career in organisation design – do you think yours is? – and more difficult to think of what one could be like: there is no common entry route to organisation design, it doesn't belong in a specific job family or profession, and there are multiple exit routes from it into a variety of disciplines.

No common entry route
As 'design thinking' gains ground it's becoming apparent that organisation design is part of a 'design family'. All members are informed by the basic principles of learning from people, finding patterns, defining the design, making things tangible, iterating relentlessly. If you want to know more on design thinking there's a good toolkit here.

You can see these principles play out across the many types of design jobs in your organisation – user experience design, service design, graphic design, product design, business design, web design – and in my organisation design work we too use these principles.

Additionally, we know, as Dave Miller, a recruiter at the design consultancy Artefact, says, 'Over the next five years, design as a profession will continue to evolve into a hybrid industry that is considered as much technical as it is creative. A new wave of designers formally educated in human-centered design-—taught to weave together research, interaction, visual and code to solve incredibly gnarly 21st-century problems-—will move into leadership positions. They will push the industry to new heights of sophistication.

You can see this happening. For example, Indra Nooyi (CEO, Pepsico) talks about how she Turned Design Thinking Into Strategy and she is one of many recruiting design specialists to lead business and organisation design thinking.

Not the preserve of a specific functional area
In the past organisation designers tended to have come from a background in management consulting and/or HR. However, as we move towards 'design thinking' organisation designers will increasingly come from other backgrounds and experiences and probably will want options for career development across, rather than within, functional areas, thus bucking the system of career paths that tend to be developed within a function or profession.

So, what does this say for organisation design career paths – should we develop them within a functional area (if so, which one?) or should we develop them across functional areas, or should we bring design thinking to bear on career paths and re-think then altogether, or even consider that careers are dead? I'm not convinced (yet) that careers are dead. But I do think they need a fundamental re-think.

Multiple exit routes from organisation design
Some large organisations may be able to accommodate career progression within an organisation design career 'lattice' but, if not, possibilities of exiting organisation design into other fields include:

• Moving into general management consulting – internal or external – extending opportunities into field where organisation design skills could be applied and/or by developing sector expertise or other expertise.
• Gravitating towards the human side of design like change management, behavioural sciences, or ethics
• Heading for the business side of design – business strategy and design, business capability development
• Developing related skills for example in some aspect of user experience design or service design
• Developing a deeper expertise in some aspect of organisation design and then applying it more generally – for example evaluation or evidence based designing or designing through data.

How have you developed your organisation design career and where do you think it will take you? Let me know.

Last week I went to the dentist and he finished the visit saying 'See you in a year'. My response was 'Well, a year will pass in a trice'. This was a phrase that he'd never heard and I had to translate for him. Later that day I read an article on Language trends run in mysterious 14-year cycles. I concluded – because the dentist is much younger than me – that 'In a trice' is neither in the current cycle nor several past ones.

Then someone sent me a Guide to learning Mandarin –the civil servants' language. 'It is no accident that Whitehall officials are known as Mandarins. Their language is often as hard to understand as anything spoken in Beijing.' The guide has 11 lessons, the first opening with 'Mandarins always appear straightforward, friendly and helpful when offering an opinion, asking you to do something, and so on. Do not be taken in! The following translations will help you understand what they really mean.'

Here's one example 'Draft Please! means: Graft for hours producing a coherent and impressive letter so that I can fulfil my teacher-fantasy by needlessly amending it.'

The 10th lesson in the Guide is a masterclass by Lord Butler written in 2004. So, if the language of the Civil Service runs in 14 year cycles we can expect a revised lesson soon.

The thing about the 14 year cycles is that the researchers hypothesize that 'word prevalence … is related to changes in the cultural environment' but it could equally be that as word usage changes so does the culture. Think how many new words are added to the English language each year (see a 2016 list here) and how the UK culture is changing.

What this flurry of stuff on language reminded me of was the work of Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey who in their book How the way we talk can change the way we work put the view 'The places where we work and live are, among other things, places where certain forms of speech are promoted or encouraged, and places where other ways of talking are discouraged or made impossible … these forms of speaking … regulate the forms of thinking, feeling and meaning making to which we have access, which in turn constrain how we see the world and act in it.'

In programmes like Yes Minister or In the Thick of it we can see the Civil Service world parodied. And in Scott Adams work we see the master of management-speak exposure. Most organisations and professions have their own language that regulates how speakers see and act in that world.

