Author: naomiorgdesign

During last week someone alerted me to the report from the IES The Palace: Perspectives on Organization Design. Having read it I now have a bunch of questions which, I guess is the intention of the authors as they specifically state that it is not a 'how to' guide but rather seeks to promote useful conversations among practitioners and line managers. Three of the many questions that came up for me and that I will talk with colleagues about are:

1. Is the language of organization development (OD) and organization design (ODS) hampering our ways of working with the concepts?
2. Are the long-established ramshackle palaces – the metaphor that the report hinges on doomed and we would be doing a better service in demolishing them than trying to redesign/redevelop them?
3. Are the social and analytical technologies we are now embroiled in way beyond our current scope of reference, mental models and toolkits? (And if so, how do we retrain and retool ourselves?)
I'll look briefly at each of them

Is the language of organization development (OD) and organization design (ODS) hampering our ways of working with the concepts?
The report opens with some definitions which position the arguments. The authors consider 'organization design (ODS) as a type of organization development (OD) work which includes a specific focus on structures and/or processes. This, idea is taken up again in section 3.4 but with a slightly different emphasis – here OD and ODS are discussed rather than two distinct strands of work as two sides of a coin that cannot be picked apart. The authors do not mention a new model that illustrates this which I now tend to use. It's from How to Design a Winning Company and shows the eight formal and informal elements of organization design. I think this came out after the report was published otherwise it might have been included.

However, rather than seeing organizations in this bisected way (art and science, formal and informal, opposite sides of a coin) another approach is to see them enmeshed which gives rise to what Alex Pentland, author of Social Physics terms 'social structures'. He asks 'How can we create social structures that are co-operative, productive, and creative'?

Thinking in a different language e.g. of 'social physics' or 'antifragile' (from the Nicolas Taleb book) may, perhaps, start to open a door to radical new ideas of organization as Dee Hock, quoted in the IES report, argued for and long before social media/social organization.

Are the long-established ramshackle palaces – the metaphor that the report hinges on doomed and we would be doing a better service in demolishing them than trying to redesign/redevelop them?
The report opens with the metaphor of a long-established ramshackle palace which is an entertaining read and presents an all too familiar scenario. Each of the chapters 3 – 10 then takes a paragraph from the opening story and develops the chapter from this. It's a good idea in one way but I'm wondering if all the organizations we deal with are ramshackle old palaces? What about start-ups that reach a point of trying to impose some form of order? And where do other organizational forms – for example co-operatives fit into this metaphor?

Hotly following these questions and as I was reading what came to mind were the names of various well-established organizations that have floundered or are floundering. The most recent one – earlier this week was Radio Shack which is about to close 1,100 stores . And an article in today's Huffington Post lists 9 retailers closing the most stores with various reasons given for doing so. I wrote a piece last year on organizational death where I suggested that organizations have a lifecycle and a good death is not necessarily a bad thing. In this vein consider the idea that some palaces are only fit for razing and what we need are people skilled at designing a good organizational deaths. (At the 'birth' end of an organization I was talking to someone recently whose niche is around helping start ups who reach a certain size – around 150 people – develop some organizing principles).

Are the social and analytical technologies we are now embroiled in way beyond our current scope of reference, mental models and toolkits? (And if so, how do we retrain and retool ourselves?)
Reading the report I found several well-used notions (and I use them myself) – for example that for organization re-design setting clear TORs is useful, as is a map, a methodology, and strong project management expertise. But in the context of reading Social Physics and so much else about 'social organization' I wonder if that kind of advice holds true. Pentland points out that 'Suddenly our society has become a combination of humans and technology that has powers and weaknesses different from any we have ever lived in before. Unfortunately we don't really know what to do about it. Our ways of understanding and managing the world were forged in a statelier less connected time. …. In today's light-speed, hyperconnected world, these [statelier times] assumptions are being stretched past the breaking point'.

Thus to read in the report, for example, that early discussion with senior sponsors should include 'where we want to be' seems to be an 'old speak' tool because how can 'where we want to be' be anything more than pie in the sky given the speed of change? But right now I can't offer a more viable 'new speak' tool. Similarly I wonder whether the Goold and Campbell Nine Tests of Organization Design (2002 – pre Twitter) are as valid now as they may have been then, and even PWC's (2009) ten principles against which to evaluate a design seem a little dated.

So a useful practitioner debate may be around what the technology means in terms of organization design. I'm fascinated by the Pentland book but a little alarmed by his enthusiasm for 'the computational theory of behavior, which focuses on the human generative processes', which in his view is 'what is required to build better social systems. Such a theory could tie together mechanisms of social interactions with our newly acquired massive amounts of behavior data in order to engineer better social systems.'

The report has left me with several other questions and I encourage you to read it and see what questions it raises for you. What are your views on the three I have raised here? Let me know.

During last week I traveled several times by bus from Oxford into Central London and back. It's a cheap, slow, way to go. One plus is the door to door – it's about 10 minute walk from my destination at each end. Going by train seems quicker although much more expensive but there's still the 20 minute walk to the station and when I get to Paddington there's the underground trip from the mainline station to where I need to be (Victoria). So there's a trade off between movement and progress. That's a phrase I heard in a meeting on Wednesday, 'Don't mistake movement for progress'. It feels like a good thing to bear in mind.

On the train ride it feels like constant movement but the door to door is about the same as the slow bus trip which makes painfully slow progress but gets there in the end, and on the bus I don't have to contend with no seats, standing in a crush, searching for my Oyster card, etc.

The bus ride takes 1.5 hours in late evening – after 9:00 p.m. and 2.75 hours in the morning, when I get on the 6:00 a.m. 'express'. I don't know how long the non-express takes. In my bid not to get impatient with incredible hold ups I think of it as a good time to get work done. Or I practice controlling my urge to leap off and get some quicker mode of transport (where/how?) by, in the words of the Zen Habits man, 'watching these urges, and finding them interesting. The best thing to do with urges is to be curious. I just watch my urges with curiosity. How did I get like this?' I haven't found that this helps much as yet but I haven't done 10,000 hours of practice, which is the much disputed but popular notion that it takes that length of time to get from beginner to expert in something.

What I found myself thinking (instead of observing with curiosity my urge to jump off the bus) was that traffic flows are much like work processes. Traffic hums along and then stops at identifiable points; traffic lights, broken down vehicles, and road works, for example. The stop points equate to things in a work process like waiting for someone to make a decision (and note we talk in organizations about getting the 'green light' on something) or to hanging around waiting for the 'computer system down' syndrome to be resolved.

Alternatively traffic hums along fast and then the speed slows to a frustrating jerky crawl with no obvious explanation. This phenomenon has been the subject of research in the world of traffic experts. For example: 'Scientists have been trying to bring order, or at least predictability, to motorway melees for decades. They assumed the familiar "stop-and-go" waves of congestion were due to the sheer volume of traffic. More recently, mathematical models have suggested they may actually be down to drivers' behaviour. With cars moving fluidly in a tight pack even a seemingly innocuous change of lanes may cause a tiny disruption which is propagated backwards for many miles.' This report goes on to note that the main culprit is timid and aggressive driver behaviour. The comments on this piece (34 of them) are worth a read too.

