Author: naomiorgdesign

I set myself a hard task when I sent off my paragraph to the European Organisation Design Forum saying what I would talk about at the annual conference coming up this week.

Naomi will discuss with us the hard but rewarding day-to-day work of designing an organisation capable of moving from a risk-averse, hierarchical, very traditional paper-based 'analogue' organisation to a 'digital' one without any service loss or disruption. She will offer insights into what makes her heart sing whilst at work, balanced by the occasional journey home in despair. Along the way she will pose some fundamental questions for reflection on organisation design theory and practice.

To get myself thinking on it before Friday arrives and I stand in front of an audience I decided interview myself. As follows:

Q What makes your day to day work hard?

The hardest part is trying to get a grip on the context. If you've ever seen House of Cards or Yes Minister or Yes Prime Minister or The thick of it you'll get the idea. They're don't seem to me to be satires. They feel like documentaries. For a newcomer to the British Civil Service, as I am, it's the biggest challenge and one that many experience.

The whole environment and context is hard. The legacy of stuff, the antiquated technology, the risk averseness, and the sheer 'buggeration factor' as former Prime Minister, David Cameron described it make organisation design and development work really challenging.

Q What does this context mean for your organisation design practice?

I've come back time and again to the 10 rules of thumb for change agents they keep me going in the low moments and remind me that organisation design is a type of change and it takes persistence, resilience and courage to do it. My 3 favourite 'rules' are: Keep an optimistic bias, never work uphill, and start where the client is.

Many times I've thought that I'm in an unfathomable Alice in Wonderland environment and I'll never find my way out and even further off is the possibility of making the organisational environment 'fit for the 21st century'. In these moments I found the theories and practices of 'Wicked Problems' very helpful as we develop the 'test and learn' way of doing organisation design.

When I feel I'm not 'one of us' in the work I pick up Debra Meyerson's research on Tempered Radicals and in that same vein recently read a wonderful piece by David Brooks At the edge of inside which talks about: 'those who are at the edge of the inside. These people are within the organization, but they're not subsumed by the group think. They work at the boundaries, bridges and entranceways'. This makes me think that organisation design is not about designing ourselves into a new way of living, but living ourselves into a new way of designing (praxis over theory) and living differently from others is not the easiest thing in a community.

Q What makes your heart sing?

The gains are so delightful. We see them often but there's no cause/effect visible that we can measure (unfortunately). For example, our work has proposed big structural changes as necessary ways forward if we are to meet our organisational objectives and several of these, dismissed at the initial 'hearing' are now being taken up and worked with. So although it's hard to 'prove our value' we have lots of circumstantial evidence that the stones we throw into the pond are making ripples.

Alongside the consulting work we're having great success with our organisation design capability building. It's gaining ground with each cohort intake and we're on the road to getting it accredited in the near future. Helping enthusiastic and energetic people understand that an organisation is a system and can't be changed through an 'org chart' view of it is great, and hearing their stories of taking risks, giving things a go, not waiting for 'permission' and seeing them take small steps and then bigger steps towards greater confidence as they apply their learning is really rewarding.

But what I makes my heart sing most loudly is the joy of working with a hugely committed workforce and an incredible team of people who are willing to dive in there and get stuff done and who find the time and energy to support each other, laugh a lot and keep on learning. #ODProud indeed.

What makes your heart sing or gives you occasional journey home in despair as you do your organisation design work? How does it inform your OD practice? Let me know.

This week just gone was peppered with discussion on new types of organisation designs and questions on whether traditional organisations can morph to a new design – flat, networked, nodal – or are they destined to stay hierarchical, bureaucratic, several levels structures?

Lee Bryant asks 'What is the use case for organisational structure?' He says that 'the rise of social technology in the workplace creates new possibilities for how we organise work.' But reading through various fascinating links he adds to his piece and from these to further links to other articles on the topic it seems that the new possibilities aren't being realised.

Certainly I've noticed the big, long established organisations I work with having huge difficulty in exploring or adopting any of these new possibilities.

