Author: naomiorgdesign

Frequently I'm asked how to set up an organization design project: who needs to be involved, what are the skills they need, and how much time/effort of participants will be involved? This is rather difficult to estimate in advance of knowing something about the project although I've worked on several proposals where we have had to submit complete 'Work Breakdown Structures' with time and staffing estimates several years in advance of any projected work happening.

In one case I remember I was asked how many change management workshops I would facilitate two years out and what would be the content of each. I said this was an impossible question to answer without having started the work and getting to know the context at which point I would design workshops appropriately. This answer was unacceptable.

However, whenever possible, and for the most part, I work as follows:

Pre-proposal: Usually, I am working with the CEO or COO or other leadership team member (at organization or BU level) to gain an insight into the context, what the purpose of the design is, and the rough scope of it. This person may turn out to be 'the client' as the project gathers life, or may turn out to be 'the sponsor', or sometimes he/she may bow out and hand over the project to some other nominated client and/or sponsor.

I explain to prospective clients that I work on a project in phases (though in practice it inevitably turns out to be more chaotic than a linear arrowed sequence moving smoothly from left to right as illustrated in a proposal graphic). Additionally I take the view that organization design is a collaborative, participative venture that must involve employees and other stakeholders. Over the years I've come to the view that the more senior someone is the less likely they are to know about the granular day to day operation of the organization and it is important to have this for a good design result. (Maybe I'm jaundiced, but I'll just casually mention the now outgoing Director General of the BBC, George Entwistle).

So in the five phases I work with following proposal acceptance I explain that each is likely to involve a different set of stakeholders, employees, and so on. I and the client are participants right through to the end of the transition phase (and sometimes into the review and evaluate phase). Roughly speaking the phases involves the following people.

Assess phase: This is where I am finding out the internal and external context of the organization and making a determination on the type of activity that will be needed to get to a couple of design options that meet the criteria and will deliver the business strategy and objectives. This usually means
a) Interviewing 1:1 members of the leadership team of the organization or part of it I am working with
b) Meeting with groups of staff representing all organizational levels either in teams or on an open call basis to find out their perspectives
c) Meeting with key other stakeholders that might include Board members, union reps, and customers of the product/services

Design phase: This phase opens with a 'kick-off' meeting explaining the scope and intent of the project. In this phase I am working with 'workstreams' to develop design options. Workstreams emerge from the assess phase and each is led by a member of the organization's staff. He/she may select appropriate team members but they should comprise a 'diagonal slice' of the organization so that all levels have a voice. Teams usually comprise 5 or so people. My role is to coach these groups through the design process. They are selected for certain qualities. (See tool of the month for October 2012)
In this phase I also set up a Steering Group with defined and agreed roles. You can find steering group role descriptions on various websites. There's a helpful summary of all project roles here.

Additionally I request that the organization provides a qualified project manager (actually, I specify this in the proposal). Without project management techniques and expertise organization design work can rapidly go off track, spin wheels, or otherwise lose direction and momentum.

I've found that it's important that people are aware that the work involves a time commitment and they will be recognized for their contribution. (And then to ensure they are recognized).

At the end of this phase, once the design has been accepted, the work streams disband and a planning team or teams is formed. To keep continuity often one or more design team members join the planning team(s).

Plan to transition: Planning team members, with a different profile from design team members, work with the project manager to develop the detailed implementation steps with critical paths, milestones, metrics and risk management. My role here is to work with the teams to make connections with other stakeholders, liaise with the Steering Group, do any co-ordination across the organization, and provide updates recommendations, and so on. Again the members are drawn from the business lines.

Transition: Here the detailed plan is handed over to the business area for implementation. Note that this is not a handover and good-bye but a well-orchestrated exercise that involves the project manager staying in post to monitor and track progress, provide a clear view on whether, in the project management terminology , 'benefits are being realized', and keeping an eye on emerging risks, or symptoms of things go wrong. My role in this is again as voice to the Steering Group, coach to the line managers implementing, and support to the project manager. Once transition is deemed complete there is a formal project shutdown, the Steering Group is disbanded, and the project manager moves on.

Review and evaluate: At a given point I recommend that the project is reviewed and evaluated against the original business case or project charter. This exercise can be done by internal auditors, by a contracted third party, or by internal personnel who were not directly involved with the original design and implementation. From this comes a report that is discussed with the sponsor and client, and with others who had a hand to play in the project. Ideally it provides lessons learned that will feed back into future organization design work. Sadly this whole phase is one that is frequently omitted which means that some of the investment in the project is lost to future projects.

One thing to bear in mind is that each organization is unique. So that what I do in each whilst following the framework above may be different depending on various things. As examples, I'm currently working with three organizations in three different sectors (and countries). The design projects for each are very different, but each of the three has a new CEO (often a trigger for a redesign). These leaders are setting a new strategic direction and want their organizations aligned accordingly to deliver it. Each assessment phase took a somewhat different form, and thus the subsequent phases also were set up slightly differently one from another. I don't think there is a one right way to do a design project:

Organization 1: 50 people head office (beyond HO 15,000 people)
Reason for design: to prepare for planned growth
Group meeting with the leadership team, including the CEO.
Individual meetings with leadership team
'Town hall' meeting with whole organization to outline project
Meetings with up to ten staff members by time slot that worked for them (to get random groups of employees)
Meetings with each work team (whole teams)
Individual meetings with staff who requested a 1:1
Meeting with board members
Desk review of documentation

Organization 2: 250 people
Reason for design: to expand into new market sector within geography
Individual meetings with leadership team members only
Individual meetings with middle management and some supervisors
Discussions with other consultants to the organization working on a related project
Desk review of documentation

Organization 3: 4000 people
Reason for design: to develop competitive advantage
Individual meetings with leadership team members
Workshop with leadership team
Workshop with pre-selected design team members
Desk review of documentation

The remaining phases of the projects will be different in each organization and will use the tools and approaches that are appropriate to them. I've found that the principle of 'Start where the system is' is a good one to follow in the determination of best method to initiate a design project. (See Herbert Shepard's Rules of Thumb for Change Agents).

Let me know who you involve in your design projects.

I was speaking at the IFMA conference on Friday on change and communication. As my co-presenter, Al DePlazaola, noted, organizations spend 'shedloads' (new UK terminology I just bumped into) of time and money operating under the assumption that change can be managed. He showed pages of various 'change management' frameworks and models – look at the selection on Google Images and you'll get the idea.

We feel that none of these work. Our contention is that preparing a game plan, identifying the "burning platform" (we must change or else!) and following a prescriptive, model based, "10 step" plan, or similar, to bring employees along is not the way to go as the reality is that if your platform is burning, it's probably already too late.

These standard approaches to 'change management' developed in slower moving environments are not appropriate now. Our current environment is fast, fast, fast. People expect rapid digital communication, from answering email within seconds to dealing with tweets (in a nano-second). Not only that, as Ian Sanders notes in his FT article Think First Tweet Later people are likely to be getting these communications and responding to them as they are walking down the street or standing in the queue at the coffee shop. Change is happening too quickly to ponderously 'manage' it.