So can changing the organisational language help change a culture? I think maybe so as do Kegan and Lahey who take the view that leaders 'have exponentially greater access and opportunity to shape, alter, or ratify the existing language rules' and also that leaders 'have a choice whether to be thoughtful and intentional about this aspect of their leadership'. For example, Kegan and Lahey leaders could help change 'from the language of rules and policies to the language of public agreement'. They give 6 other types of languages and practical suggestions on how to change them.

But if leaders are not instrumental in changing the language as an aspect of changing the organisation, can it still be changed? I think it's worth trying (would it be easier in organisations where the mantra is 'everyone's a leader'?)

One of my colleagues drew up a list of words and phrases in common use that he felt constrained transformation and proposed trying to eradicate them in order to transform the organisation. By encouraging a community of people to talk and act a new language this might help bring about cultural transformation and perhaps in less than 14 years.

Do you have experience of conscious language change used to help transform your organisation? Let me know.

The past week seems to have been one of events in that I attended a change management masterclass hosted by Kogan-Page: People-centered Organizational Change: Strategies for Success. I went to a book launch of Mark and Anna Withers' new book Risky Business: Unlocking Unconscious Biases in Decisions. I spent a day on an Agile Awareness course, and I went to the European Organisation Design Forum event at the Wellcome Trust.

No one has yet asked me what was the return on investment of that time (no money changed hands) or how I would evaluate the benefits of the events. However, those are the sorts of question I do get asked so I thought I'd better have a shot at answering them.

There are various methods of evaluating training effectiveness the four stage Kirkpatrick model is one, the CIPD suggests a similar, but five stage one, another is Brinkerhoff's Success Case Method. Businessballs has a short piece summarising the most common methods and also offering access to a toolkit.

But two of the events I went to were not training in the conventional sense – they were more networking and information sharing. So how do I evaluate these events? There are some interesting blog pieces on evaluating social networks.

For example, an HBR blogger discusses four questions that help you work out the value of a network: who is in it? How well does it connect? Is there functional communication? Who are you talking to?

Another blogger offers 'Beckstrom's Law' that says 'the value of a network is the net value of each user's transaction summed up for all users. At its core, the concept is about transactions: The value for users is the total benefits from all transactions in a network minus the cost of those transactions'. This lost me.

Heading for a simpler approach than any of those offered and one that encompassed all four events I asked myself three questions:
1. Did I learn anything from any of the events that I could immediately use or apply? (Practical value)
2. Did I learn anything that increased the value of any skills, knowledge or experience I already have? (Added value)
3. Did I learn anything that piqued my curiosity, that I could come back to, that I thought would be valuable at some point though not now? (Investment value)

The answer was that for all four events I was able to answer the three questions positively. So here are some examples of the value I got by category:

Practical value

• Links to a 3 min video The Gubbins of Government: How new technology will change the mechanics of government services that I can use in training courses.
• A reference to EngageforSuccess an organisation that promotes employee engagement 'as a better way to work that benefits individual employees, teams, and whole organisations'. It has info, contacts, and links for immediate application into some culture work I am doing.
• Adding to my collection of info and tools about managing change is the work of Julie Hodges that I hadn't come across before. I've just downloaded to my Kindle a sample chapter of her book Managing and Leading People Through Organizational Change: The theory and practice of sustaining change through people. In the talk she gave she shared a number of useful tools and techniques that appear in the book.

Added value

• In my organisation design work we do a lot of stakeholder involvement activity, but at one of the events the role of the Board and Non-Executive Directors was raised. I'm not sure I pay enough attention to them in the day to day OD work we do. Bringing them into the conversation could be very useful.
• In all four events I met people I knew from past work, networks, or communities. Just renewing acquaintance, catching up with them, sharing stories and having a laugh in the breaks is energising and fun. I went home (four times!) feeling uplifted by the contact with them.
• One of the speakers mentioned two white papers published by the Change Management Institute one is about the future of change and the other about evolution and themes in change management. They both build on a view I hold that traditional programmatic models of change are well past their 'sell-by' date. The reports offer new approaches based around change as a process that is participatory, experimental, emergent, and 'people-powered' dispersing through organisational networks. More fuel for my fire in these.