Reasons for sticking with the way big organisations typically organise work in hierarchies, bureaucracies, management layers, and rather inflexible systems could be due to the desire for 'legibility.' Small organisations can be flat and flexible because they are 'legible', as they get bigger and more complex that 'legibility' decreases and a desire to 'simplify' in order to return to legibility takes over. The drive towards simplification is evident in many management ideas – seven steps, five principles, four box grids, etc. Venkatesh Rao in A Big Little Idea Called Legibility explains the inherent dangers of it and also offers four reasons why it remains attractive.

Rao's idea of legibility is taken in a slightly different direction David Manheim in Go Corporate or Go Home. He (Manheim) makes a brilliant case in saying that the way information is held in databases defines the organisational structures. Read it and see whether you agree with his hypothesis. (Since the advent of PowerPoint I've thought that Microsoft defines organisation structures by offering so few structure related graphics).

Bryant offers Haier as an example of a company that has the ability to both stay legible and reinvent itself to take advantage of new opportunities. It has been through reinvention three times as new technologies appear and is now attempting a fourth one – that takes it a far remove from hierarchy and bureaucracy – to become 'platform' based in the way described by Bryant.

'It makes more sense for an organisation to maintain a single, conservatively managed shared services platform to provide all the common services required, and then allow individual teams or business units freedom to create their own apps on top, than it does to maintain a one-size-fits-all vertically-integrated software stack that forces all parts of the organisation to tolerate a lowest-common-denominator inflexible product, which is traditionally how IT functions have tried to meet the many and varied "requirements" of their business.'

In this platform model 'Each employee of Haier has the opportunity to become an entrepreneur who can start up his or her business on Haier platform to directly create value for customers.'

Whether Haier can do this and how it would fare under a different CEO are both matters of conjectures. However, a strategy+business article on the company suggests that 'much of the credit for Haier's success accrues directly to Zhang Ruimin, the company's CEO since 1984'. There are many other companies whose fortunes have dipped when a single minded leader departs. In many instances these have been asked back to 'save' the company. See a list here.

Not all organisations can take the Haier route. Most organisations of any size have a hierarchies, layers, and organising structures that make them 'legible'. But how can they stop being hidebound bureaucracies, and usefully take advantage of new technologies? Several ideas are being tried by various companies. They include:

• Culling senior managers (reducing management layers)
• Developing models of "self-organisation" or "self-management" on a larger scale than previously attempted
• Changing the ratio of employees to managers (wider spans and fewer layers)
• Dividing into smaller units that are easier to manage and motivate.
• Running projects over shorter cycles also keeps the build-up of bureaucracy to a minimum
• Giving smaller teams more independence and granting more autonomy to workers
• Running "hackathons" -— internal competitions -— to find novel ways of solving operational problems.
• Developing leaders who continually look at subtracting unnecessary rules and procedures

Is your use of better tech enabling it to become a better organisation? Let me know.

This week I got these questions:

• What are you noticing about the practice of organization design recently? What are the implications?
• How would you best design a corporate centre for a new organisation which doesn't have 100% clarity on what its delivery arms will be specifically doing yet?

It seems to me that taking a stab at the first two questions might help with the third question. So here goes.

I'd already given a bit of thought to the question 'What am I noticing about the practice of organisation design?' in prep for a conversation over the weekend with Organization Design Forum colleagues on it and their views both changed and added to mine. I'm noticing:

a) An accelerating desire to learn about organisation design i.e. there seems to be recognition that it's more than re-jigging the traditional organisation chart. I mentioned in an earlier blog that Deloitte in its Human Capital Trends 2016 has organisation design as its top trend. (But think through why you want to follow a trend). People are looking for skilled organisation designers. I first started facilitating organisation design programmes for the CIPD in 2007. That year we ran 1 course and it was undersubscribed. When I stopped teaching it in 2014 there were 5 or 6 courses running per year, all fully-subscribed. That may not count as evidence of accelerating interest in the topic but it is an indicator.