So what approaches might work in this digital, rapid fire communication age. In our talk we suggest four which are not mutually exclusive. We illustrated them by taking a small but fun example of a corporate fitness center manager making the decision to withdraw its free towel service (a decision many are making). OK it's not significant in the grand scheme of things, but I've noticed that in a major change the truism 'the devil is in the detail' is worth bearing in mind. The four approaches are:

Just do it. Withdraw the towel service with a straightforward note and explanation. "We are withdrawing the towel service, effective first of next month. The cost of providing them is one that we can no longer justify.' This approach is clearly not collaborative, involving, or participative – all hallmarks of a 'good' change management process, but in some circumstances it is worth just biting the bullet. You're unlikely to get agreement on a best alternative and people will get over the loss of this service. Does it smack of autocracy, and command and control? Maybe so and maybe that's ok. Certainly in some cultures it is more the norm than in other cultures. The 'suck it up' (as the US phrase goes) is swift, cheap, and easy. One caveat before you press 'send'. Consider the risks if you take this route.

Gamification. This is increasingly seen as a way of driving productivity, learning, and changes in behavior. It works especially well with generations that grew up using social networks and online games. The article Profiting by Playing Games explains:

LiveOps and the other organizations are among the employers who have firmly jumped on the gamification bandwagon as a way to liven up the workplace (no matter where it may be), and boost productivity, learning and innovation — depending on the objective.

Gamification, which differs from the traditional use of video in the workplace, is based on using game mechanics and game theory to drive behavior by injecting some fun and a sense of community into the workplace.

"Gamification describes the broad trend of employing game mechanics to non-game environments such as innovation, marketing, training, employee performance, health and social change," says Brian Burke, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner, which predicts that, by 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes."

Deloitte has produced a short but useful paper on gamification in the workplace making the points that:

• Serious business issues demand serious solutions. Games can generate serious solutions
• Games and contests are a fun way to recognize and reward employee achievements. But strategy and innovation demand a more serious approach.
• Innovations and strategies often result from out-of-the-box thinking-—exactly the type of thought processes that some games cultivate.
• Popular games can hold answers when you focus on the game's attributes.
• Some game attributes, such as leaderboards and badges, can help build engagement and accelerate cultural shifts. Other types of game traits, such as anonymity, peer review and crowdsourcing, can lead to breakthrough thinking.

In the instance of the towel service you could initiate a type of poker game (putting it into context) of the employee benefit what's important would you rather win: coffee, free drinks, towel service, etc.

Nudging: having a variety of different ways to experience the towel service that doesn't involve the company paying for it directly. Nudging people's behavior in a different way, using concepts of behavioral economics, is well described in the book Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Rich Thaler. (Read an article on it Nudge Nudge, Think Think).

For example if someone wanted to join the fitness center they would have to opt in to the towel service, accepting the cost of it. Or you could linking the towel service to a health benefit. In this nudge approach if you meet a minimum requirement for gym time, you get a towel.

Language changes can nudge behavior. The article just mentioned notes that "A study into the teaching of technical drawing in French schools found that if the subject was called "geometry" boys did better, but if it was called "drawing" girls did equally well or better. Teachers are now being trained to use the appropriate term." What would be the effect of having a "towel benefit" rather than a "towel service"?

Make it go viral: Think about some of the YouTube things that have gone viral. Domino's Pizza is one. The damage to a guitar by United Airlines is another. Social media – internal and external – is a powerful and underused tool in change management. It is also a dangerous tool if used carelessly or thoughtlessly. But there are now dozens of businesses aimed at making your products and services go viral, creating the buzz that makes people want to join in. Making withdrawal of a towel service go viral in a positive way presents a challenge but there are some innovative, creative people out there.

Other ways of moving change management practice away from established models and frameworks built for a previous era? Let me know.

Various factors converged during the week to prompt my thinking on mentoring Millennials – an age group of the population roughly defined as those being born around 1980. The RSA Journal that I get had three articles on this generation in one copy:

• Restless, bylined with, "Owen Jones writes that highly creative but deeply frustrated, young people today have the potential to make or break our society's future."
• Portrait of a Generation which notes that 'fourteen years ago, a UK-wide survey identified self-determination and entrepreneurial ambition as the core characteristics of the so-called Millennial Generation. Today, against a much tougher economic backdrop, how do the views of young people compare with those of their predecessors?'
• A Time for Heroes reports that "What begins to emerge is a picture of a [Millennial] generation that is more comfortable with taking risks and whose appetite for enterprise is both driven and hampered by economic circumstance. Through research, engagement and practical innovation, the RSA's project seeks to understand how we can harness and enhance this promise and capabilities and the contribution they will make to pulling us out of the current crisis. As Tapscott argues, unless we understand the Net Geners, we cannot begin to understand the future or how they can shape our world."

Then as I was preparing for my IFMA talk next week on communicating change I came across a three minute video from the Advisory Group on leadership in times of flux. Suggesting that leaders need much the sort of skills that Millenninials tend to have.

My own research on this group (part of my TEDX Future of Work talk) threw up more points on Millennials and leading in chaos:

• Most organizations which have performance management systems, job descriptions, career paths, grades, older senior people, expectations around level in the hierarchy (even while some described themselves as 'flat' organizations) all leave Millennials feeling alienated. One said to me the other day "I've reached the point that I just going to come in to work, do a job, and take my talents and skills into a side business where I can feel in charge of my own destiny."
• Millennials are juggling insane demands on their personal lives – in the US particularly they tend to have huge student loan debt. Across the western world they may be looking for a committed relationship, rearing young children, be looking after older parents, be trying to get a foot in the housing market, and so on. A couple of months ago Bagehot in the Economist wrote a telling piece on Generation Xhausted in which he says "Researchers of well-being have established a fairly clear pattern, across different cultures and countries, in which happiness dips in the 30s and 40s before recovering in the 50s.
• At the same time as these 30 somethings are bearing the brunt of life stress they are also trying to advance their ability to either move up a conventional up-the-career-ladder and/or earn enough money to support themselves through their final third of life (now in the age range of 60 – 90+). This adds to their stress for, as Bagehot says, "Like a middle-distance athlete on a bend, anyone who wants to run something in his 40s needs to position himself for supremacy a decade earlier. In a big company, that might mean taking charge of a division or a region."

But 'positioning for supremacy' is a whole endlessly changing ball game for both organizations and individuals as they operate less in fairly stable situations and more in chaos. Chaos being like the weather, which you can, at times, predict well for the next 15 days or at other times can only forecast for a couple of days, or at other times can't even predict the next two hours.

This leading in a time of chaos is also discussed in two Fast Company articles. The first This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business.
The second Secrets of the Flux Leader argues well the case for very different forms of leadership and organization designs based around managing paradoxes like "efficiency and openness, thrift and mind-blowing ambition, nimbleness and a workplace that fosters creativity".

SIDEBAR The article also repeats the reassuring (to me anyway) notion that Generation Flux describes the people who will thrive best in this environment [of chaos]. "It is a psychographic, not a demographic–you can be any age and be GenFlux. "

During this reading and research period I met with some Millennials to forward an idea I'd had following one of them sending me an article How the economy upended young architects' hopes. This article talks about people who graduated from architecture schools in 2006/2007 and working in architecture firms feeling for the most part, as one reported "underutilized, underpaid, underappreciated, undervalued, and invisible most of the time."