Investment value

• Information and a book reference on Effective Altruism that has organisational possibilities (see Patagonia's donation of every Black Friday sale to grassroots environmental organisations).
• A great question to ponder 'What do you not value that other people say you should value'? This one may also turn out to have practical value.
• A reference to the United Nations report and rankings on e-government that I may be able to use at an event I am speaking at next year.

How do you measure the value of the events you attend? Let me know.

I'm repeatedly asked where should Organisation Design sit as an organisational function? The question means where, functionally, should the skills and attributes of OD report. It's a question I tackle in my – about to be revised – book Organisation Design: Engaging with Change. In it (2014), I said:

Although 'organization design' is often seen as vested in HR, and certainly required as an HR competence – it figures on the CIPDs HR Profession Map a new design is typically initiated and driven by the business. HR, with its focus being primarily on the workforce, is only one of the parties that enable new organization design success. Other support service areas, among them IT, finance, facilities, and communications are also typically tagged as enablers of new design success, and often work alongside the business and HR in planning and implementing a (re)design piece of work. …

Where, then, should the 'point' people with internal expertise to do the detailed technical work required to design and then keep an organization well designed be situated in an organization? Are they best placed as part of an HR function, part of a strategy department, as an independent unit reporting to a COO or CEO, or somewhere else?

The current predominant view seems to be that organization design skills are part of an HR function's services to clients and thus sit in HR.

A view gaining ground, however, assumes that organisation design:

• Is integral to delivering the business strategy
• Is needed for developing the capability of the whole system
• Demands collaborative working on the design from a multi-disciplinary team having expertise including the integration and alignment of IT systems, work process improvement, and business analytics
• Should be practiced by engaging and involving internal and external stakeholders through humanistic values. (See my blog on these)
• Is more than an 'peopley' organisation chart and should be evaluated and measured quantitatively and qualitatively to assess value-add to the business

and places the OD function an independent, objective multi-disciplinary expert unit working with line managers and leaders who are also skilled and capable in organisation design.

Many organisations are heading down this route and are developing 'design thinking' capability. This is not vested in HR but in 'the business'. There are countless articles targeted at line managers and leaders that discuss this. See, for example, McKinsey's Applying design thinking across the business: An interview with Citrix's Catherine Courage or Design Thinking Comes of Age in a recent Harvard Business Review.

More of a 'how to' is Strategy+Business's 10 Principles of Organization Design aimed at business leaders/managers. Some of the 10 principles are more useful than others: 'Focus on what you can control', for example, is likely to give a false sense of security. I'd rather see a discussion around 'focus on what you can't control', which would enable discussion of unintended consequences and designing for ambiguity, involving designs that allowed for ongoing horizon-scanning and sense-making.

Similarly, the principle, 'for every company, there is an optimal pattern of hierarchical relationship' is a statement that organisation designers argue about. Read Elliott Jaques Levels With You which opens, 'The controversial Canadian theorist claims he can create the perfect organization. Has he found the key to management -— or merely a justification for bureaucracy?'

The Strategy+Business, 10 Principles, article concludes with the statement 'Remaking your organization to align with your strategy is a project that only the top executive of a company, division, or enterprise can lead'.

So is it time to take organisation design out of HR? Let me know.

Several things happened this week that tested my own resistance to change. I've often said that people are happy enough to change as long as they have had a part in the decisions and it is somewhat within their control. Often they are not party to the decision and neither is it within their control. As happened to me.

I talk of change in four categories (not ideal but serves to illustrate):

• Continuous not very planned incremental change e.g. Organizational members leaving and joining an organization as part of normal staff turnover
• Intermittent but planned incremental change e.g. Hand written letters, typed letters, email, social media
• Continuous not very planned radical change e.g. Stream of policy changes, leadership changes, restructurings, acquisitions, etc.
• Intermittent planned radical change e.g. Whole office move to new building

During the past week I've experienced all four types and for all my knowledge of 'change management' I find that this has not been a comfortable experience. Indeed, I observe myself resisting the changes in all sorts of not very helpful ways.

When I'm teaching people to work in situations where they feel resistance from others – individually and collectively I advise the following:

1. Accept that this is a period of emotional turmoil and that people may experience feelings of anger, hurt, disappointment, depression, betrayal and loss.
2. Suggest people seek emotional support from trusted friends, family peers and managers.
3. Allow people time to internalize and reflect on how they feel about the change.
4. Challenge them to avoid self-defeating behavior.
5. Stop them staying stuck in this stage

Now, feeling my resistance to my circumstances it's a good moment to see if I take my advice.