b) Digital technologies are rapidly changing the way organisation design can be done and also the way that we think about organisation and organisations. Look, for example, at Alex Pentland's work on Social Physics and you begin to get the scale of the possibility – it goes beyond social network analysis and data visualization. Some of the people on the call started talking about socio-tech and I've just found my 2003 folder full of info on it. There do seem to be some interesting and relevant-to-now lines to follow from that theory. See this 1999 paper on it.

c) Organisation design working with other types of designers – graphic, service, business, product, user experience, etc. They offer similar but different skills and perspectives. Working on a design issue or opportunity together and with other disciplines is a fruitful way of looking at organisational possibilities. In my 2-years with nbbj, an architecture and design firm, I learned the value of thinking 'design' and not just 'organisation design'.

What are the implications of this? These 'noticings' leave me thinking:

• That the 'models' we use in organisation design e.g Burke-Litwin model, Galbraith's 5-star model, Nadler & Tushman's congruence model and so on, have probably had their day. Maybe the way we think about organisations has also had its day?
• We (organisation design practitioners) could learn a lot from fast prototyping, test and learn, and other iterative ways of designing that other types of designers use.
• We can't design for any predicted future because the predictions won't hold – digitalization is moving too fast to keep up even if predicting were more accurate than it is.

So for the person who asked 'How would you best design a corporate centre for a new organisation which doesn't have 100% clarity on what its delivery arms will be specifically doing yet?' I suggest:

One approach is to work on the basis that you'll never get 100% clarity, so:

• Develop some design principles – I enjoy Dieter Rams' principles as a discussion point for organisation design work.
• Work on what you do know and what you can find out about the current direction.
• Look not just at your own organisation but the context in which it is operating.
• Watch what is happening to the design of the organisation without you doing anything and see how things are forming.
• Use data and visualisations to help free up your thinking and head towards 'what-if' mode e.g. why are you assuming a 'corporate centre?'
• Work with things that seem to be working in the 'right' known direction and help adjust those that aren't.
• As things become clearer review and iterate the design –view the work as ongoing and not as a project with an end point.
• Start now even if it's only 5% clear.

How would you answer the three questions? Let me know.

On Tuesday I went to a discussion on 'Bringing Purpose to Life'. I was attracted by the ambiguous title. Was it about bringing purpose into our personal lives, as in 'The Purpose Driven Life', or was it about how to turn a company 'purpose' from a statement like into something 'alive' and inter-actable with? Or was it something else? It turned out to be a bit about both and more.

Pete Burden (@peteburden) facilitated the conversation. His view is that 'Purpose is an important topic. It comes up regularly in leadership and management conversations. Having a purpose can help, but it can also be tricky.'

What is 'tricky' about purpose? Pete gave a rich introduction well-laced with references. Purpose is often abstract, static, and reified. You see purpose statements on laminated plastic credit-type cards as wall posters. What makes a purpose 'come alive' is not the statement itself but the constant interplay of subjective, emotional, relational, social conversations – both formal as in 'Steering Groups' and informal as in 'gossip' related to what people think the purpose is. He suggested that 'meaning is internalised via dialogue' and 'actions related to purpose are contingent on the situation.

Following the theme of 'the situation' Pete mentioned Mary Parker Follett's work and I've just read her piece on The Law of the Situation (extract from The Giving of Orders). In this she's talking about giving orders saying that as situations changes then orders change (watch Charlie Chaplin working on an assembly line – a 3-minute clip). Similarly with purpose – it shifts and changes in action.

You can see how this works if you apply different situations to the purpose statement. Take this purpose "to refresh the world, to inspire moments of optimism and happiness, and to create value and make a difference." (Guess which organisation has this). Making this statement 'come alive' in Holland is likely to be very different from making it 'come alive' in Gambia.

Concepts in the statement – optimism, happiness, value – are interpreted and understood differently depending on the situation, the individual and various other factors. Here Pete tossed in Bourdieu and 'Habitus', Peirce (on semiotics) and Mindell on ProcessWork.