Knowing that the company I work for has many Millennial employees and being curious as to whether they are feeling this frustration I suggested that we meet with them to talk about the issues including how do we help the organization recognize that Millennials are potentially current and certainly future leaders in times of flux/chaos, and how do we help Millennials change the traditional organization and use the talents they bring. I got an interesting response back, "I'm not sure how widespread the issue is among young[er] designers. I also am not clear how we could have a healthy group discussion without fostering insurrection."

So now I am beginning to see a cycle that looks something like this:

• Traditionally led organizations that are not rapidly adapting their mindsets, systems, processes, expectations to develop leaders for chaos, are likely to fail.
• Working with Millennials to develop organizational leading in chaos skills is not going to be easy for senior people who don't grasp the need to lead differently, or don't want to, and who might be hanging on to their own jobs as they now have to work more years than they thought they would have to.
• Millennials who can't show what they're capable of because the existing systems preclude it, and because they are stressed by all kinds of other life things, will become presenteeists in order to keep a job when it's so difficult to find one. To raise questions about the traditional way of doing things might lead to "insurrection" (involvement in which I'm assuming is seen as a career limiter).
• Millennials who have the circumstances in which they can be entrepreneurial, self-employed and creative (the type of people who can lead through chaos) will leave established organizations which will then fail. (Rendering other Millennials employed in those companies jobless).

What to do? I've been pondering this on my various running outings during the week. My current thoughts are as follows:

• To design, with a range of age group representatives, a mentoring scheme that addresses both the traditionals and the Millennials and develops both their abilities, by learning from each other, to lead in chaos, without either groups feeling threatened. But this feels a somewhat traditional and counter chaos approach.
• To design a meeting on the topic "Movement or insurrection: how do we make our mark in the organization?" open only to Millennials, or maybe held in a location and at a background noise level that would deter traditionalists, as a subtle way of not contravening the diversity policy. But that would exclude me and I want to be involved in what they come up with. Also in my organization the bulk of the people are at one site but there are others at other sites. How would we include them in the discussion?
• To open an all-company hackathon on the topic of how to start a movement to develop leaders for flux from the Millennial generation. The hackathon would take much the same form as the MIX did with Getting Performance without Performance Management. The aim there was to "lead a conversation about what should replace performance management in a Management 2.0 world. How do we replace the "control" that the term performance management implies with something better?" That hackathon was held between September 21 and October 22 and seems to have some good suggestions.

SIDEBAR: Windows 7 Word does not recognize 'hackathon'. I wonder if it is included in the Windows 8 dictionary.

I'm leaning towards the third idea and will consult with my Millennial colleagues on how to set it up. If you have other ideas on the topic I'd love to hear them.

This week a consultant sent me an email with some questions on organizational structures (aka what you see on as an organization chart). And a line manager from another organization sent different questions but on the same topic. This sparked in me the idea of answering the 10 common FAQs I get about structures – so here they are with some answers. Feel free to challenge, add, comment on.

1 What are the emerging organizational structures?
Various structures are emerging both in theoretical literature and in application. These include network structures, formal versus informal organizing structures, state capitalist structures , open source structures, (see The Rise of State Capitalism), and co-operatives (not new but gaining ground).

2 What are the models, theories and concepts that underpin these emerging structures from a technical/operational perspective?
These tend to come out of organization theory, social science, social psychology, behavioural science and economics. Theorists in the field include:

Siobhan O'Mahony from Boston University and Fabrizio Ferraro from IESE Business School (University of Navarra) have individually and together investigated, as Ferraro explains, "the emergence of novel institutions, such as Open Source Software, Sustainability Reporting and Responsible Investing, the evolution of global corporate networks and architectural changes in industries."

O'Mahony is interested in how people create organizations that promote innovation, creativity and growth without replicating the bureaucratic structures they strive to avoid. She has done a delightful study of Burning Man and Open Source communities,finding that:

"Both communities sought to differentiate their organizations from reference groups … We found that the ability to pursue a differentiated strategy was moderated by environmental conditions. By exploring the organizing decisions that each community made at two critical boundaries: one defining individuals' relationship with the organization; the second defining the organization's relationship with the market, we show how organizing practices were recombined from the for-profit and nonprofit sectors in unexpected, novel ways. This comparative research contributes a grounded theoretical explanation of organizational innovation that adjudicates between differentiation and environmental conditions."

Carliss Baldwin at the Harvard Business School. She studies the process of design and its impact on firm strategy and the structure of business ecosystems. See a recent article of hers in The Journal for Organization Design (Vol. 1, No 1, 2012) Organization Design for Business Ecosystems.

Jay Galbraith an Affiliated Research Scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California and Professor Emeritus at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland. has an article in Vol. 1. No 2 of the same journal The Evolution of Enterprise Organization Designs predicting organization designs of the future. In his words

"International expansion leads to organizations of three dimensions: functions, business units, and countries. Customer-focused strategies lead to four-dimensional organizations currently found in global firms such as IBM, Nike, and Procter & Gamble. I argue that the next major dimension along which organizations will evolve is emerging in firms which are experimenting with the use of "Big Data.""

3 Are the models and new structures appropriate for all environments?
No any organization should think about the appropriate structure in relation to its environment, the uncertainty it faces, its legacy and history (some government organizations, for example, have a legislated structure), how it wants to specialize/differentiate, how it wants to integrate (i.e. the linking mechanisms).

Having said that structure choices involve tradeoffs and there is no one best way for a specific organization to structure. Generally speaking, people can work in any structure. I came across a structure manifesto on a wall in a nightclub in Newcastle on Tyne once. I wrote it down immediately. It read:

• One can work within any structure
• While one can work within any structure some structures are more efficient than others
• There is no one structure that is universally appropriate
• Commitment to an aim within an inappropriate structure will give rise to the creation of an appropriate structure
• Apathy, i.e. passive commitment within an appropriate structure will effect its collapse
• Dogmatic attachment to the supposed merits of a particular structure hinders the search for an appropriate structure
• There will be difficulty in defining the appropriate structure because it will always be mobile, i.e. in process
• Within any structure it is always essential to act with responsibility and consider the impact of the structure on people, their minds, and other living things.

I thought these were valid points. I wonder if the manifesto is still there?

4 Should we be thinking about roles, posts or individuals as we develop the structure?
When I work with organizations I look at the work that has to be done and develop the structure in line with estimated work volume, work flow, handoff and interdependencies, and then the benefits of one type of structure over another. See Chapter 3 in my book Guide to Organisation Design: Creating high-performing and adaptable enterprises (Economist Books), for a discussion on the characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of different types of structure.

In reality individuals start to intrude when the structure with roles has been developed and it is evident that there is no place for, say, Jim who then has to be slotted in somehow. That's when I find the political jockeying begins.

5 What is the relationship between business process maps and organizational structure? (And do we need to do current business process maps?)

I have found that detailed current process maps are rather a waste of time and effort when doing a restructure. However identifying the business purpose of the organization (or part of it that you are working with), agreeing the core business processes that deliver the purpose and then mapping at a high level the ideal process flow (not the current) with handoffs and interdependencies, is the way to go. I then encourage people to 'bundle' the work across the core processes in different ways and then develop the structure from these bundled options. As I said in last week's blog I am re-writing my first book on organization design and am going into much more detail in the second edition on the methods and testing of these 'bundled' options that lead to proposed structures.