In previous times like this I've headed for songs, words and poems that acknowledge disappointment, frustration, anger, etc. and offer alternative ways of thinking about it. Chet Baker singing Look for the Silver Lining is one I listen to and also for an instant pick-up Chin Up is a lovely singalong from Charlotte's Web. In other dark times I've found Theodore Roethke's poem that begins 'In a dark time, the eye begins to see'… Acknowledgement and acceptance do help. See zen habits on frustration, or some of Rebecca Solnit's work.

Talking over the situations has been helpful and led to several new avenues for exploration. One person suggested rather than aim for 'resilience' with the aim of 'bouncing back' instead take the situation presented as an 'offer' and in the moment, improvise around it. This has taken me into a whistle stop tour of improv. I looked at Keith Johnstone's work, listened to his TED talk and then Steve Chapman's work.

Someone else led me towards the Alternatives to Violence Project which works to develop attitudes and skills for handling conflict and violence well. (Note: I am not feeling violent but the techniques of interaction and communication in conflict work well in change resistance).

Allowing myself and colleagues time to internalize and reflect on how we feel about the changes relates to sense-making – a concept I came across years ago in Karl Weick's book 'Sensemaking in Organisations'. I've just come across a recent (2014) excellent Academy of Management paper on the topic.

It opens saying 'Sensemaking is the process through which people work to understand issues or events that are novel, ambiguous, confusing, or in some other way violate expectations. When it works sensemaking 'enables the accomplishment of other key organizational processes, such as organizational change, learning, and creativity and innovation'.

Taking (or giving) the reflective time is often organizationally counter-cultural. But I'm having a go at making time to consciously sensemake in order to ward off self-defeating behaviour and knee jerk reactions. As sense-making reveals ways forward then I can take action.

Getting stuck in a stage of resistance is not my typical stance and trying some new (to me) approaches for letting go will be energizing and interesting.

How do you in your organization design/development role manage your own resistance to change? Let me know.

Last week I was in Washington DC. I got the bus from the airport to Wiehle Reston metro station where you get the Silver Line into the city. There on the station plaza are two colo(u)rful sculptures one of an elephant and one of a donkey – the symbols of the Republicans and the Democrats respectively. On my return trip on Saturday the elephant looked bigger and the donkey distressed.

On Wednesday, reeling, I went to an Edward Tufte workshop on Presenting Data and Visual Information. Years ago I got his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and I came back with the course 'party bag' of another copy of it + three other beautifully presented books he's constructed. Read a delightful review of them here.

He opened the day – no hello or introduction as they are one of his bugbears 'people don't need an attractor, they've already arrived' – with a Stephen Malinowski musical animation before moving on to discuss the National Weather Service, weather forecast page which he used to illustrate his fundamental principles of analytical design (Chapter 5 in Beautiful Evidence).

Beyond the principles I came away with multiple new ways of seeing and things to try out. For example:

He's scathing on PowerPoint presentations. He thinks 'stacked in time' information penalizes the reader or viewer – far better to have it 'adjacent in space'. And he is ferocious on PowerPoint produced pie charts and dashboards that he condemns as 'chart-junk'.He praised Amazon's Jeff Bezos for doing away with PowerPoint and instead running meetings with 6-page narratives. Am I bold enough to take this approach in the next meeting I present at?

He recommends scrolling – not page turning to lead people through info. I've just completed someone's online survey that follows this principle and now I'm aware of it I noticed how much easier it is to keep going rather than having to press 'next page' every bundle of questions.

He told us not to segregate information but keep the flow by reducing all visual impediments. He pointed out, for example, the redundant colon in the label 'High: 62 F' on the weather forecast.

He thinks lines and boxes interrupt flow (he's no org chart man). Here's what he says on Gantt charts: 'About half the charts show their thin data in heavy grid prisons. For these charts the main visual statement is the administrative grid prison, not the actual tasks contained by the grid'. Good, I can add that to my case against the use of the 9-box grid.