With a brief wash of the theory in mind we turned to small group discussion. Pete asked 'What do we think are the assumptions of those who developed the purpose?' and 'What do we think are our assumptions as we think about the purpose?'

So if we go back to the purpose statement I mentioned earlier "to refresh the world, to inspire moments of optimism and happiness, and to create value and make a difference." Asking the two questions indeed raises some tricky considerations.

'What do we think are the assumptions of those who developed the purpose?' For example are we assuming that those developing the statement had a view that moments of optimism and happiness can be inspired by a product or service? What are we assuming they meant by 'create value' – what type of value and for whom? Ditto 'make a difference'. Is there some implied assumption that employees go along with the statement, or is it ok to challenge it? How do these concepts change in a situational change? The answers help shape the design of the organisation.

The second question 'What do we think are our assumptions as we think about the purpose?' Once I did some work for a tobacco products company. I had a bunch of assumptions about the company and had to answer all kinds of bafflement from people, with their assumptions, who asked me why I was working for it. (It wasn't about the money). I wonder if we examine our own assumptions enough as we come to OD work?

By the end of the afternoon my curiosity that led me to attending had gained me:

• New (to me) writers and theories to explore
• Useful ideas to take into my organisation design work that 'purpose' is an on-going reflective process of enactment and not a static statement: as the situation shifts, the purpose shifts and the design shifts The image offered was of a Calder mobile, but my image is of a Janet Echelman moving interactive web.
• A reminder to examine the assumptions I bring to my OD work and an interest in the assumptions the other players in the work are bringing.

Do you think organisational purpose changes with the situation? Let me know.

I still haven't managed to cure myself of my habit of saying 'yes' instead of 'no'. There's lots of advice on how to say no which I seem unable to take, though I did manage it twice last week which felt as if I might be able to learn how.

In an alternative to saying no Adam Grant recently wrote a book called Give and Take which is all about the benefits and value of helping people. There's a compelling NY Times interview with him Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead? So maybe I can pat myself on the back for giving stuff rather than feeling overwhelmed by stuff resulting from my incapacity to say no.

Anyway this is what I tried to tell myself as I knuckled down over the weekend to meet the deadline of submitting the material for a one-day workshop I'm running in October. I looked at the now published, introductory paragraph I'd written months ago and was a bit shocked when I discovered I'd opened with the sentence 'Being on the knife edge of organisational change can be challenging'.

I wondered what that meant – my past self didn't seem to have left many clues for my current self to work on in a way that my future self could then deliver on the day. (Watch Dan Gilbert answering the question 'Why do we make decisions which our future selves so often regret?') The thought that I should have said no to the invitation to facilitate momentarily outweighed another thing I tell myself to do which is to give things a go.

As I reflected on how to learn to say no, what to give and take, how to make decisions that made sense in the future, I suddenly thought that these mirror the types of issues and dilemmas that challenge us in organisational design and development.

Take last week's news about Marks & Spencer, the UK retailer, cutting 500 staff from its head office and moving 400 others out of central London. Chief executive, Steve Rowe, said:

"M&S has to become a simpler and more effective organisation if we are to deliver our plans to recover and grow our business.
It is never easy to propose changes that impact on our people, but I believe that the proposals outlined today are absolutely necessary and will help us build a different type of M&S – one that can take bolder, pacier decisions, be more profitable and ultimately better serve our customers.
We remain committed to investing in store staffing and improving our customer experience and therefore our store colleagues are not affected by this proposal."

So here he is rather than saying 'yes' to the current organisational complexity he's saying 'no'. He's making future focused decisions now, and he's giving assurances to 'store colleagues' (albeit it in the context of a staff outrage at proposed pay cuts to offset the cost of the national living wage).

But this has left him on the knife edge of organisational change as his strategy is one in which success or failure are equally likely. I wonder if the colleagues and consultants who advised him feel that challenge?

I'm not in that 'knife edge' situation but as I thought about what I could have meant when I originally wrote the sentence I got some insights and ideas on the approach and content for the session, and learned quite a bit in the process as I researched the material. So maybe saying yes is ok and perhaps I should have faith that my future self will be able to cope with what my past self has initiated?