6 Who are the various players in developing an organization structure?
Usually it is a leader either of the whole organization or the part of the organization that is being restructured who initiates the work. I advocate for representatives of different levels of the organization to be involved in re-structure work to get full insight into the work that is done. In the Hoshin Kanri program I attended last week we were reminded that Taiichi Ohno (father of Toyota's lean manufacturing system) refused to read more than the first page of written reports. Instead he'd say "let's go and see" and make people "get the facts" at the workplace.

7 What are their roles?
Generally I set up a restructure as a project with a steering group, design team members, and a different transition team. The tool for October on my website is a design team member profile. I also work with specialists usually from HR, IT, Corporate Real Estate, who can provide expert information on the consequences of the structure options generated. Transition team members are different from design team members and are responsible for project implementation.

8 How do you audit/review a structure to see if it is contributing to efficiently and effectively achieving the business purpose and simultaneously providing a good customer/employee experience?
Ideally, you will have in the original project charter (there is a template on my website) or business case the measures of success. Use this as a start point for review.

9 How can we strike a balance between helping managers to conceptualise a complex process, and making it look so simple that they dive into the actual structure design stage too quickly?
My tack on this is to ask managers what the risks and consequences are of diving into the structural design too quickly. The risks are numerous – you need to have a good series of questions that will surface these. Once they recognize risks and consequences then they are usually happy to spend a bit of time thinking things through using a systems model that shows the relationship between structure and other organizational elements.

10 I have worked in and around this area successfully for a few years now but mainly on a small scale department basis. The thought of taking on a whole organisation feels somewhat scary. Is it the same process?
Briefly, yes it is the same process. You are just scaling it up and there will be more to keep an eye on. Very good programme and project management helps on this. I invariably have a qualified project manager working alongside me in the work that I do.

As I said, feel free to challenge, add, amend, comment and/or submit other questions.

The first edition my book Organization Design: the Collaborative Approach was published in 2004. I've now started writing the second edition that will come out in summer 2013 (assuming I write to schedule). I find it staggering to look back and see how much has changed in a bare eight years, and from what I see the changes are continuing apace and they all have a significant impact on the way organizations function. Changes I've noted so far include:

1. Accelerating swift and wide-ranging information and communication technology (ICT) changes that are impacting organizations. Since 2004 social media has burst upon the scene, cloud computing has become the norm, and business intelligence software is getting increasingly sophisticated. All these have huge impact on the traditional organization of enterprises.

2. Increasing requirements for 'sustainability' including carbon footprint savings, 'greening' the enterprise and so on. This again requires looking at the way work is done through a new lens.

3. Intensifying demands, brought about by fiscal and political conditions, to do more for less – smarter, more efficiently, more effectively. Just look at the impact the financial crisis of 2007 – 2009 had on governments. Worldwide they were and continue to be faced with the challenge of offering better citizen services with vastly reduced budgets. No organization can keep pace with this type of demand without looking at its design.

4. Increasing involvement of architecture and design firms in the application of their world's design principles into the world of business operations and organization. This confluence of two disciplines is intriguing and perplexing, giving rise to questions like 'Should can HR compete or collaborate with real estate?' 'At what point do facilities and HR mesh?' 'How relevant is space design to business performance?' 'What can the two disciplines learn from each other?'

5. Building steam for creating better work life balance coming particularly from people in their 20s and 30s in the US and Europe. The introduction of flexible working, family friendly policies, remote and virtual working all contribute to organizations having to take another look at the way they operate their people processes.

6. Emerging tensions around competition as companies seek to extend their range into new areas – both geographic and products/services. This gives rise to all manner of cultural and internal competition

7. Changing global demographics that are leading to high youth unemployment and an increasing trend towards people over 65 staying in the workforce.

8. Heightening skills shortages in specific disciplines – engineering and computer sciences in the US and Europe, for example.

9. Developing understanding of networks, 'organized complexity', neuro-science , and biology that are changing the way we think about organizations. Moving us away from thinking of them less as bounded systems, and more as complex, adaptive organisms.

10. Advancing product technologies that are changing the jobs landscape – many jobs previously done by humans are being done by robots, or by other technologies: self-checkout in supermarkets is an example, digital wallets are on the way and both are human job replacements.

To my mind these phenomenally fast moving changes require three things from organizational leaders

• To think very differently about the way their organizations are structured: a growing number are thinking of their enterprises as networks with dependencies and interrelationships rather than fixed hierarchical bounded structures.
• To create a flexible, agile, adaptive, sustainable organization: one that continues to perform well and provide decent work (as defined by the ILO)
• To seek expert support in creating and maintaining this type of responsive organization and not feel they can go it alone. Design work is not for the layman as findings from a survey done in 2012 found. It reported that about half of surveyed organisations viewed their organisation design as only moderately successful, and none of them viewed themselves as very successful at organisation design. (This nugget comes from an interesting piece of happening as a collaboration between the University of Westminster Business School and Concentra, email Mair Powell on: orgdesignresearch@orgvue.com if you would like more information)

This is where the second edition of the book comes in. Its primary purpose is to:

• Provide the tools and techniques to enable HR/OD professionals to develop confidence and competence in organisation design (and development)

Its secondary purposes are to:

• Give line managers an overview of the design process, their role in it, and what support they can expect from their HR/OD colleagues
• Suggest how HR/OD and the line can work most effectively together on design projects
• Provide insights into ways of handling the kind of on-going change that all enterprises face and often find troublesome

I'm taking this approach as I see from facilitating organization design courses that HR/OD professionals need the skills and technical expertise to guide, coach, and support line managers through organization design and development. It is clear that capability in this respect is now a 'must have' one. A 2012 quote from a local government line manager illustrates.

In a context of increased pressure on resources within the governmental institutions (10-15% of staff cuts over 5 years in average) the current mainstream message within these institutions is that staff need to "do more with less". We of course all understand that this is difficult to achieve and may lead employees to being in unbearable situations. Organizational design and development is therefore becoming central as we look for new ways of working, being together, learning to do better differently and finding the way to make the "less that is actually more".

It's also notable that three things have occurred, since the first edition of this book, to help HR/OD staff develop their organization design and development competence:

a) The UK's Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) has added organization design to its HR Profession Map, requiring demonstrated competence in this discipline from HR Practitioners. The CIPD is now offering certification in organization design and several universities are including organization design as a module in their HR programs.

b) The US based Organization Design Forum has opened chapters in both Europe and the Middle East/Africa. And other chapters are planned.

c) Software programs have been developed (and it is highly likely that more are in the works) that take a 'big data' approach to organization design drawing on an organization's multiple data sets to facilitate organization design visualization, scenario planning and delivery

So what I'm doing is extensively updating the original book in the light of the context outlined above and grounding it in a further eight years of my own experience of:

• Consulting with organizations of all sectors, sizes and business models, on their design issues
• Leading public and tailored organization design programs in Africa, China, US, Europe, and UK
• Writing and researching in the field.