This stop and go progress due to timid/aggressive behaviour sounds all too familiar in an organizational setting. So we get the timid people who won't take the initiative 'It's not in my job description.' Or 'I'll have to ask my supervisor'. Or 'That's against the rules'. And on the other hand are the aggressive people who insist something happens now. Or pull rank. Or yell and scream till they get their way, and so on. Maybe we could promote or demote people on the number of points on their driving licence? Alternatively when we're thinking about capability in a work flow we could weed out the overly timid people and the aggressive people; but then we'd be contravening the diversity policy. Another possibility to keep work humming along is to take a leaf from the traffic planners/car manufacturers and develop and deploy some form of organizational adaptive cruise control – or is this there now but called performance management?

So what can we learn from the current state of traffic congestion research? I liked what I read about abandoning road construction (and thus road traffic) in favour of a drone network. This was for Africa. 'Why not build roads? Following the lead of road systems in the West is a nearly impossible task for the African continent. You're talking about a massive infrastructure investment and a huge ecological footprint. If you were to deliberately plan out an approach to transportation and logistics in Africa, would you do it in the same way? I'm convinced that the answer is no. Instead, I think you would use a few different modes of transportation; and one would be an aerial method like the drone network we're proposing.'

Good, now we have an innovative approach to work processes; we don't do them as logical flows or in the way we've always done it putting up with the timid and aggressive behaviour and the identifiable stop points. We instead have networks of drones; a notion that would be particularly attractive in some organizations as drones are apparently 'in the super low cost category'. But I must be careful here. We don't want people to think we think workers are drones and we don't want workers replaced by robots although we're fast heading down that route, and we can't pay under or even at the minimum wage to maintain the 'super low cost' because we've just found out that employers who pay above the minimum wage have a more engaged workforce whose members don't cause trouble.

So let's put the drone idea to one side and look at another traffic planner scheme. To reduce congestion, you cut out routes and roads. The idea is based on Braess' paradox which is very intriguing. 'One study identified six roads in Boston, 12 in Manhattan and seven in central London that could reduce average journey times if closed.' In another Braess Paradox based experiment scientists were looking at ways of stabilizing the power grid (power is delivered via networks which are not very stable). What they found was that an extra link in one or two positions destabilised the network, actually reducing its capacity, just as a new road or bridge can increase congestion. What can organization designers get from this rather well known finding that you can 'restore network function by cutting out parts of the network. Just as closing a road can sometimes improve the flow of traffic.' We learn we can just cut out bits of the existing network. Hmm this may be already well known in organizations as 'downsizing' or is it 'Lean'?

In more reading I find that apparently Braess Paradox has been negated because the paradox disappears in times of high traffic. But in another lovely paradox the conclusion from this research is that 'the negation of the paradox actually adds to the paradox's original conclusions: when designing transportation networks (and other kinds of networks), extreme caution should be used in adding new routes, since at worst the new routes will slow travelers down, and at best, the new routes won't even be used.' Oh we introduce something new and then people won't use it. Does this sound like 'resistance to change'?

But not so fast on the Braess Paradox. We might be better off going for recognizing the fact that in any network the 'paths between nodes can have different capacities, like a wide highway versus a small country road.' So we can develop 'a max flow algorithm' which has to consider both the volume of flow and the route it can take'. The article says that the algorithm 'identifies clusters and bottlenecks first, allowing the algorithm to focus on difficult areas and speed up the solution.' But it doesn't say whether it takes into account the timid/aggressive people or just the work? Regardless, I like the sound of an organizational 'max flow algorithm' perhaps it's going to be the latest tool for organizational design consultants?
In summary, during my commutes this week, I've found out:

• That closing roads can reduce congestion.
• That timid and aggressive drivers increase congestion.
• That introducing new routes doesn't mean people will use them.
• That networks of drones are a cheap alternative to getting things done and there is no congestion involved
• Deploying adaptive cruise control could help keep traffic flows humming along
• That the Braess Paradox and 'max flow algorithms' are terms ripe for adoption by organizational designers.

So it could be that organizational designers can learn from traffic planners and vice versa – what insights could you swap with traffic planners? Let me know.

The Organization Design Forum is holding its 25th anniversary conference in Charlotte, North Carolina from April 29 – May 1. The theme is Reframing Organization Design which is billed as 'a conversation and learning experience that explores the new ideas and practices that will influence how adaptive, innovative and sustainable organizations are designed in the future.'

As we well know, and are told again 'The forces impacting markets today are evolving at an increasing rate: global competition, diversity of customers and cultures, workforces spanning geopolitical boundaries, and technology. The top reasons for reframing organization design are:

• Organizations are continually pressed to make quicker iterations of strategic thinking and decision-making in response to market forces
• Workers must join together, often across great distances, to quickly create connections and produce quality work and results
• Organization design theories and practices of yesterday must be tested against the realities of today so we can build new theories and practices for tomorrow.'

There's a good line-up of presenters and ideas so it's unfortunate that I can't be there in person as I will just have moved back to the UK, with all the turmoil a move across continents entails, but I'm hoping that I can be there via Skype or other medium at least for the Advisory Board Roundtable that's planned and that I was invited to participate in.

From talking with various of the organizers I think it's going to be a worthwhile event – although I do wonder what makes conferences successful or unsuccessful in the eyes of the various stakeholders. One thing that 's already made it worthwhile for me is that it has it set me thinking about conferences generally:

Thought 1: A conference is essentially a pop-up organization design: a team forms to design and deliver the event. Most of the conferences I've been to have been traditionally organized in that there are speakers on pre-determined topics, with a timed agenda, there is a body of people managing the organization of the event, there are administrators, suppliers, and so on. This Organization Design Forum one follows that model.

Yet there are ways of 'reframing' conferences that more closely mirror current organization design discussions around self-organizing and emergence. 'Unconferences', are one example of this self- organizing – take a look at this recruitment one – but they have to be careful not to slip into the traditional mold as this blogger points out in 'The Death of the Unconference'. So what could we learn from both traditional and un conference design that could help with the design of a longer time-frame organization?

Thought 2: Many people would like to come to a conference but it is in a fixed place (usually) and at a fixed point in time. Are there ways of reframing conference design to include people who can't be there in its delivery and outcomes? Social media is the big disruptor of organization design so why aren't we thinking of designing conferences in a different way that make good and innovative use of social media? (Just tweeting comments while listening to a standard presentation isn't quite what I have in mind).

Look at the video, 'Why social network mess can benefit your business', from Euan Semple and you get an idea of how social media is changing organization design. Because a conference is short lived and has a potentially very widely dispersed interest group it would be a great forum to try out some experiments with social media that took conference design in new directions and in ways that could inform other organization design activity.