What does being on the knife edge of organisational change mean for you? Let me know.

I don't know why it's crossed my mind to count the number of organisations involved in taking the three of us on holiday. Here we are sitting in a hotel in Istanbul looking at the Marmara Sea from the hotel balcony. It's glorious.

But what has it taken to get us here? The list organisations with direct involvement includes: Megabus, Transport for London, Uber, British Airways, Expedia, Istanbul Transport, PayPal, First Direct, Passport Office, (for one-day expedited passport issuance as one party member didn't notice her passport expiry date), Insure and Go, and the Turkish evisa organisation.

The list of indirect involvement includes organisations behind various websites that we've consulted on currency exchange, weather, info on Istanbul, flight comparisons, hotel reviews, travel experiences, safety in Istanbul, and so on.

Then there are the add-on organisations who touched our travel in some way: suitcase manufacturers, telecoms providers – getting our devices working here, retail outlets in the airport , the third parties providing snacks on British Airways, the organisation making the check-in kiosks, air traffic controllers, security checkers, passport and border controllers, cleaners of locations …

Each of the direct and indirect 'customer touchpoints' comprise a web of systems, processes, policies, compliance, interactions, interdependencies and other connections that together make our holiday logistics work. Beyond these back office 'technical' aspects of it, are the 'human' aspects of making it work – how many people does it take to get one person safely to a holiday destination with luggage and connected mobile devices? I'm guessing that it must run into several thousand.

We've had a 'seamless end-to-end customer experience'. Everything has run smoothly and we're having a good time. It's easy to take that experience for granted. But I'm wondering if there would there be more value for me, and the people/organisations I've encountered on the way, in other responses, for example:

• Gratitude that it all works so well
• Recognition there is so much trust in 'the system' working
• Awareness that 'the system' is so complex that one tug somewhere and it could all come crashing down?

Gratitude: There's lots written on the benefits of cultivating an attitude of gratitude for both individuals and for organisations. Look, for example, at Charles Kerns article Counting your blessings or Dora Schmit's Effect of Gratitude on Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Customer Satisfaction both mentioned in a previous blog of mine on gratitude. If I were more consciously practicing gratitude what effect would it have on the people and organisations I encountered and would I feel differently too?

Trust: Arranging my holiday relied on me trusting the organisations involved and their proving trustworthy. For organisation proving they are trustworthy over time is essential to maintain customers. Look at the various examples of product recalls, most recently Samsung's and you'll see the damage done by trust breaking down. Whole industries can be decimated by consumer lack of trust. Tourism in Turkey, for example, has plunged 50% in the past year following terrorist attack and political unrest. Building and rebuilding trust (a lengthy process) is one set of activities. Maintaining it is another. (See one of my blogs on building trust here).

Complexity: The technology underpinning my holiday logistics is beyond comprehension, literally, as the author of Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension explains in scary detail. Would conscious awareness of this complexity bring benefits? In the day to day things like password protection, paying online, being alert to scams and so on are a necessary part of it. In organisations and society the value of knowing how to work with complexity might help mitigate risks and provide some consumer assurance.

Rather than just take your smooth running holiday logistics for granted what do you think a better response would be? Let me know.

PS: I am now home and all the logistics worked without hitch on the return journey and the human interactions were great too.

We've been posed the question in our organisation: 'what are we seeing as emergent problems' that are giving rise to 'noise around the operating model'. This has led to several reviews gathering steam.

I think before we set off on different tracks we should work from a common understanding of what an 'operating model' is and even better what our current operating model is. This is important because there are several competing views around conceptualizing an 'operating model' and we don't have a single model used consistently in our organisation. So identifying 'noise' could mean we were hearing completely different things and wouldn't be able to agree which to pay attention to.

Additionally, there is further confusion around related terms and relationships. For example: is a business model the same as an operating model? Is a target operating model different from either of these? Where do business capabilities fit? How is organisation design linked to any of these?