Reflection on what I've learned during that period five things stand out that help guide me in my work:
1. Unless you are clear on what the design is for (what it is supposed to do) you don't stand a chance of delivering something that works
2. There is no one right way for doing organisation design
3. Even using a systematic approach organisation design is an evolving iterative process which usually feels messy and complicated
4. Faced with design options take the one that makes most sense at the time
5. The design you come up with is not one which will last forever (or even for very long)

I'm planning for the book to be practical and pragmatic, systematic but flexible. It will be more of a 'how to' guide than a textbook so it won't be academic or theoretical although sometimes I'll give way and mention theory or research to clarify or illustrate. I'm thinking that each chapter will be organized in the following sequence:

• What you will learn: the purpose and outcomes of the chapter
• Input on the chapter topic: discussion, information, interspersed with reflective questions
• Where people go wrong: the pitfalls in this point in the design process
• Tips for getting it right: how to avoid the pitfalls and make this stage of the process work
• Tool: something that will help you in your organization design practice
• Summary: the key points covered in the chapter

I'd love to hear whether this is the sort of book you'd be interested in reading and if you have any ideas on what specific topics you'd like to see covered.

Below is the script for the talk I planned to give at TEDX Columbus on Friday (Oct 5 2012). Inevitably, it came out somewhat differently on stage. (The videoed on-stage version will be on You Tube in the next week or so). And this is the last installment of TEDX stuff.
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The poet, Ben Okri, commands the workers of the world to 're-make the world', 'delight the future', and 'create happy outcomes'. Wouldn't it be lovely if we could 'delight the future' and create happy outcomes in working for pay? Let's consider the likelihood of this and see what we would need to do to achieve that outcome.

First though let's look at what we think of as 'work'. Some think of it as paid employment because we need to earn our living, while others think of it, more generally, as an activity that requires effort. And many activities can fall into either category. For example if you do the ironing then it's unpaid 'work' and if you pay someone to do it for you it is that person's paid employment.

The focus in this discussion is on paid employment – money earned by working. I'll cover three types of work and give one example of each plus an associated trend. I'll move on to look at three age groups in the workforce, and suggest three capabilities for each that will help these workers meet their work futures confidently given that trends are not predictions and we cannot say what the future will actually be.

First, think about work in three categories, albeit overlapping ones.

• Routine work: repetitive, assembly line sorts of things
• In person work: like doctors, teachers, shop assistants
• Data manipulation: like problem solving, information analysis, coding.

Routine work. When I was 18 I spent a summer in France working on an assembly line where bottled fruit in cognac came down the line and my task was to wrap and knot a gold thread around the neck of the bottles. I could not have predicted that assembly line work like this would be increasingly mechanized to the point that now we're seeing the accelerating use of robots to do this type of work. What does this increasing roboticization mean for assembly line workers? Trends suggest new types of jobs emerging that involve machine human supervision and interaction, requiring completely different skill sets from those required in the past and those currently required.

In person work is similarly changing – for much of my life I've been a teacher or trainer. This used to mean being with people face to face in a classroom. It still does but things are rapidly changing. For example, I now teach for Capella University. It is totally on line and the people I teach I've never met face to face. I talk with them on the phone, I email them, work with them in a virtual classroom, and grade their assignments. Increasingly the face of traditional education is changing. Trends here suggest many different forms of self-education, free education, and on-line collaborative education – this means a dramatic change in jobs related to teaching and learning.

The third form of work – data manipulation of all types has also seen massive changes. When I started work the internet did not exist. Data manipulation for me meant learning shorthand, looking at physical encyclopedias, and getting very excited when I got a calculator to replace my slide rule. Now we are flooded with data and manipulating what is called 'big data' has become big business. Again trends suggest that this whole field of data availability and new jobs associated with emerging fields will grow exponentially.

So back to the question is it possible for workers of the world to remake it, delighting the future, and creating happy outcomes where trends are suggesting very different and rapidly changing work. Given the impossibility of accurately predicting the jobs let's consider what capabilities people need to develop to meet more or less any future of work.

I'll talk about three different age groups and what capabilities the members of each need to continuously meet the future of work.

Luke, aged 11, is typical of his age group. He enjoys playing Minecraft. It's a data manipulation game and can involve interaction with other players – though not in-person. He's been playing it a couple of years now and is getting progressively more skilled at it. His father, however, is continuously on at Luke to do his regular homework. But, is there an argument to suggest that playing Minecraft might teach skills more suited to future work, than traditional schoolwork? I think so and people who will enter the workforce in 8 or so years from now are going to need all the skills they can muster.

Look at current figures: 81 million unemployed youth worldwide, 3 times more likely to be unemployed than adults, of the employed youth a quarter earn less than $1.25 per day. It doesn't seem that it's going to be easy to create a happy future out of this situation even with the new types of jobs that are likely to emerge. The future of work for the world's youth looks bleak – what will enable them to have some hopes of creating the happy outcomes? From my experience helping young people develop resilience, resourcefulness, and responsibility will take them a good way in the future. Coincidentally these are attributes that many of the serious computer games help build, but I'm not sure whether a traditional school education does – perhaps a controversial view but worth examining.

Women in their thirties are another interesting group to look at. Traditionally clustered in in-person work – when I was entering the workforce I was more or less choosing between nurse, teacher, or secretary. Things have changed in that women are represented in a much broader range of jobs but the expectations of employees in the workforce have not changed that much. It is still the case (although a luxury for some) that women are more or less deciding between a family and a career. It is incredibly hard to balance a career up a traditional corporate ladder with child rearing. Current figures illustrate. Of US women in the workforce 28% hold senior management positions, 14% hold seats on executive committees, and 3% are CEOs. Of these the women are much more likely to be single and much less likely to have children than their male counterparts.

Sadly, right now this hasn't changed much since I was in my thirties making the decision to have children whilst keeping a career going. In my case, and in particular circumstance, I made the agonizing decision to leave my children with my now ex-husband. In the face of all social norms of the time I became the weekend parent and he the single parent.

However, for women in their thirties today there are grounds for optimism – they may well be able to delight the future and create happy outcomes. How? Well, enabled by the opportunities digitization, technology, and the internet offer the trends are towards women owning their own careers – rather than trying to fit into a corporate mold -self-employment, and flexible working. And they're aided in this by men who also want to be a part of their children's daily lives, and are similarly seeking more work autonomy and a better work life balance than usually found in organizations. So I do see the work of current thirty somethings as having a positive effect on the future of work, albeit outside the world of traditional organizations.

But what capabilities do they need to keep going on this track? In my experience three stand out: a really clear definition or redefinition of their values: what matters to them. A willingness to challenge norms, and perseverance. All three are enduring capabilities and necessary to create a future of happy outcomes.
The third group I'd like to look at are the 60+ – those of pensionable age. Many of these, for various reasons, are rejecting notions of typical retirement – that is giving up paid employment to play golf, garden, or just sit in a chair. My father was typical of this age group. He died aged 85 still working – not for high pay but for a stipend. He was one of the founders of the Native Prairie Association of Texas and he founded the Dallas Nature Center, now run by the Audubon Society as the Cedar Ridge Preserve.

He was in the vanguard as the numbers of older people in the workforce started to increase. Current figures show that in 2010 3% of the UK workforce was over 65, and of these 63% have been with their employers more than 10 years, 66% work part time, while 50% work for companies which employ fewer than 25 people. This is more or less the situation of my father. Although in the US, he worked part time for a small organization and had been there over 20 years when he died.

The numbers of pensionable age people staying in the workforce looks set to continue to increase into the future. Will this be a delight and create happy outcomes? It's a double edged sword – for older workers maintaining a reasonable income is essential – pensions are not necessarily enough to live on. But there is an argument that in some countries older workers staying in the workforce preclude younger workers from getting jobs. For organizations keeping the knowledge gained over, say ten years, is often a big plus, particularly when methods of knowledge sharing are weak. But salaries can be an issue – an older full time worker may be much more expensive than a younger one which can make older people vulnerable to lay-off.