Thought 3: What is the value of a face to face conference over a virtual one? Many people say the best part about conferences is the networking i.e. meeting face to face. What can we learn about the value of face to face interaction at conferences that could help in designing mobile working and virtual teaming?

One of the ODF conference organizers has been thinking about how to involve people not in the actual room – see thought 2 above – but notes 'the need for human interaction much in the same way as we build any of our relationships. Skype and FaceTime just doesn't give enough of a realistic in the room feeling and also it's easy not to be paying attention to what's going on through these things. People like to see the whites of your eyes from time to time which I think relates to trust and understanding and developing shared meaning between people.'

Nevertheless building trusting and collaborative relationships with minimal face to face time is an increasing challenge for organizations. Reframing a conference design that could test out some methods of doing this that could then be trialled in organizations would be a useful conference outcome. There are some ideas on building trust virtually in this blog How to Build Trust in a Virtual Workplace.

Thought 4: How would we measure the value of conference attendance for participants? The ODF one has a registration fee of $1895 and there is an additional transportation and accommodation cost. How will attendees know that it is worth the investment they make? Could conference attendees be helped in thinking through how to measure this? (And would that make any difference to numbers of on-site participants?)

We know that another of the big issues for organizations is putting a value on knowledge work. e.g. How do we know that an investment in a one-hour meeting is worth the monetary value of the time spent? A conference that helped participants develop measures (qualitative or quantitative) of the value they are gaining from participation that they could take back to their organizations and try out in other meeting or knowlege work settings could help reframe aspects of organization design.

Thought 5: How do we measure the value of conference attendance for the organizers of the conference? I wonder if it's just about having 'paying bums on seats' as a fundraiser, or is it about reputation, being 'the place to go' (like Davos), enabling people to learn new things, a combination of these and/or other factors? For the Organization Design Forum it is about … involve yourself in the Organization Design Forum and/or the European Organization Design Forum – which now has chapters in several countries and you'll find out more on this thought.

Are you going to the Organization Design Forum Conference? Let me know why or why not.

Last week I looked at bridging the gap between theory and practice to generate new knowledge around organization design. I also said there are two other ways of generating new knowledge

• Looking and trends and fads
• Collecting bits and bobs of information that could connect dots to form new knowledge

So this week it's looking at the trends and fads that are 'out there' and thinking through how to learn or develop knowledge from them.

I see I've already got four blog posts related to trends and fads Trends for Talent Managers, Organizational Trends, Trend Spotting and Foresight, and Management Fads and Trends. Also I have a chapter in my book on Organizational Health on the topic. I think it's vital that organization design practitioners are alert to trends and fads and can make sound or at least considered judgments on whether/how to respond to them. (See February 2014's tool of the month that is about deciding whether to adopt a fad).

Note that a fad is different from a trend. As a said in my book 'A fad is something that captures the popular imagination and is adopted with wild enthusiasm for a relatively short period of time. Thus fads progress through a fairly swift lifecycle of introduction, growth, maturity, decline, and then 'death' (that is drop out of fashion) or 'mainstreaming' (that is absorption into the way things are done – losing the connotations of fad).'

A trend is a month by month or year by year movement of a metric. Trends in organizations are collected on performance-based data, obviously the financials, but also include customer satisfaction, company reputation, productivity, and employee engagement among others. Trends are often shown graphically as 'trend lines' drawn from quantifiable metrics collected over time.

Thinking about organization design – how should you treat fads and trends? Well, treat both thoughtfully and with skepticism. I like the critical thinking advocated by Stephen Brookfield who tells us to be reflective which involves identifying: truth, context, assumptions and alternatives. (See my blog on Reflection where I discuss this in more depth).

There are masses of websites doing trendwatching. A post on LinkedIn lists a selection of 18 of them. It's a nice eclectic list that covers a lot of ground but misses some relevant to organization design like demographic and workforce trends. The UKs Office for National Statistics is a mine of useful trends for the UK on these.

Consider the time period that makes something a trend rather than a fad. Sometimes things look like trends but they suddenly drop into the fad category. Take the sale of tablets as an example: Look at the sales trend over time from 2010 when they entered the market to end December 2013. Sales were increasing quarter by quarter until they appear to have peaked. Now read the piece Our Love Affair with the Tablet is Over .The point made is that 'What we are witnessing today is a merger of phones and tablets, not just at Netflix but everywhere, which is why this decade's attempt at tablets is nearing its death -— just four years after Jobs launched the original iPad.'

So what about organizations that have invested in tablets for employees? Were they sensible? Ahead of the curve? Misplaced in their thinking? Now having to justify sunk costs? Is the commentator who thinks our love affair with the tablet is over right or wrong? How would you find out? How could you identify the current and forecast truth, context, assumptions and alternatives around tablet purchase and use? If you could how would it affect the way you thought about your organization design in terms of things like workplace, technologies, workforce, and policies? What knowledge could we generate from the tablet example that would inform organization design activity?

One of the things that is very hard is making the sound judgment on trends and fads. There's a research project going on investigating how to improve forecasts because 'we can't even be sure that the forecasts guiding our decisions are more insightful than what we would hear from oracles examining goat guts. Worse still, we often don't know that we don't know.' (Tetlock & Gardner, 2013) Take a look at the website about this research tournament that is drawing on crowdsourcing to try and develop new knowledge about forecasting (and thus, perhaps onward to organization design). Any one can register to be part of round 4. The researchers say that 'participants can improve their forecasting skills through a combination of training and practice, with frequent feedback on their accuracy'.

Another way of developing new organization design knowledge is developing scenarios around trends. In his book The Art of the Long View, author Peter Schwartz said that 'scenarios are . . . the most powerful vehicles . . . for challenging our 'mental models' about the world and lifting the 'blinders' that limit our creativity and resourcefulness.' He suggests the point of scenario exercises is 'to identify the two or three factors or trends that are the most important and uncertain' and work with them. There are lots around now to choose from: robotics, bio sciences, climate change, demographic trends, political trends …

I think that scenarios could offer great scope for organization designers as an alternative to systems models as they foster strategic conversations 'that question whether that which has been impossible might become possible and which investigate how that which has been possible might end.' Thus strategic conversations around scenarios become 'a process of future oriented sense making that attends to cognitive, psychological and social aspects, surfacing the biases inherited from past or extant cultures and institutional norms and preferences in preparing options for choice in decision making. … these conversations in turn enable more courageous foresight.' (Ramirez & Wilkinson, 2013)

How do you create new organization design knowledge from trends and fads? Let me know

References
Ramirez, R., & Wilkinson, A. (2013, October 19). Rethinking the scenario 2 x 2 method: grid or frames? Technological Forecasting and Social Change.
Tetlock, P., & Gardner, D. (2013). Who's good at forecasts? The World in 2014, 81.