He's insistent on leaving the reader to pick out the information he/she is interested in. He was humorous on the way George Miller's paper 'The Magical Number 7 + or – 2' has been (erroneously) interpreted as suggesting that people have a limited capacity to interpret text. As he pointed out the weather website one is info dense but viewers have no problem finding what they're looking for. He firmly stated 'never accept an argument that lots of info will confuse the user.' He mentioned the New York Times and Washington Post as other exemplars of visual presentation and pointed out that in any news report every 4th paragraph there is a 'human interest' quote. Now I know that I've been seeing it!

Towards the end of the day Tufte talked about Streams of Story in his book Visual Explanations – highlighting Barbar's Dream in which the 'graceful winged elephants of kindness, intelligence, hope, love … drive out the demons of anger, ignorance, fear. It's a powerfully told story in exquisite visuals. We might hope the elephant at Wiehle Reston station would take to it heart.

What/who do you recommend as exemplar visual data and information presenters? Let me know.

Several meetings I participated in last week left me musing on 'implications of swirl'. This is a phrase I came across in a Bain brief 'Four paths to a focused organisation' looking at change and transformation. They have a graphic that illustrates swirl that runs on the lines of:

1. Issue identified that requires resolution
2. New process/initiative proposed to resolve issue
3. Data needed to determine whether proposal merits go-ahead
4. Meetings scheduled to review data
5. Additional requests come from meetings before any decision to go ahead can be made
6. Data needed to answer requests
7. Follow up meetings to review answers before any decision to go ahead can be made

The implications of this is that a) a lot of people spend time and resource getting stuck in the data sludge b) the issue is not resolved instead heading towards the plug-hole the swirl leads to.

What Bain doesn't go on to describe is that further implications are that, in my experience, at this point either someone gets frustrated by the lack of progress and hands the issue to a different group of people to resolve. They then work through steps 1 – 7 above.

Or the person or people who recognized the issue in the first place moves on to a different role without handing over information about the issue or where they are in the steps above and the new person spots the issue and sets off the whole process again. It's immensely frustrating to everyone.

Instead, Bain offers four suggestions on how to 'eliminate swirl and build a company that can get things done'. It looks straightforward in their paper. You:

1. Decide where the work is to be done
2. Determine the appropriate level of supervision for each kind of work
3. Assign roles for critical decisions
4. Define and reinforce behaviours that eliminate the culture of swirl

If only. Even if the players change, in organisations where swirl happens then the ingrained responses mean that any issue is likely to go through the 7 steps outlined above. In fact the issue may compound as most likely each of the Bain's four steps to resolution could create its individual swirl.

I wish I could be as confident as Bain in suggesting four things to resolve swirl. But I'm not. I think 'swirl' as described is a complex issue related to factors including risk appetite, anxiety about trying new things, wanting assurance that the proposal is the 'right answer' before giving any go-ahead, power, territoriality, belief that data (usually numeric) will yield a way forward that is 'better' than the one originally proposed, and lack of effective knowledge sharing. So what to do? I see swirl in action a lot and I'm thinking of two possibilities to stopping it:

Abort the swirl process. Once the issue is identified and some proposal is made to resolve it trust that the proposers have done enough to be confident it is worth trying and test it out on a 'test and learn' basis i.e. action the proposal and then gather data on its effectiveness in action. In this approach you only go as far as step 2 in the Bain 7 steps.

Treat the issue of swirl as a 'wicked problem' rather than a 'tame problem' which I think is what Bain's suggestions for treatment look like. Wicked problem approaches require creative thinking and doing enough of the right things at the same time.

How would you address the swirl issue? Let me know.

I've been both an internal consultant and an external consultant at various times in my career. My preference is for internal consulting and I'm often asked why: people seem to find it curious as 'internal management consultancy has traditionally been seen as the poor cousin of its external counterpart', (and still is in many quarters).

I like it because I get to know the organisation as an employee: I experience it in a way that an external consultant can only approximate – its style, culture, leadership – and yet I also have to keep a certain distance from it. It's a tension that means I both consult and have to live with the consequences of the work that I do and learn from it in a way that external consultants don't. I like that insider/outsider role challenging though it is.

Reading lists of pros and cons of internal v external consulting you get a feel for the differences. They're well explained, for example, by Consultancy UK and 9 lenses. What's interesting is that in this kind of comparison they are presented as a kind of either/or. There seems to be a tacit implication that you use internal consultants for different types of assignments than the ones you use external consultants for.