What capabilities will people over 60 have to hone to keep themselves earning as work changes. Three stand out: staying in the world, that is being curious, learning new things, keeping up with technology. Living with precarity – elders are often in precarious situations economically, health-wise, and socially Staying fit. The fitter someone is the easier it is to hold onto work.

As discussed and illustrated the trends emerging show the future of work looking like:
• New jobs and new types of work in all three aspects of routine, in-person, and data manipulation
• New work patterns in terms of work-life balance, self-employment, and flexible working
• High tension between young people trying to enter the workforce and those of pensionable age trying to stay in it.

So can we workers today remake the world, delight the future, and create happy outcomes? I think so but with a caveat – we can develop ourselves to do so and as I've shown this preparation includes each of us developing certain capabilities. But as well as this it will take the majority of our educational, corporate, and political systems to make parallel major changes in their design and operation – and this is I contend is a bigger challenge . So I close with the question; what can and should we workers of the world do, beyond developing our own capabilities, to delight the future and create happy outcomes?

As I've written about in a previous blog I'm speaking at a TEDX conference soon. So my eye was caught by an article in the Financial Times I was reading while sitting on the flight back to DC this week. It was called 'Life After Ted'. It's mainly about Richard Saul Wurman who first hosted a Ted conference in 1984 and in 2001 sold to the concept to the Sapling Foundation which now runs the events. The article reports that the TED events have 'developed a cult status' and 'TED Talks, a series of lecture videos posted online, have received more than 800m views to date.'

Wurman is of the view that as far as TED goes 'Now every speech is auditioned, rehearsed, edited, rehearsed again … the spontaneity has gone. TED today has become over-orchestrated, too 'slick'." His antidote to this is to put on WWW 'an exercise in improvisation through conversation'.

A couple of people I've talked to about TED (and the various TEDXs) share similar views – that it's a good concept that has peaked. The article notes that 'TED is running out of speakers to invite and, therefore, running out of big ideas'. It has now 'resorted' to auditions to identify speakers for future events. The article also mentions the paucity – although, for the WWW event – of women speakers, and I recall that one of the reasons I was invited to the TEDX Columbus was because they needed more women speakers. So I had a go at checking out the TED ratio of women to men speakers.

I didn't have time to call up TED directly to answer the question (and couldn't find a detailed answer on their website) but I did find a Huffington Post article (2010) that said

"Over the past two years, TED Conferences have featured 30-40% women speakers. This isn't ideal, but it's actually much more balanced than many other, similar conferences, and obviously a priority for them. "

And related to the ratio of women to men speaker question, there is, on the TED website, the question Is TED elitist? With the answer

"In a nutshell, no. It certainly attracts people who are regarded as elite in their area of expertise. But the word 'elitist' implies exclusionary, and there have been numerous steps in recent years to open up our conferences to as broad an audience as possible".

The page goes on to list these steps including (among several), "We've expanded significantly … the number of women."

Wondering about whether TED has had its day was partly triggered by an email from a colleague who emailed me earlier in the week saying,

"About 25 years ago, I read an article by a German economist who proposed that corporations have organic limits to growth. Despite best efforts, organizations cannot sustain beyond a certain rate of growth. They will outstrip the ability to grow and integrate the necessary infrastructure. The inevitable consequence of growing too quickly will be a collapse of the organization as it becomes unable to manage itself. The author proposed that limit was at best, 15% per annum, based on his analysis of international companies over the past few decades. Does any of this sound familiar to you? "

What it called to my mind was an article by Larry Greiner called 'Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow'. It's an old, but now classic, article first published in the Harvard Business Review in 1972. In it Greiner proposes five stages of organizational growth – creativity, direction, delegation (in a later version he changed this to decentralization), co-ordination, and collaboration. Greiner suggests that "evolution is not an automatic affair; it is a contest for survival," and asked the question "And what about very large organizations? Can they find new solutions for continued evolution? Or are they reaching a stage when the government will act to break them up because they are too large?" (He did not ask 'are some organizations too big to fail?' which was the 2007-8 question.) He suggests that to move from one stage to the next requires 'revolution', saying 'these periods of tension provide the pressure, ideas, and awareness that afford a platform for change and the introduction of new practices."

So going back to the TED Talks – are they in one of the 5 phases of growth? Looking at the Greiner article maybe so. TED could be described as being in stage 4 co-ordination, and I'm wondering if it is too far-fetched to say that TED, is on the cusp of its 'revolution' to move from co-operation to collaboration. The thing about the co-ordination phase is that it is characterized by the introduction of formal systems and processes which, if they get out of hand result in what Greiner calls a 'red-tape crisis', which is typical of a bureaucracy.

One of the outcomes of TED is that its originally highly successful formula has spawned a range of lookalikes and the FT article mentions some of these. In this respect it is much like Apple and a different FT article this one on Apple has an interesting observation from Guy Kawasaki who worked there. He says:

"The irony is that today, to use the old Apple slogan, 'thinking different' means you consider things that are not from Apple, because Apple is so dominant. Once you win the revolution, you become the bureaucracy. That's an interesting transition to make."

So rather than moving from co-ordination to collaboration, is TED instead in danger of becoming a bureaucracy and then ossifying? Again, maybe so, I say this because I am, in my current role of being a TEDX speaker, having to conform to very specific requirements e.g. TED Commandments, presentation length, slide format, dress code, and so on. Of course, it could be argued that this is necessary for a good event but is it too slick? Does this TED formula have in it the seeds of its own destruction? Will it succeed in redesigning itself into effectively into collaboration? (For example, are the auditions for speakers an indicator of movement towards collaboration? )

It's difficult to say and Greiner himself pointed out that to move from one phase to the next requires 'considerable self-awareness on the part of top management as well as great interpersonal skills in persuading other managers that change is needed.'

What are your views? TED – the start of its new revolution or TED – the decline into bureaucracy? Let me know what you think.

Last week I was in Shanghai teaching organization design to thirty people from various national and international companies. It was an amazingly interesting workshop – I learned so much and have come back with a raft of questions to answer on approaches to organization design. Several of them are complex and very worthwhile to answer but I'm still thinking about them.

One of them is somewhat less complex but no less worthwhile to answer. It's about getting and maintaining what in the jargon is called 'business savvy'. Why were the Shanghai participants in the organization design program interested in this? Because they felt that that HR people there (in China) are not thought of as 'business' people but as 'people' people. These HR practitioners wanted to know how they could develop their own skills so that they can have credible, forward thinking business conversations with their colleagues who are running the organizations and managing the business of it.

They want to move on from the notion that all they do is recruit , train, pay people, and make sure that the organization complies with employment law. They want to be trusted as business advisors skilled at developing business growth, profitability and performance through careful attention to the 'people asset.'

What they need to do this is 'business savvy'. This is explained by Ed Griffin (development partner at D3 Partners and interim HR director at Chime Marketing) in an engaging podcast from the CIPD as being

"About a deep and comprehensive understanding of the organization. I think fundamentally it's about understanding what makes your organization viable. So that's about understanding where does the funding or the finances come into the organization. It's knowing who are the people who bring that in and who are the people who support those who bring in the money. So what's the relationship between what your people do and the value that achieves the purpose of the organization. I think there's also something about understanding how your organization really works in terms of its processes, its procedures and its systems, and then there's a piece which is about the human dynamics. So it's about understanding what you might call organizational politics, who's really influential and who's not, who are the noise makers but not necessarily the powerbrokers.