I'm going to attempt an explanation of the different terms. I've presented them in what looks like an ordered sequence of steps to take. In reality each is inter-related with the other and if you are an established enterprise you could 'start' at any one of the steps as you already have at least an implicit business model, a strategy, an operating model, and an organisation design. Making these explicit, if they aren't, enables you to see where to do things differently in the future which case you are heading towards a 'target operating model'.

First develop your business model. There are many conceptual models to help you with this – a commonly used one is Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas but Tim Katelle's blog discusses Eight models of business models (including Osterwalder's) ending with good advice: 'So pick whichever one resonates the most with you to use'. Generally, they ask you to think through the basic building blocks of your organisation – what is your offer what customers are you targeting, what activities and channels will take your offer to your customer. At this point you may pick up on the business capabilities you need to action your business model.

Second develop your strategy. The amount written on strategy would take even IBM's Watson a good while to synthesise it and come up with the best model for developing a strategy. A simple view is that a strategy is the approach, including direction and scope, you will take in a given time period (often quoted as 3-5 years) to maximise the value of your offer.

Third design your operating model. This too is a minefield of different conceptual models. Look at many different images of them on Google Images but at bottom they are all concerned with organisational activities that will deliver the strategy. (You'll see some of them are remarkably similar to the business models). What they are getting to is what you need to actually do to deliver your business strategy. One paper describes this as the 'tactics'.

Ashridge, a management college, suggests POLISM as a mnemonic from which to develop your operating model. (Processes and activities, Organization and people , Locations, Information and other links, Sourcing and partners, Management system)

A very good demonstration of how to get from a business model to an operating model is given by Tom Graves in his blog From business model to enterprise architecture. (You'll get the idea even if it seems highly technical). Note that I have equated 'enterprise architecture with 'operating model' which may not be 'right'.

Fourth do the organisation design that delivers the operating model. Unsurprisingly there are numerous conceptual models for doing organisation design work (see my book The Economist Guide to Organisation Design 2nd edition for comparisons of these).

In my work organisation design involves the people, roles, and social organising structures to get the work specified in the operating model done. So I'm looking at what exactly is the work, how many people do you need to do it service, what skills levels and capabilities will they be, how will they be organised into work teams. See also Nicolay Worren's blog What is organisation design.

Having written all this I'm not surprised there's confusion. Put simply?

• What are you offering to whom and how? (Business model)
• What is your direction and scope over the coming period to activate the business model (Strategy)
• What are the key 'tactical' components e.g. systems, process, people, technology which will deliver the strategy. (Operating model)
• What work are people doing within and across the key components and how are these people organised to do the work efficiently, effectively, and with enjoyment. (Organisation design)

What terms and models do you use in in your organisation that are in this ballpark? Let me know.

Years ago (1987) Roger Harrison wrote a 'Focus Paper' published by the Association for Management Education and Development called 'Organisation Culture and Quality of Service: a strategy for releasing love in the workplace'. I read it when I'd just taken my first private sector job after a previous career in teaching and it made a big impression on me.

In part this was because I had a liking for Kahlil Gibran's piece on Work 'Work is love made visible … And all work is empty save when there is love' (which has helped me through some career choices).

I've still got my original copy of that Focus Paper and nearly 40 years later what Harrison said then rings true now. 'Business organisations are tough places to nurture tender feelings … much of the business world is unable to support movement beyond the values of action, competition and strength'.

In 2008 Harrison wrote a follow up paper which someone sent me at more or less the same time that I was sent a link to Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge's blog 'Is love an important ingredient for organisation development?'

Both are of the view that 'love' is not a word that goes down well in an organisation. But both believe that the qualities that define 'love' i.e. 'empathy' 'compassion', 'warmth', 'respect', and 'connectedness' – are exactly what organisations need to be generative, motivating, and engaging places to work.

I wonder why words like 'empathy' 'compassion', 'warmth', 'respect', and 'connectedness' have more currency than the word 'love'. Perhaps it is because individually they feel easier to act on? There are lots of programmes that claim to help you develop empathy, for example.