I think this binary response means organisations don't get the best of both consulting worlds. What works better is to think of the internal/external attributes as complementary and to pair internal consultants with external ones. Liken the interaction to that of putting on a play – you have people 'on-stage' on this instance the external consultants, and you have people off-stage (the internal consultants) – the play cannot be put on without both parties working effectively together.

When I've been an external consultant I've found life much easier when I work closely with the internal consultants as they pave the way, can give rapid reads of the context, and tell me the territory. When I've been an internal consultant I've been able to throw off the difficulties of being a prophet in my own land because the external consultants' credibility acts to legitimise my (same) recommendations.

In either direction where internal and external consultants work as a single team I've found that:

• It encourages and develops organizationally consistent approaches to consulting language, terms, tools and methodologies. Having this avoids the multiple competing approaches that typically each external consultancy brings. These confuse employees and also run the risk of the assignment being seen as an initiative or fad that will disappear once the consulting contract has ended and the consultants have left.
• The exchange of knowledge is more fruitful in both directions. My experience is that even with a 'transfer/share knowledge' clause in external consulting contracts without the internal/external pairing this often amounts to little more than a handing over of documents that the client has paid for and a one or two day workshop. With a true internal/external pairing there is day to day co-creation to design and deliver a piece of work which leads to a richness of knowledge share that brings additional benefit to the assignment and the various organisations involved.
• Organisational power dynamics are easier to manage – the credibility that external consultants bring to bear on organisational issues and opportunities is useful, while internal consultants can facilitate, mediate and work to appropriately integrate the external consultants work into the fabric of the organisation rather than it just being a temporary add-on that can be blown up. I recently heard this relationship described as the 'legitimising role' and the 'mine detector role'.
• The relationship can act as both a useful brake and a sensible spur. Often external consultants are looking for the next billable piece of work and work to a problem-finding strategy that involves major work rather than continuous improvement tweaks – here internal people can put the brake on. Conversely external consultants can bring innovation and expertise that will energise and re-invigorate internal consultants' work.

What's your view on internal and external consultants' collaboration? Let me know.

Last week I was talking with someone with 'too many direct reports'. I've been here before and commonly the statement comes with a request to know what the 'right' number of direct reports is that someone should have. Fortunately this wasn't part of the conversation I had in this instance.

The start-point was to find out more by completing the sentence, 'I have too many reports – to ….. what?' We discussed 'to control', 'to pay sufficient attention to each of them', 'to run successful meetings with', 'to develop their skills', 'to manage my own work-load', 'to know what's really going on', 'to focus myself on the strategy and big issues', 'to network with my peers', 'to develop my own skills and knowledge' and so on. We were trying to find out whether the issue is actually too many direct reports or it feels like that because of other things. (See a book QBQ! The Question Behind the Question for good tips on this type of conversation).

Getting to a span comfortable for a particular leader means understanding that various factors play into the mix. An article by Julie Wulf in the Harvard Business Review (April 2012) How many direct reports suggests five important areas to consider and recommends exploring the implications of each. PWC has used three of the five points from the HBR article and ranged some questions under them to form the 'C-level span of control diagnostic tool' adding in one additional aspect not in the HBR article – I've listed these at the end of this piece.

The tool 'allows you, in just three minutes, to get a sense of the target number of direct reports based on your current leadership situation'. I am deeply dubious about the '3 minutes' to even get a sense of things but I pretended I was the person in question and did the diagnostic (and got an answer of 5 – 8 and wondered if that was the single answer to any permutation but didn't explore that thought further).

The value in this tool is less in the answer it throws up and more in the conversation and reflection that it generates around what a large number of direct reports 'gives' the leader and what it 'takes from' the leader. (See a research paper Span of Control and Span of Attention for some insight on this). The dialogue facilitates further reflection on what a smaller number of reports could give and take and whether this would be beneficial to the situation.

Assuming that there is a case for reducing the number of direct reports the tricky thing is then to actually do it without confusion, conflict, wounded feelings and people feeling demoted. I've presented a negative because that's what I've usually observed in this situation. Only a few people are thrilled to be now excluded from the 'inner circle'.

One way through this is to have a discussion with the current large number of reports on the thinking behind the statement and get their views on how a reduced number of direct reports could be achieved. They might come up with things like experimenting with a 'job share' i.e. halving the number of direct reports by pairing them up so only one of the pair appeared at management meetings and trusting them to keep each other/the leader briefed, or inserting a deputy who handles functional reports while the manager handles operational reports.