And then there's a massive external piece. So actually business savvy is about understanding what's going on outside your organization, what's the context within which your organization sits. It's about understanding your customers, it's understanding the competition, it's understanding how products and services are developing in your field. It's about being able to get in the mind. I think somebody said once if you're not serving a customer you'd better be serving someone who is. So it's that proximity to the people who are the beneficiaries of your organization and its work.

Without 'business savvy' organization development practitioners (largely seen as part of HR) will not get their desired 'seat at the table' that is – a place on the management/executive team of the business. Some who have business savvy already are succeeding. Take Richard Booker, HR director at BG Group PLC, a global natural gas organization who speaks in the podcast. And note – he is a trained accountant. He left his finance job and joined HR out of sheer frustration with the HR function in his own organization. As he explains:

"I went through a variety of different iterations of a finance career, ended up at Citigroup in New York looking after risk management for derivatives and structured products. It was a great job but I had an awakening one morning that I realized I spent more than half my time on people-related issues as a manager and the HR function were generally the 'No' police."

A few years ago, in 2005 – Fast Company published an article more or less on the "'No' Police" theme. It was called Why We Hate HR, and describes the high level of barrier HR faced to get that 'seat at the table'. Five years later 2010 the magazine published a sequel to it Why We (Shouldn't) Hate HR, suggesting that.

The real problem isn't that HR executives aren't financially savvy enough, or too focused on delivering programs rather than enhancing value, or unable to conduct themselves as the equals of the traditional power players in the organization–all points the original essay makes. The real problem is that too many organizations aren't as demanding, as rigorous, as creative about the human element in business as they are about finance, marketing, and R&D. If companies and their CEOs aren't serious about the people side of their organizations, how can we expect HR people in those organizations to play as a serious a role as we (and they) want them to play?

I think that's a good point but it doesn't address the issue that many OD/HR people are not skilled at challenging their colleagues' conventional thinking about the human element in the business. OD/HR professionals lack the internal reputation, credibility, and authority to argue their case because they don't speak the language of business and don't know how to. It's a bit of a circular argument because to be credible they need the business savvy. How do they do this if they are not an accountant, or other trained business person? What is going to help them develop and then keep their business skills honed?

Well there are lots of ways but begin by taking small steps. Anyone in an organization who wants to develop and maintain business savvy can start by asking these ten questions, about their own organization. If they don't know the answers then they should set themselves the challenge of finding out and then keeping up to date as they are not likely to stay the same for very long.

1. If you work in a for-profit publicly traded company do you know what today's share price is?
2. Who are your company's current competitors?
3. What are they competing with you on? (Price, quality, customer service, product innovation, etc)?
4. What do your business colleagues worry about most in terms of operating the business?
5. What are the main strategies in moving this organization to being more successful?
6. What are the key short-term goals to achieve these strategies?
7. What are the main constraints in executing these strategies?
8. How confident are you that these strategies are the right ones?
9. Why should your customers be committed to your company?
10. What is the value proposition you offer your customers?

I go along with Ed Griffin and think that the main stumbling block to being business savvy is not knowing enough about the external operational context of the organization. So step 2 is to develop a personal strategy to keep up with the social, technological, environmental, economic, political, legal, and ethical backdrop that are the main drivers of change in a company. There are literally hundreds of sources of information but as a starter here is are the main things that I look at every week, they all come, in the first instance as an email alert to my inbox, but now I have a Twitter account I'm converting them to look at them on that.

• Co design (from Fast Company)
• Economist
• Emergent by design
• Fast Company
• Financial Times
• Idea Cast (HBR podcast)
• McKinsey Quarterly
• New York Times
• Psyblog
• Science Daily
• Stanford GSB-Knowledgebase
• Stanford Social Innovation Review
• Strategy+Business
• TechCrunch
• Technology Review
• The Mix Fix
• Wall Street Journal

It's a big mixed bag of stuff to look at, but covers the main areas that give me confidence to talk with the various business leaders and managers I meet with in the course of my work, and I find what I learn fascinating. For example, yesterday, from Technology Review, I found out about Baxter, the industrial robot, which uses technology that could bring automation to new areas of manual work – useful in my thinking about types of work and how organization designers need to be forecasting about how to design with such technology in mind.

How and where do you get your business savvy? Let me know.

Now I'm a member of the twitterverse, or 'twitscape' as my brother calls it, the organizational design challenge that social media in general poses to more traditional organizations have started to flash neon high alert in my mind. In my forthcoming book on organizational health I discuss social media but inevitably things have continued to move on since I wrote the chapter. As a colleague observed this week, "There is a clear need emerging, particularly among public service organizations, for skilled consultancy in digital communication and engagement, and the need to design around digital/social media engagement."

Accenture has three papers on the topic that, out of the many I have read, I think neatly summarize the issues. (Several others sources are referenced in my book)

The first "Are you ready for digital revolution" (2011) points out that "The ultimate promise of digital and interactive channels is personalization: bringing timely and relevant offerings and experiences to customers wherever they are, at that moment. … But many companies lack the technologies, analytics capabilities, leadership, and organization structures to capitalize on this seismic shift."

The second Harnessing the power of social media (2011) says that "The impact of social media is embryonic today but could ultimately surpass the predictions of the industry's most daring visionaries. Companies that actively experiment with embedding a social media mindset and capabilities in their business processes will transform their relationships with customers and create value in unforeseen ways. … its impact will be felt along the entire length of the value chain. Companies will be forced to reexamine outdated business practices and create opportunities to leverage these new capabilities in powerful ways."

The third paper Social Media: Enabling relevance at scale in an always-on, always-connected world (2012) tells us what companies can do in order to learn to use social media to a) transform how they engage with customers, b) collaborate with internal and external partners, c) align their operations to a common purpose and d) develop a new vision for high performance via embracing social media.

Summarizing the three papers I find that there are a number of aspects of digital and social media that have an impact on the design of organizations.

Relationships with customers

1. App development enables new ways of interacting within and between organizational departments and customers, e.g. apps such as Find Starbucks also allow customers to locate physical outlets quickly.
2. Organizational websites are being redesigned to foster straightforward online navigation with minimal number of clicks needed to complete a purchase or make a comment
3. Ability to segment by customer spells the end for standard responses and one-size-fits-all offerings.

Internal structures, relationships, and operation

1. IT departments have to be organized to learn and to cope with a very fast moving, unstable and complex environment, one in which new technologies and applications sometimes emerge and then disappear within a few months as strategies change, and where data volumes continue to grow exponentially.
2. HR department similarly have to consider policies and guidelines for social media use – both welcome and unwelcome. And additionally work out who has authority to respond to customer comments and queries, all the while ensuring that data privacy laws are upheld.
3. Employers will be compelled to recalibrate their own responses to the online musings of employees.
4. Social media also offers new avenues for recruiting, allowing companies to spread a much wider net and to differentiate themselves to younger generations.
5. Integrating social media will compel companies to make dramatic cultural changes,
6. The once clear-cut boundary between marketing and sales continues to blur
7. Companies are partnering with cloud monitoring services to track and respond to online complaints and comments that customers make.
8. Social media creates the opportunity for much greater collaboration between departments, engendering more experimentation, faster decision making and more precisely tuned responses.
9. Companies need a unified IT backbone and infrastructure that link data housed in the far reaches of the organization, often in different forms, as well as information held outside the company.