The final section of the entry I'm writing for the encyclopedia 'Design and form: Organizational' for the 2nd edition of Elsevier's Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences is on explaining major directions for developing new knowledge about organization design and form. This has been incredibly challenging and I've been struggling with it all week and haven't been helped by feeling pressure from the deadline which was January 31 – so I'm a week late right now. However, I've finally come to the conclusion that there are three ways to think about directions for new knowledge:

• Bridging practice and theory – that I'll talk about in this post
• Looking at trends and fads that are 'out there' and potentially learning/developing knowledge from them. 'Neuro' is one that falls into the category of fad right now. See the blog Neurobonkers. But will it stay that way?
• Scanning, listening and looking out for bits and bobs of information that aren't a trend or a fad but could have a big impact on 'connecting the dots', or getting a completely new insight or perspective that developed new knowledge. One item that caught my eye this week was on Bitcoin , 'Peek into the future, and it's possible to envisage this sort of technology being used to cut intermediaries out of trades of many kinds – beginning with payment systems such as Visa and moving on to banks, real estate and more. Transactions could be arranged, executed, verified and publicly recorded automatically'. Think of the organization design implications of that scenario.

I'm going to duck discussing definitions of 'new knowledge' as it's too difficult to determine what is 'new' and what is 'standing on the shoulders of giants' (as Google Scholar is taglined). And, as I said, this week I will look at just the first direction: In the next two weeks I'll discuss the other two directions. (After I've submitted the encyclopedia piece?!)

Bridging practice and theory
There is an ocean of research on organization theory. I'm surprised to find after looking along my bookshelves that I own eighteen academic/research based organization theory books – a drop in the ocean, but still. Some of these have a lot of highlighting and notes I've written but I have no recollection of doing this – and that memory failure made me wonder how one gets 'knowledge'. Have I integrated all the highlighted stuff so it's become part of what I know or, once highlighted, did I instantly forget it? Have I bridged the gap between theory and practice?

In any event as I was reading (or maybe re-reading but I don't know in some instances) I found some of it very heavy going e.g. 'Under norms of rationality, organizations and others assessing them prefer efficiency tests over instrumental tests, and instrumental tests over social tests. But efficiency tests are not possible when technical knowledge is incomplete or standards of desirability are ambiguous'… This is on page 97 of Organizations in Action: Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory in case you are thirsting for more like this.

Reading this sort of thing I am reminded why many managers I meet with hate 'theory' and 'ivory tower thinking' and just want something practical they can do to improve performance or achieve whatever it is that they are aiming for. And from the other side of the fence I can see why academics are rather dismissive of fads and quick fixes which are not underpinned by rigorous and validated research.

My impression is that in general academics tend to fight shy of discussing what will make the theories actionable in day to day organizational life. I don't know why this is since my experience of universities and other higher education institutions is that they would enormously benefit from any lessons on organization design that their own employees – faculty and administrative – could bring them.

But this reticence leaves a big gap between theory and practice attributed to a number of possible causes which one researchers suggests is due to academic 'fragmentation', 'self-absorption' and 'living in a self-indulgent state' (Starbuck, 2003). Further, although it is obvious that 'there is a very large body of [theoretical] knowledge about organizations and organizing , examples of effective applications of this knowledge in designing real organization are few and far between'. (Meyer, 2013).

Managers, as a wild generalization, don't help develop new knowledge because they tend to be lured into fad adoption. I suggested some reasons for this in my book Organizational Health:

Organizations are likely to be attracted to a fad if it is:

1. Simple to understand, easy to communicate and associated with buzzwords and catchphrases
2. Prescriptive in its approach – it tells manager what to do in things like seven steps, or five phases
3. Encouraging of the successful outcomes by raising hopes even if there is little in the way of evaluative process attached to the sales pitch
4. Universally relevant or one-size-fits all as shown by exemplars who have already adopted the fad.
5. Easy to apply in practice or even partially apply by taking some elements of the method – this makes it easier to graft on to existing operations without whole scale change
6. Able to speak directly to business issues of the day e.g. to downsizing in a recession
7. Interesting because of its novelty but not so radical as to disturb the underlying status quo
8. Given legitimacy by consultants or and their successful devotees – an endorsement by a management celebrity and/or their followers goes a long way even without any evidence of true results (Miller & Hartwick, 2002)

From both perspectives the lack of actionable learning going on between academics and managers is a pity because there is a lot that they could learn from each other. And this was recognized in the Organizational Design Community's 2013 Annual Conference. As Alan Meyer reported participants there (I was not present) 'faced the challenge of making organization design knowledge actionable'.

In his useful article Emerging Assumptions About Organization Design, Knowledge And Action (that I mentioned in a previous blog about the conference) Meyer, observed that 'most established design efforts are rooted in a rational model of action … scholars should understand organizations, consultants should translate scholars' understandings and practitioners should take action based on understanding' but noted that several conference participants 'offered support for a model of action that accumulates knowledge through feedback from experience instead of through analysis and anticipation. … In this model action becomes the basis for understanding'. (Meyer, 2013).

He presents a table of assumptions on the relationship between knowledge and action. One of the emerging assumptions is that 'Designing should unfold as an iterative sequence of experiments in which scholars, consultants, and practitioners collaborate in acting, evaluating, and designing.' I think this is an excellent assumption to test – the immediate challenge being to set this in motion, perhaps through through evaluation of the fad(s) in practice, scenarios, or metaphor development, or working as a multidisciplinary team on real organizational design issues to get to a solution and simultaneously develop theory around it.

How would you bridge the theory/practice organization design gap? Let me know.

References
Meyer, A. (2013). Emerging Assumptions about Organization Design, Knowledge and Action. Journal of Organization Design, 2(3), 16-22.
Miller, D., & Hartwick, J. (2002). Spotting Management Fads. Harvard Business Review(October), 26-27.
Starbuck, W. H. (2003). Shouldn't Organization Theory Emerge from Adolescence? Organization, 10(3), 439-452.

"A social business is one that invites mass collaboration utilizing social media platforms to enable their employees, customers, suppliers and all other stakeholders to participate directly in the creation of value." (Eeswaran Navaratnam)

Several discussions through various channels have focused my attention on 'social business' this past week. I listened to a discussion with Lisa Gansky on what she calls 'the Mesh, [that] is taking root around the world in the form of thousands of businesses and organizations that understand and cleverly exploit the perfect storm of mobile, location-based technology, social networks, and an evolving ethos of community and citizenship.

I had a conversation with someone from Change Agents Worldwide on the current or future value of things like job evaluation, performance management systems, and other infrastructure processes common in the pre-social business world. (See their white paper Toward Higher Rates of Adoption for Social Business Platforms through Adaptation and Exaptation.) And I came across various other aspects of social business which turned into tweets: see below.