In our study group the other week we discussed both Harrison's and Cheung-Judge's papers. We had a collective feeling that more love in our workplace would be beneficial and then wondered how to generate it through our organisation design and development activity.

Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge offers a number of suggestions. Of hers we were attracted to:

• Learn how to be fitter 'gelling agents' – doing more conveying, connecting, building alignment types of intervention. Learn how to grow the confidence and trust between units by evoking positive emotions they have for each other and be an explicit peacemaker.
• Focus on key aspects of building culture that will engender trust, love, support, interconnectedness, interdependence, etc. in the core leadership development programmes – starting from entry induction, to first-line supervisor to middle management training.
• Invent creative systemic experiential interventions to build not just competency, but a new mental model, new behaviour, new 'character' within the organisation.

Harrison too made some suggestions and of his we discussed 'what we can do as individuals' that will run alongside our OD & D work. One colleague noted that 'everything I've been involved in during the past 15 years or so has involved commoditisation, commercialisation, efficiency driven, initiatives driven through a mechanical metaphor, rather than an organic metaphor.'

The mechanical metaphor leads to targets, measures, and attitudes that lead to people feeling overworked and overwhelmed – a topic discussed by Mind Tools via interaction on Twitter last week. We want to develop the mindsets and actions that head towards the organic metaphor and the more human outcomes it generates.

From this discussion we came up with lots of subtle shifts and actions we will each/all take that might start to change the prevailing language and culture from a mechanical to an organic one in which people have a genuine concern for each other and choose 'to will the highest good' – a characteristic of love.

'Why is the measure of love loss?' Is the question that opens Jeanette Winterson's novel, Written on the Body. What do you think we lose by not recognising, fostering and speaking of love in the workplace? Let me know.

Threaded through the books I've written are stories about how real organisations design and redesign. People like to read about exemplars, examples, comparators and case studies. The organisations I've discussed illustrate both what goes well in organisation design and why this might be so, and also what doesn't work and what can go wrong.

These examples of real organisations are what give the book a shelf life. A company that's an exemplar of good practice one year could take a terrible dive the next and vice versa. All of us writing about Volkswagen or Toyota have seen the highs and lows play out. This makes picking the organisations to mention in a book a bit of a gamble (unless I want to keep writing new editions or have a continuously updateable book).

I am about to write a third edition of one of my books, and the reviewers of the current edition have variously suggested that I illustrate points with more industry sectors, more types of organisation (private, public, partnership, etc.), more global organisations, more sizes of organisation, and fewer UK based one. That's quite a list to consider.

Previously I've taken rather a scattergun approach – finding the stories in the moment that I was writing the chapter. But this time I thought I'd be more systematic. So today I started to work on what organisations to talk about in order to cover the reviewers' (sensible) suggestions.

I began by looking at the industry sectors the big consultancies list their expertise in. KPMG has twenty-one while Bain has fourteen, and Accenture twelve. All of Deloitte's sites denied me access so I guess either their server was down or something else was going on. PWC has twenty-four industry sectors and McKinsey twenty-two.

I'm curious to know if the sectors they have in common – Financial Services (in Bain's case it's Banking), Healthcare, Energy/Oil and Gas, Technology, Telecommunications, Retail and Consumer Markets, and Public Sector – are most in need of consulting expertise and therefore examples of them could go into the 'what's not working category'. Or is it that as it appears that these sectors can pay for consultants the organisations must be doing well? Or is it that organisations in these sectors are constantly fluctuating between boom and bust and therefore always need consultants.

If all these views hold true I could concentrate my stories on these industry sectors as they represent a large proportion of the global workforce. (See infographic for 2010 UK figures).

However, varying stories by industry sector is not enough to meet the reviewers' suggestions. To appeal to a wide practitioner audience I'll have to talk about the various types of ownership. This is a pretty interesting area as new forms are beginning to show. For example, the Economist notes that:

Other corporate organisations are on the rise. Family companies have a new lease of life. Business people are experimenting with "hybrids" that tap into public markets while remaining closely held. Astute investors … specialise in buying public companies and running them like private ones, with lean staffing and a focus on the long term.