Innovation

1. Firms can engage employees, customers, suppliers and other third parties as active participants in the innovation process
2. Innovative companies are using social media to be more proactive in seeking customer feedback and engaging customers to diagnose and resolve problems.

Leadership

1. Leaders need to pursue technology-based solutions-—sometimes across partnering companies-—that enable them to crunch data better and faster, as well as predictive analytics that make it possible to personalize the customer experience in as close to real time as possible.
2. Strong, purposeful leadership also plays a critical role when it comes to design the organization for social media. Specifically in the area of integrating IT and marketing leaders have to make new investments in the talent, technology and processes needed to forge a new era of cooperation between marketing and IT-—and make this transformation an organizational mandate.
3. Management team's knowledge and understanding of online technologies must keep up to speed with the rapid developments and they must be willing to make a financial investment in a holistic approach to social media deployment

So how do organizations start to redesign around the potential of digital and social media? Here are some pointers:

Approach

1. Get a feel for the size and scale of the 'seismic shift'.
2. Map out a detailed change path that redesigns the organization around social media
3. Clearly articulate social purpose and harness the potential of the data captured by aligning actions accordingly

Leadership

1. Require CEO-level endorsement of, and engagement in, both the social media strategy guiding the change ahead and its robust execution.
2. Find, attract and retain tomorrow's digitally savvy leadership by searching for people capable of dealing with high uncertainty

Structure and process

1. Factor experimentation into the mix-—pursue small, manageable chunks of digital capabilities, which can enable measurement of business returns before making a larger investment.
2. Create new organizational structures that are nimble and responsive to an environment packed with uncertainty
3. Develop capabilities that provide an end-to-end customer view.
4. Allow generation and sharing of ideas in an open, unfettered environment
5. Incentivize, empower and encourage employees so they can become the listening posts for consumer signals to ensure a precise and timely experience is provided at every brand touch point.
6. Integrate multiple sources of customer data using real-time analytics, and then make sure the right people are able to use the knowledge generated to support ongoing relationships and more personalized products and services.
7. Create new ways of working based on alliances with previously isolated parts of the organization such as sales, service or R&D.

Customer

1. Constantly anticipate and respond to evolving consumer needs across an expanding array of media and digitally enabled touch points.

As I read and integrate these types of reports and watch the upward trends of use of social media I come to the conclusion that organization designers must put digital and social media at the center of their agenda as they work with organizations. It is clear that the deployment of these technologies will fundamentally change the design of organizations as we know them.

Your views on this topic welcomed.

Well, a new development this week (and shortly to be reflected on my website with the ubiquitous logo). I am, with some trepidation, entering the Twitterverse. This means first learning a whole new language – but fortunately there is a dictionary. Second it means finding time to tweet, tweetback, retweet, monitor twaffick, twadd people to my account and follow. Third it means controlling the amount of time I spend on the above activity. I definitely do not want to become tweetaholic or find myself twiking or twitterlooing.

So already you can see I am practicing. I may be a neweeter, but I'm willing to learn. On a side point I'm thinking of suggesting to Rosetta Stone that they add Tweeting (or is it Twittering – where is my teacher?) as a language to the list of languages they offer for self-learning. I pass their retail outlet everytime I go to Dulles airport (a lot of times this year), and am often tempted to re-learn my rusty French and Spanish. But no longer, I must master tweeting or else I might feel tweepish at my ineffectiveness, or might inadvertently tweetsult someone.

Enough levity and on to the serious part. Why am I almost a tweeter? Well from a business standpoint it might make sense. However, in a 2009 report Do Fortune 100 Companies Need a Twittervention? the findings were that

"For the majority of Fortune 100 companies, Twitter remains a missed opportunity. Many of their Twitter accounts, did not appear to listen to or engage with their readers, instead offering a one-way broadcast of press releases, company blog posts and event information."

Three years is an eternity in the Twitterverse so things have moved on a bit but not as much as one would think. A Pew Research Report Twitter Use 2012 says that

"As of February 2012, some 15% of online adults use Twitter, and 8% do so on a typical day. Overall Twitter adoption remains steady, as the 15% of online adults who use Twitter is similar to the 13% of such adults who did so in May 2011. At the same time, the proportion of online adults who use Twitter on a typical day has doubled since May 2011 and has quadrupled since late 2010-—at that point just 2% of online adults used Twitter on a typical day. The rise of smartphones might account for some of the uptick in usage because smartphone users are particularly likely to be using Twitter."

So what does this 'uptick' (Lucy Kellaway add the use of this word to your management guff list) mean for businesses who are interested in using Twitter? My company is interested as it is of the view that a lively Twitter presence will in the words of the Weber Shandwick report mentioned earlier

• Build a dialogue that paves the way to new relationships with clients and advocates
• Generate loyalty among new and existing clients [via useful information]
• Create a wider awareness of the company name and what it offers

In this respect it may be a relatively early adopter. Fast Company, in an article of August 30 2012 The $1.3 Trillion Price Of Not Tweeting At Work told us that

"On June 6, Larry Ellison–CEO of Oracle, one of the largest and most advanced computer technology corporations in the world–tweeted for the very first time. In doing so, he joined a club that remains surprisingly elite. Among CEOs of the world's Fortune 500 companies, a mere 20 have Twitter accounts. Ellison, by the way, hasn't tweeted since."

Interestingly though, the article points to several ways in which social media use can improve employee productivity, break down organizational silos, and unlock company knowledge. So rather than adding value to external relationship development it seems that at this point Twitter and other social media may have more value in enhancing internal productivity. This point is developed in the McKinsey report The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies

"which finds that twice as much potential value lies in using social tools to enhance communications, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within and across enterprises. MGI's estimates suggest that by fully implementing social technologies, companies have an opportunity to raise the productivity of interaction workers-—high-skill knowledge workers, including managers and professionals-—by 20 to 25 percent."

But getting back to my role the company has enrolled me as one of their social media (i.e. Twitter) voices. My role (again in the words of the Weber Shandwick report) is to

"offer opinions and encourage discussions, reach out to their communities of customers and advocates, build relationships with new customers and look for untapped supporters."

A tall order in 140 characters per shot with rather tight conventions around them. I've found the Mashable Guide to Twitter a good source to help with these but almost as useful is just jumping in and giving it a go.

So having taken on the role a couple of challenges appear (some personal as mentioned) and others to do with organization design. What are the organization design implications of social media use? If we suddenly get a torrent of traffic to respond to will we be able to cope? Who will be detailed to deal with questions? What are the legal, ethical, privacy, confidentiality ramifications. Will my performance and those of other twitterers in the organization be measured on number of tweets or outcomes of our tweeting? To some extent we don't know yet – we're learning as we go. So far one person has been designated to support my tweets, guide me through the learning process, and monitor the traffic (I mean twaffic). But my guess is there will be all kinds of consequences that we will have to start designing in or out of the current organizational system.

So watch this space. In the meanwhile you can follow me on @naominbbj – comments on how I'm doing – please tweet me!