• Fascinating blog/infographic ranking airlines for social. http://dld.bz/dgM2n . Does social #design convert to revenue gain? via @dachisgroup
• Interestng graphic rankng city gov social media use. http://dld.bz/dgJZ8 .Barcelona 1st. London last. Time for new #design 4 London gov?
• Millennials as leaders how will they #design orgs? Interesting info http://dld.bz/dgB7v via @forbes
• Just re-found Galoppin on social architecture http://dld.bz/dg7zs useful ideas to help rethink org #designs.via @sharethis
• Exlnt essay on promise of social media http://dld.bz/dgBwD how it cld re#design social research via @Demos

The Galoppin manifesto (and he has a free e-book on the topic) opens with the words, 'This manifesto is aimed at any organizational leader or citizen interested in promoting change. In this manifesto I argue that the digital economy has shifted the point of gravity from control to co-creation. As a consequence, the laws of nature that determine the dynamics of change management have shifted as well.

Successful organizations are those who are aware of that shift and tap into the new literacy of collaboration that social media has brought us. The result is a new balance between hierarchy and community that is called social architecture.'

This 'new literacy of collaboration' is reflected in the Ten Tenets of Social Business proposed by by Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim, in their book Social Business by Design (and here replicated from Noort Social Business ). We are told that:

[These] tenets represent a fundamentally open, participative, scalable, and rich way of living, working, and otherwise connecting and engaging with the world."
1. Anyone can participate.
2. Create shared value by default.
3. While participation is self-organising, the focus is on business outcomes.
4. Enlist a large enough community to derive the desired result.
5. Engage the right community for the business purpose.
6. Participation can take any direction. Be prepared for it, and take advantage of it.
7. Eliminate all potential barriers to participation. Ease of use is essential.
8. Listen to and engage continuously with all relevant social business conversations.
9. The tone and language of social business are most effective when they're casual and human.
10.The effective social business activities are deeply integrated into the flow of work.

One outcome of working towards these tenets is, as one blogger noted, that They [successful brands] have started to see proof that social conversations have an impact upon the whole organisation and therefore teams are getting bigger and more departments are working together.

But the more people are 'social' the more they are releasing data which can be used in various and/or nefarious ways. So parallel tracking with the social business enthusiasts are the social business red flag wavers. Watch Mikko Hypponen on the design of the surveillance state or read Evgeny Morozov's argument for caution in which he makes the point that Big data, with its many interconnected databases that feed on information and algorithms of dubious provenance, imposes severe constraints on how we mature politically and socially. Or read Jaron Lanier's book Who Owns the Future? In which in the words of one reviewer he continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. Or read about Dave Egger's novel 'The Circle' to shrink at the thought of a world where "privacy is theft". (Better, read the novel itself).

Thus for an established organization social business raises a number of challenges:

Challenge 1: Fast enough adaptation
This challenge is to adapt fast enough to keep pace with newborn competitors who are entering the field already designed as social businesses. Having a digital strategy as, for example, the UK Government has is only one element of becoming a social business. As my conversation with the person from Change Agents Worldwide highlighted, the systems, processes, policies, and ways of working in an established organization have to be completely re-configured and this in an environment that is constantly moving. Take a look at one of the many images of 'one minute on the internet' to get an idea of the scale of what this looks like or watch a YouTube video ande read the blog Social business: A multi-billion dollar industry to realize that becoming a social business in the broad sense of the definition above should be a non-negotiable part of any organization's strategy.

Challenge 2: The informal organization
The challenge here is to pay attention not only to the formal aspects of the changes necessary to become a social business but also to the informal organizational aspects – language, styles of interaction, culture, informal politics, ways of working, relationships, and so on – and work out how to change established patterns. These are the types of things that Galoppin talks about as social architecture. I sent Galoppin's blog to a friend, Terry Huang, who returned some excellent points and questions:
Even in an industrial economy situation – for instance, making a car or computer – there has been evidence that collaboration/co-creation can improve quality and productivity. Both car/computer manufacturers have found that a team building a car instead of a manufacturing line adapts to changes and quality issues earlier and in instances produces goods faster. However, it requires very skilled and experienced workers who are often devoted to the craft to have that model be successful. What if you don't have the right people to apply a co-creation approach? (Or the company isn't compensating enough to attract the right people?) What if the person is just there to go through the motions and to get a steady paycheck? What if the person simply isn't smart enough? We shouldn't design to the lowest common denominator but we do have to.

Ultimately, isn't personality a huge factor? Let's say we are in an accounting firm. I wouldn't count on accountants to mobilize for change… Perhaps there needs to be a "minimally-viable-change-agent-ratio" in order for change to be successful in an organization. 30%? 40%? If the nature of work for an organization attracts 80% non-creative, non-motivated, temporarily-dedicated, process-oriented, passive people, how do you apply social architecture?

Challenge 3: Managing the positive of social business and its darker side
It may be the biggest challenge to manage the positive elements of social business (co-creation, community, etc.) with the darker side of privacy intrusion, surveillance, and 'algorithmic regulation' which Tim O'Reilly in his book Beyond Transparency comments on: The use of algorithmic regulation increases the power of regulators, and in some cases, could lead to abuses, or to conditions that seem anathema to us in a free society. "Mission creep" is a real risk. Once data is collected for one purpose, it's easy to imagine new uses for it. We've already seen this in requests to the NSA for data on American citizens originally collected for purposes of fighting overseas terrorism being requested by other agencies to fight domestic crime, including copyright infringement!

Challenge 4: No maps
Here the challenge is to take the path towards social business with no well proven theories, methodologies, frameworks, good practice, benchmarks or tools to help. However, this presents great opportunities for organizational experimentation, innovation, and use of social media to take them down the path. (Altimeter has a survey report The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Business Transformation which found that 'Although only 28% of organizations surveyed felt they have achieved a holistic approach to social media, that is the ultimate goal: to become a truly social business that is formed as a result of cross-functional and executive support, where social strategies weave into the fabric of the organization. The survey reports offers some high level guidance on stages to becoming a social business').

So can established organizations manage these and the many other challenges of becoming social businesses – and what will become of them if they don't? Let me know.

This past week I've come across several pieces concerned with either new or emerging forms of organization design. What follows are some examples:

The latest MIT Challenge is 'The Unlimited Human Potential Challenge'. This makes the point that:

'The Social Web and other digital technologies and platforms offer a robust set of alternatives to industrial-era forms of organizing. We now can imagine organizations

• where coordination happens without centralization
• where power is the product of contribution rather than position,
• where the wisdom of the many trumps the authority of the few,
• where novel viewpoints get amplified rather than squelched,
• where communities form spontaneously around shared interests,
• where opportunities to "opt-in" blur the line between vocation and hobby, where titles and credentials count for less than value-added,
• where performance is judged by your peers
• where influence comes from sharing information, not from hoarding it.'

Challenge organizers are 'seeking the most progressive practices and innovative ideas for unleashing human capability to produce radically new approaches to organizing, competing, and creating advantage.'