How would you handle reducing the number of direct reports? Let me know.

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Listed below are the five HBR areas with the related PWC questions + the additional PWC area with questions.
1 Evaluate Where You Are in the Senior-Executive Life Cycle

• How long have you been in your role?
• How many direct reports do you expect to change?
• What is the status of the strategy?

2 Assess the Degree of Cross-Organization Collaboration Required

• How much time do you spend on collaboration across units?
• How related are your businesses?
• How global are your operations?
• How adept at collaboration is your team?

3 Consider How Much Time You Spend on Activities Outside Your Direct Span of Control

• How much time do you spend with others besides your direct reports (e.g., customers, regulators, field operations)?
• Are these "outside" activities aligned to advancing strategic priorities?

4 Consider the Scope of Your Role
(Not in PWC diagnostic)
5 Consider Your Team's Composition
(Not in PWC diagnostic)
Current span and situation (PWC)

• How many direct reports do you have now?
• What is your level in the organization?
• What is your role/function?

On Friday and Saturday I was at the EODF conference, and was honoured to be labeled 'special guest' and give one of the six keynote presentations. Although nerve-wracking it was a good reflective experience for me.

I wrote about the challenge I'd set myself last week.(Being on the edge of inside). Briefly it was about what made my heart sing and my heart despair in the work that I do. I turned those parts into a 20 minute presentation of 10 slides each with one or two images rather than wordy bullets about what I was going to say (in case I didn't stick to the script).

Fortunately a couple of days before the presentation I asked a colleague if he'd be willing to listen to the presentation and offer feedback and comments as a rehearsal. He did a great job and in the course of our discussion I realized I'd left out something I'd promised to people which was to 'pose some fundamental questions for reflection on organisation design theory and practice'.

This was a useful activity for me in thinking on my own OD practice and, ready for the conference, I came up with the following (in bold):

1. If you look at performance stats for an organisation – take the Marks & Spencer ones as an example – what are the stats telling you that could point to design challenges or opportunities and what aren't the stats telling you?

2. Once you know the challenge – the M & S one is to 'resurrect sales' – where do you actually start the design process?

3. The two questions above are about trying to get some context, information, and 'feel' for the organisation so that you can find a sensible entry point for design work. How much of an organisation's context do designers need to have before they can do good design work or does having a team of internal and external consultants working together provide better design solutions?

4. Newcomers to organisations (whether as new hires or external consultants) have to rapidly 'read' the organisation if they are to work successfully in it. But I'm wondering whether some organisations are easier to read than others and my question here is – 'is organisation design about making an organisation legible? (See my blog that references organisational legibility).

5. One of my 'rules of thumb' (thx Herb Shepard) is 'start where the system is', but this can be a double edge sword. How best should designers adapt their methods and techniques to suit the context – without losing the 'bite' or slipping into collusion with the context?

6. This (Q5 above) is a constant question of mine to myself and what I'm doing in terms of adaptation is take some of the theories, thinking, and practices of wicked problems and applying these into the organisation design work and this approach is going well. So my question here is 'Is it time to stop using a programmatic/formulaic approach, with phases and steps, to organisation design – how useful is this in a complex system?'

7. Using a wicked problem approach to organisation design means I'm now using a different style of doing it – much more of a movement than a mandate, not quite a stealth approach but towards that. What are the different styles of doing organisation design – stealth, challenge, radical, expert, traditional – are we or should we be consciously doing organisation design work in a particular style and what are the impacts and consequences of designing in different styles – think Gaudi v Frank Lloyd Wright.

8. Entering the realm of wicked problems means many things one of which is there isn't a clear cause/effect 'outcome'. This makes it difficult for organisation designers to prove their value. In the absence of cause/effect what signifies organisation design value add? (Answers welcome here).

9. As we do our work we're noticing that inviting lots of people to participate in the design work is helpful , and in general (not just in my organisation) I observe that organisation design skills and understanding are increasingly being sought. Who most needs them in an organisation and how can they be cheaply and effectively taught or transmitted?

10. My final slide is about participation – what I'm learning is, it is not that we consultants design the organisation it's the people in it who do. How can we work better with that realization?

What fundamental questions for reflection on organisation design theory and practice would you pose? Let me know.

Thanks Bill Zybach for the rehearsal discussion.