But the most interesting alternative to public companies is a new breed of high-potential startups that go by exotic names such as unicorns and gazelles.

Reading a bit further on in that piece I get the idea that by concentrating on the newer organisational types I can cover the other reviewer suggestions – globalness, organisation size and fewer UK examples – all in one go:

New companies also exploit new technology, which enables them to go global without being big themselves. Startups used to face difficult choices about when to invest in large and lumpy assets such as property and computer systems. Today they can expand very fast by buying in services as and when they need them. They can incorporate online for a few hundred dollars, raise money from crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter, hire programmers from Upwork, rent computer-processing power from Amazon, find manufacturers on Alibaba, arrange payments systems at Square, and immediately set about conquering the world.

But, sadly, that isn't going to work. It's not a big proportion of the workforce that works in these types of organisation: I have to balance stories of new organisations with stories of more traditional ones. But the day's research has been a good start.

For the seven sectors mentioned above what organisations would you like to see stories of in the book and why? Let me know.

To Kiran: Thanks for your email about how to evaluate the effectiveness of organisation design and development work. I take it that by 'evaluate' you mean passing a judgement on whether the design/development activity has delivered whatever it was supposed to deliver? Evaluation is something I've never really cracked because it is virtually impossible to show any cause/effect connection between organisation design work and what then happens in the organisation.

Even if you start off a project with measures of success, critical success factors, and clear objectives that the work is supposed to deliver then the time lapse, context changes, and the fact of intervening all mean that what you judge at the 'end' may bear little resemblance to what at the beginning you thought you would be judging.

We just had a research project done for us on evaluating our work. The researcher made some excellent and thought provoking points. As she said, 'It is critical to understand that OD & D is not just about org charts in terms of hierarchy and reporting lines but also about the relationships and interactions of work and people throughout the organisation and across any partner organisations'.

This implies that what you choose to evaluate is 'a political process' which depends on 'who is looking' at the evaluation: a Head of Finance might judge effective organisation design in a very different way from a Head of Research and Development, or the Head of Customer Experience.

You may be able to get over this 'who are you evaluating for' issue to some extent by agreeing evaluation measures at the start of the intervention and starting the evaluation right then. This causes a different possibility that in focusing on a specific area for evaluating – for example streamlining decision making processes – you may miss opportunities for design/development work that could foster other benefits.

Because OD & D is, consciously or unconsciously 'a set of values in practice' any evaluation method should recognise that. Unfortunately, however, 'the Holy Grail of measures of OD & D practice and intervention is based on the world of scientific materialism'. The researcher's view is that although 'Everyone looks for hard measures to prove effectiveness … logic and quantity are inappropriate devices for describing people and their interactions'.

As an example, take streamlining decision making processes. You may be able to show that you have speeded up the process but that it doesn't follow that the decisions made are any better (and indeed they may be worse) but you wouldn't know that if you are only judging OD & D effectiveness on speed of decision making.

She suggested that OD & D evaluations 'need to be directed at the total system'. This says to me that rather than 'evaluating' organisation design and development work, in academic terms, as a summative assessment, it would also be sensible to seek feedback on the work as a formative assessment; to improve organisation effectiveness we need both summative and formative evaluation. (Evaluation against pre-determined criteria is essentially about summative assessment. In an academic setting it would be an end-test. Formative assessment on the other hand, is about gaining information in order to provide guidance on performance improvement).

Formative assessment is less about judgement and more about information that will encourage improvement. Often we confuse the two as Robert Poynton discusses in a useful blog.

So in organisation design and development work seeking ongoing feedback on system performance during the course of the work is just as important as doing end-point evaluation when it 'closes'. Be aware however, that neither feedback nor evaluation is objective – both are open to multiple interpretations.

You may be able to temper this by approaching organisation design and development via an adaptation of agile's 'test and learn' principles. (See how it is adapted to marketing here).

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What's your view on measuring the success of organisation design and development work? Let me know.