This sounds tremendously upbeat and worth going for and they have an example of someone who is thinking in this direction. Her idea is:

The Mesh
'For Lisa Gansky, that future is all about sharing. The Sharing Economy, what Lisa calls "the Mesh," is taking root around the world in the form of thousands of businesses and organizations that understand and cleverly exploit the perfect storm of mobile, location-based technology, social networks, and an evolving ethos of community and citizenship.

The Mesh isn't just about offering consumers more choices, more tools, more information, and more power-—it's also fundamentally transforming what it means to win, the nature of competition, and how value is created. Just as in kindergarten, sharing is not an optional activity. The Sharing Economy is infiltrating every realm of endeavor with inventive solutions in sync with the values of community, connection, sustainability, generosity, quality, and simplicity.'

The Mesh idea of everyone sharing is great but contrast it with Eric Schmidt's view (he is the Google Chairman) that:

New technologies were creating "lots of part-time work and growth in caring and creative industries [but] the problem is that the middle class jobs are being replaced by service jobs."
He went on to say that governments needed to invest in education systems to improve skill levels and human cognition. "It is pretty clear that work is changing and the classic nine to five job is going to have to be redefined. Without significant encouragement, this will get worse and worse."

If there is job replacement (very likely in my view) and all sorts of new skills are called for what would things look like in a 'Wirearchy'? Wirearchy is 'an emergent organizing principle that informs the ways that purposeful human activities and the structures in which they are contained is evolving from top-down direction and supervision (hierarchy's command-and-control) to champion-and-channel … championing ideas and innovation, and channeling time, energy, authority and resources to testing those ideas and the possibilities for innovation carried in those ideas … through connection and collaboration … taking responsibility individually and collectively rather than relying on traditional hierarchical status.'

So how do we take individual and collective responsibility rather than relying on those with traditional hierarchical status to be responsible? Maybe we'll learn something from Tony Hsieh (CEO Zappos) bold move into Holacracy. John Bunch, the Zappos person leading the move into holacracy explains what it is on the Zappos Insight blog:

'The HolacracyOne refers to Holacracy as a "distributed authority" system, but I think it goes further. It is a system which incorporates: distributed accountability, authority, and leadership.

First, it distributes accountability. It allows each person to understand clearly who is expected to do what throughout the organization.

After that understanding is gained, Holacracy distributes authority. The authority distributed is to make whatever decisions each role filler deems will best fulfill the accountability, or responsibilities, of each role.

Distribution of accountability and authority, taken together, enable something very powerful: distributed leadership.'

But will a distributed leadership system work in a 'micro-multinational' start-up which is, according to the Economist article, 'in a constant feedback loop very different from the old start-up model of 'build it and they will come'. Now start-ups 'should start with a "minimum viable product", or MVP, a sort of trial balloon to gauge the audience's interest. They should always test their assumptions, aiming for "validated learning". And if their strategy does not work, they should "pivot": in essence, throw in the towel and start again with a different product.'

A one person start-up might cope with this fine but how about if they are in an 'ecosystem', a term for economic clusters, that some describe as 'made up of "domains", including markets, policy and culture. [And] others describe as collections of actors that play certain roles, such as providing talent, finance and infrastructure. Yet others talk about them as a set of "resources" entrepreneurs can draw on.'

And what happens in a more established company if they are trying to compete with these pivoting micro-multinationals? Here we can look to Tesla and Adobe for possible learning (about what to do and not do). These two companies have changed their business models in order to compete more via 'continuous feedback' but as an unintended consequence appear to be alienating their customers – much as Netflix did when it changed its business model in 2011. In Netflix's case, however, it seems to have managed a bounce-back perhaps because 'It went beyond its original capabilities and developed skills to win in online streaming. Specifically, Netflix decided to compete with content providers like HBO and develop its own content.'

This sounds good, but read on and you'll find that this commentator on Netflix puts its success in overcoming customer disillusion down to Reed Hastings, the CEO, explaining 'What makes Hastings so special is that he has been able to maintain the tireless reinvention that is required of a startup in the context of a publicly-traded company. A big part of that is that he is a founder -— like Amazon's Jeff Bezos – who has been able to go the distance of starting a company and running it after it went public.' So not really distributed leadership then?

Or maybe the Netflix bounce-back is due to their 'travel light' talent management approach which apparently makes the human capital side of organizations more agile. Basically it is centred 'on "temporary" relationships between individuals and organizations. Responsibility for an individual's career and skills shifts from the organization to the individual. Employment is "guaranteed" for only as long as an individual has the skills the organization needs.'

I'm not sure that 'travel light' is a new form of organization design as it seems to bear a close resemblance to the old fashioned 'hire and fire', with strong implications around Schmidt's point reported by the BBC that the jobs problem will be "the defining one" for the next two-three decades.

Schmidt said given the constant development of new technology, more and more middle class workers would lose their jobs, and those that had jobs would have stagnant wages resulting in global economic damage because according to Business Insider's report 'the middle-class folks whose wages are stagnant are the global economy's biggest spenders. And when they don't have money to spend, their lack of spending hurts not just them but all the companies that depend on them for revenue.'

Further 'The stagnation in middle-class wages is not just a middle-class problem. It's an economic problem. And it's one of the main reasons that global economic growth is so lousy.'

This brought me to thinking about what Frans van Houten, CEO, Royal Philips advocates – A circular economic system which 'would ensure that products were designed to be part of a value network, within which the reuse and refurbishment of products, components, and materials would ensure the continual re-exploitation of resources.'

Apart from the delightful understatement that 'building a circular economy would require a fundamental restructuring of global value chains' (not a small piece of organization design work) Van Houten notes that 'At the same time, consumers must be open to using products that they do not own. 'Because the circular economy is inherently systemic, it can succeed only if all stakeholders co-design, co-create, and co-own products and services.'

So here I am at the end of the week considering the viability of 'The Mesh', Wirearchy', 'Holacracy', 'Micro-multinationals', 'Ecosystems', 'Travel light' talent management, and a circular economic system comprising value networks and inherent systems.

Maybe it's time for a cup of tea and a scone consumed while I am considering whether they're basically all saying we (individual and/or organization) need to share more, keep learning and developing skills, pay close attention to what's going on, and respond appropriately to our changing context. What's your view? Let me know.

During the past week someone alerted me to the Oxford Futures Forum. I'd not heard of it before but I'm constantly looking for perspectives and insights on what the future might hold. Since all organizations I work with are looking to be 'agile', 'scalable up or down', 'adaptable', 'future fit', and similar words/phrases – it would be good to know what they think they might be facing in order to meet the future. When organizational members say 'agile' they are generally neither talking 'Agile' or 'Lean' in terms of specific methodologies nor why these two techniques might go together. They are talking about a more nebulous organizational capability required in turbulent situations. It is described in an article Journey towards agility: the agile wheel explored as 'proactivity, adaptability, flexibility, speed, learning and skills to provide strategically driven and effectively implemented waves of change. This [agility] is a dynamic capability, and can be defined as "the organisation's capacity to gain competitive advantage by intelligently, rapidly and proactively seizing opportunities and reacting to threats" (Bessant et al., 1999).

It may not be sensible to assume that current turbulent situations will continue into the future but this does seem to be a generally accepted assumption. In 2012, for example, Accenture produced a report Corporate Agility: six ways to make volatility your friend' with a 12-point 'Agility Checklist'. The white paper is clear that 'in today's chronically uncertain markets, agility is an exceptionally powerful competitive weapon.' As an example, Troy Carter, Lady Gaga's ex-manager, talks about this uncertainty in relation to the music industry in an interview:

"Everybody should be nervous," he says, matter-of-factly, the Philly accent still detectable. "With the music industry we've always had technological change, whether it was disruption from eight-track to cassette, or cassette to CD, CD to download, download to streaming. The difference now is how fast it's happening. We're seeing new technology pop up every few months like this." Carter clicks his fingers. "I sit on the edge of my seat. I try to live around the corner just to get a sneak peak, to have some sense of what's happening. The industry [needs] to be very aware, concerned and curious about everything on the way." Among the changes he foresees: albums released solely as apps; unprecedented data harvesting; more African Americans in Silicon Valley; concert holograms; massively bigger audiences; and the triumph of the perpetually online, engaged digital star.

The thing that interested me about the Oxford Futures Forum is that the aim of its 2014 meeting is to 'join two established communities of thought and practice – the design research community and the scenario planning practice and research community with, among other purposes, those of:

• Forging and supporting an international community of future-minded practices aimed at stimulating actionable, impactful knowledge;
• Identifying and investigating academic and practitioner interests at the forefront of scenarios and design, and relating them to each other;
• Uncovering and pushing the boundaries of scenarios practices and theory, to clarify and extend their effectiveness through critical review and linking with other fields.'

The intent is not to make specific predictions or forecasts about the future. Philip Tetlock (a professor of organizational behavior at the Haas Business School at the University of California-Berkeley and a commentator on forecasting) remarking on these says that

'we found that our experts' predictions barely beat random guesses – the statistical equivalent of a dart-throwing chimp – and proved no better than predictions of reasonably well-read non-experts.'

So clearly there is no point in suggesting that organizations design themselves specifically to meet, for example, prediction no 5 in the World Futures Society top the forecasts for 2014 and beyond, that 'Buying and owning things will go out of style'. On this prediction the Society says that, 'The markets for housing, automobiles, music, books, and many other products show a common trend: Younger consumers opting to rent or subscribe to pay-per-use arrangements instead of buying and owning the physical products. Shared facilities will overtake established offices, renting units will become more common than owning a home, and sales of books and music might never become popular again.'

Rather, the Oxford Futures Forum in 2014 seeks to make use of scenarios to test out various future possibilities. The approach works for products, services and, I am suggesting, the design of organizations. As the Forum website says:

A designer designs things for future situations, and if paying attention to the context of the design, would consider scenarios as a plausible set of contextual conditions of these situations.
In practice these future situations unfold; scenarios help to explore how they may depart from how any designer imagined things would play out. In this way, designers and strategists are in the same situation, and can use scenarios in comparable ways.
From the perspective of scenarios scholarship and practice, scenario sets render explicit the assumptions a design and/or a designer have made of the future context. They ascertain if alternative plausible contexts need to be considered to ensure the design works as intended.

On this basis, think how working with scenarios could be effective in designing agile organizations. It seems to me that there's a big opportunity to use scenario work in organization design to a much greater extent than I've seen done. (Shell has a scenarios team but I don't believe it is using its work to think through the on-going design of the organization)

Supposing buying and owning things actually does go out of style, as a recent Economist article The Sharing Economy also implies – what repercussions would this have on any organization that sells products or services? We already know some of the clashes of interest that have followed the introduction of the taxi service Uber – should taxi companies have been working on this as a potential scenario a few years ago and have had a more agile response to it than litigation?

The 5th Global Drucker Forum held in November 2013, on the theme of Managing Complexity, picked up on some of the issues associated with this increasing unpredictability of what organizations face. And Roger Martin in his conference blog In the Flow: Networked for Complexity points out in a thought provoking piece.

'Hierarchical organisational models and process-driven working practices are struggling to cope with the chaos and complexity this paradigm shift [of industrial practices ceding to knowledge based work] has introduced to the workplace.'

In following a link in this article I found another blog that looks at one aspect of this paradigm shift asking the question 'How do traditional, regulated industries cope with social engagement?' The blog writer's answer to the question is 'Not so well, as it seems. In a series of two posts, we will explore the reasons that hold those industries back from becoming truly social (part 1), taking Pharma as an example. Between real constraints and irrational fears, various avenues of action exist (part 2) to seize the business potential of social engagement.'

On the assumption that turbulence, paradigm shift and uncertainty are giving rise to new thinking, new types of work and new models in which to do work is it in fact possible for traditional well established organizations to change their design to meet this type of challenge and if so specifically how? I think this is where scenario work could give pointers towards answering the question.

Government is one type of organization that might benefit from designing via scenario work. During last week, I was working with some civil servants and we were discussing agility in governments, pointing out that policies, frameworks and other enshrined infrastructures make it very difficult to make government agile in the type of way spelled out as necessary in the World Economic Forum, Future of Government report. The report notes that:

Governments in the future will need to adapt and continuously evolve to create value. They need to stay relevant by being responsive to rapidly changing conditions and citizen expectations, and build capacity to operate effectively in complex, interdependent networks of organizations and systems across the public, private and non-profit sectors to co-produce public value. As recommended in this report, what is needed today is flatter, agile, streamlined, and tech-enabled (FAST) government.

It seems that these civil servants, and organization design practitioners in established organizations would be well advised to put resources and effort into developing scenarios which help them understand how to design the agile government and other enterprises now required.

What's your view on the value of scenario planning in helping design agile organizations? Let me know.

I have been invited to write a piece on the topic of 'Design and form: Organizational' for the 2nd edition of Elseviers Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. As I said in a previous blog piece on the topic 'The chapters are intended to summarize the state of current knowledge on the subject, draw links to other subjects, and explain major directions for developing new knowledge.'

Aiming to describe the current state of 'knowledge' of organization design and form is problematic as it implies there is generally accepted agreement on it. This is not the case, partly because 'knowledge' is context driven – what we know in one situation may not hold true in another, and partly because 'knowledge' is interpreted through the meaning-making processes of the 'knower'. An academic in the field of organization design and form will have a very different 'state of current knowledge' from the line manager struggling with the poor performance of his/her department, or the shareholder anxiously watching an organization's share price rise or fall.

Beyond this difficulty with the word 'knowledge' the word 'current' state' suggests that there has been a past state of knowledge that is 'true' and a future state of knowledge that could be predicted or at least guessed at, and a current state that is 'now'. Taking the idea that the state of past knowledge on the subject of organizational design and form could be articulated is similar to taking the idea that history can be told as a unified story. But as John Arnold explains in his book History, A Very Short Introduction

'Historians cannot tell every story from the past … there are many more things that could be said … Historians inevitably decide which things can or should be said.' He makes the point that 'history is true in that it must agree with the evidence, the facts that it calls upon … at the same time it is an interpretation, placing these facts within a wider context or narrative. … The past itself is not a narrative. In its entirety, it is as chaotic, unco-ordinated, and complex as life. History is about making sense of that mess, finding or creating patterns and meanings and stories from the maelstrom.'

So it is with organization design and form. Organizations are 'maelstroms' but until the early 1990s organizational theory was predominantly rooted in an (open) systems perspective (e.g. Katz and Kahn 1978) which led to a view that in order to function effectively they needed 'fit', 'congruence', 'alignment' and 'equilibrium' between various organizational components (e.g. Lawrence and Lorsch 1967). Common models underpinning this open systems theory of organization include Galbraith's Star Model, Nadler and Tushman's 1977 congruence model (see reference at end), and McKinsey's 7-S model.

Challenging the prevailing open systems perspective Gareth Morgan (1997) in his book Images of Organization presented eight images (metaphors) of organization: as machines (the systems perspective), organisms, cultures, brains, psychological prisons, instruments of domination, flux and transformation and political systems. Each one of these offers a multiplicity of ways and related theories in which to interpret an organization. For example, as he explains in his article 'Reflections on Images of Organization and Its Implications for Organization and Environment'.

'When you view organizations as brains, you find yourself thinking about information processing systems, learning capacities and disabilities, right and left brain intelligence, holographic capacity distribution, and a host of images that can take a brain-like thinking beyond the spongy mass of material that comprises an actual brain.'

It seems to me that the eight generative metaphors that Morgan presents are reasonable proxies for the 'state of current knowledge' about organization design and form. We can see each in the work of competing academics and practitioners. Each metaphor offers a path to theory construction and each a set of practitioner tools and intervention approaches. On this basis the state of current knowledge on organization design and form is fragmented: there are many competing positions and contested theories each with adherents and detractors.

The value of recognizing that there is no unifying theory (or practice) of organization design and form (in the same way that one can recognize that there are different perspectives and interpretations of history, even given the 'facts') is that it 'shows the inherent incompleteness of any particular point of view.' As Morgan remarks holding only one perspective as 'a way of seeing becomes a way of not seeing; and that any attempt to understand the complex nature of organizations (as with any other complex subject) always requires an open and pluralistic approach based on the interplay of multiple perspectives.'

The idea of 'multiple perspectives' of organization design and form is brought alive by the use of metaphor and storytelling – the latter much as historian John Arnold demonstrates – to present, interpret and make meaning of a variety of states of current 'knowledge'.

This approach was demonstrated in the Organizational Design Community's 2013 Annual Conference. As Alan Meyer reported participants there (I was not present) 'faced the challenge of making organization design knowledge actionable'. In his useful article Emerging Assumptions About Organization Design, Knowledge And Action on the conference, he comments 'my overall assessment is that design oriented scholars are in the process of shifting from one integrated set of assumptions to another somewhat more amorphous set of assumptions.' He arrived at this assessment by listening to conference participants telling their various stories.

He presents three tables that illustrate the shift in assumptions. The first table considers established versus emerging assumptions about organization design, the second table shows established and emerging assumptions about design knowledge, and the third presents established and emerging assumptions on organization design action. Meyer's conclusion is that seeking to make design knowledge actionable is nudging the community away from a set of assumptions based on linearity and equilibrium (open systems theory, and toward a new set of assumptions based on emergence, self-organization, and non-linearity (possibly multiple theories).

The inherent danger of moving from one set of assumptions towards another is that the emerging assumptions become the new 'way it is', leaving no room for competing and equally valid approaches. In table 2, for example (about design knowledge) one of the established assumptions presented is that 'design knowledge achieves validity through nomological rigor, operational definition of variables, and documentation of causal relationships between carefully measured variables, as demonstrated by statistical analysis'. The emerging assumption related to this is that 'design knowledge achieves pragmatic validity through communication in clear and evocative language, should often be elucidated in narrative form, and benefits from illustration in pictorial diagrams'. It is easy to imagine that quantitative information becomes abandoned in favor of qualitative information.

As Gareth Morgan illustrates through metaphor and John Arnold (the historian) tells us we are dealing with 'maelstroms' when we work with organizations. Recognizing the limitations of past and current interpretations of 'states of knowledge' we might consider thinking not in terms of emerging assumptions – unless are going to question them, but rather taking a path that Chris Rodgers talks about as he aimed to 'clarify my thoughts on how to reframe the dominant – yet limiting – either-or perspective that dominates much conventional management thinking.' He has 'since developed a view of paradox that seeks to accommodate the positive aspects of contending ideas, views or values … and which acknowledges the potentially negative aspects of otherwise well-intended policy shifts.' (I mentally substituted the word 'assumptions' for 'policy' here).

Rather than thinking that one metaphor, or theoretical approach is 'better' than another, or one story is the 'truth' and another isn't it would make for richer approaches to organization design and the ongoing development of the 'state of current knowledge' to work with the paradoxes and the range of interpretations available.

These derive from what Ralph Stacey describes as 'complex responsive processes of interaction between people taking the form of conversation, power relations, ideologies, choices and intentions'. The social processes are inherent in each of the eight images/metaphors of organization, and in any account of history. They foster a range of interpretation about 'what is' (or was). None of the metaphors is 'right' but all of them have merit. Being aware of, and arguing about, the merits of each creates possibilities of changing things and is likely to give rise to new generative metaphors and new theories of organizational design and form.

What's your view that the eight metaphors and their related theories are useful and describe the current state of knowledge of organization design and form? Let me know.

NOTE: Morgan has suggested another metaphor he would put in if he had the opportunity: Organizations as Media.

References
Galbraith, J. (2012). The Future of Organization Design. Journal Of Organization Design, 1(1), 3-6. doi:10.7146/jod.1.1.6332
Meyer, A. (2013). Emerging Assumptions About Organization Design, Knowledge And Action. Journal Of Organization Design, 2(3), 16-22. doi:10.7146/jod.2.3.15576
Morgan, G. (2011). Reflections on Images of Organization and Its Implications for Organization and Environment. Organization Environment. Vol. 24 no. 4 459-478
Nadler, D. A., & Tushman, M. L. (1999). The organization of the future: Strategic imperatives and core competencies for the 21st century. Organizational Dynamics, 28(1), 45-60.
Nadler, D., & Tushman, M. L. (1977). A congruence model for diagnosing organizational behavior. Columbia University, Graduate School of Business.
Stacey, R. (2012) The Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management: Meeting the challenge of complexity, London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-53118-4 (Extract from the Appendix)