Naomi Stanford

Today I'm doing a short session to an HR Forum "Organization culture and business success – are they connected?" I haven't done it yet (as I write I am traveling to the venue) but I'm wondering how it will be received. It's a topic where there's a fair amount of opinion on the answer and little definitive evidence i.e. consistent academic research to prove one thing or the other.

Many leaders are convinced that there is a connection. Reckitt Benckiser, for example, just won the 2009 Economist Innovation Award in the category 'Corporate Use of Innovation' because:

It has demonstrated strong sales and profit growth, even in the recession, in large part because of the strength of its innovative and entrepreneurial corporate culture. Controversy is encouraged, bureaucracy avoided and performance rewarded. A diverse multinational workforce provides a wealth of perspectives on consumer behaviour. …

But organizations are subject to external forces that may be beyond their control, and no matter how 'good' their culture they cannot successfully weather these (some of the banks are recent examples). Of course, that kind of statement leads to the argument that their culture was clearly not focused on business success, and that is a valid point: sustainable cultures should be able to weather all kinds of vicissitudes. But that too is open to debate – if it were true, where are the Romans, Aztecs, and so on. Were their cultures 'bad' or were they right for their times and circumstances changed?

Beyond sitting on the fence on this I have seven suggestions on how to make connections between culture and business work effectively, including:

• Be clear on what you define as business success
• Recognize where the culture supports/or not the business
• Be alert to "strong" v 'healthy' culture

I'll post the presentation later this week with some comments on how it is received.

Yesterday I was working with a client group to develop their internal organization design framework and methodology. I had my two organization design books with me and was explaining that many of the tools that I was suggesting be adapted for their use appear in the books.

One of the participants asked what I would do differently if I were writing the organization design books again. A great question since it's a constantly moving field. It reminded me that earlier this year I was talking at a conference on the future design of organizations and I looked again at the deck I'd prepared for that. In it I proposed five new guidelines for organization designers:

1. Design from the outside in
2. Design from networks not structures
3. Design for and with multiple stakeholders
4. Design to make positive contributions socially, economically, culturally, environmentally, politically for all stakeholders
5. Design for an emerging future not a desired future

Each of these means a different way of thinking about organizations – their purpose and the way they operate in a global context. So we had a sidetrack conversation on what these guidelines might mean for the client as potentially designing with these in mind would provide a radical track that they didn't know if they had the will or capability to go down. However, the conversation opened up questions on what would prevent them taking a different approach and what, if they were driven towards it regardless, would help them get there. I'm meeting with them again in a couple of weeks and I'm looking forward to seeing how their thinking is developing on this. Meanwhile I'm wondering if I should/will convert the slide deck into an article.

The Organisation Design and Change Framework and Toolkit is housed on the UK's National School of Government website. It was developed by representatives from the public and private sectors. It is a seven stage framework with a range of models, tools, and quotes that are freely downloadable.

So, for example, Stage 1: Set the Stage for the Design, suggests six tools – SWOT, PEST analysis, Porter's five forces, cost benefit analysis, De Bono visioning, stakeholder analysis – and also lists key questions "to shape and inform your conversations with the leadership team".

The site is very nicely organized and easy to work through. Any beginner in organization design would get a good insight into what it is all about (a lot more than structure), and get some ideas on how to approach organization design.

There is no instruction on how to actually carry out an organization design project – but the site is not billed as a 'how to'. It is just what is says – a framework with tools. These are presented in a simple (perhaps too simple) way but you can't fault the content and the intention.

Beyond any instructions, aspects that are missing are tools for checking alignment of the design, reviewing it at 30, 60, 90 days, suggestions on how to gather lessons learned, and a reading/further resources list with case studies.

UPDATE: November 20, 2013
I have now found out that the UK's National School of Government has shuttered. One of the comments made about this relates to 'where are the resources accessible' but there is no response.

This business survival toolkit has some of the same types of tools.

I've just skimmed through Matthew Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft, having read it during the early part of the summer. I was looking for his description of working as an article abstractor. It's a few vivid paragraphs on what it was like being employed on a piece work basis to write abstracts of academic articles. His starting quota was fifteen articles a day and when he left eleven months later his quota was twenty-eight articles. Apparently abstractors were taught how to write abstracts to a formula or method – they didn't need to have an understanding anything in the article.

Crawford states that he 'felt trapped in a contradiction. The fast pace demanded absorption in the task, yet that pace also precluded absorption, and had the effect of estranging me from my own doings. Or rather I tried to absent myself, the better to meet my quota, but the writing of an abstract … cannot be done mindlessly. … To not do justice to an author who had poured his life into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.'

Crawford has a PhD I political science and philosophy and now runs a motorbike repair shop. The book is essentially a closely argued treatise on what makes work meaningful to an individual and of value to an organization which may be mutually contradictory states. Drawing on his own experience in various type of work he comes to the conclusion (if this is an argument that can be concluded) that in the absence of political and organizational systems that strive to make work meaningful for individuals it means "seeking out the cracks where individual agency and the love of knowledge can be realized today, in one's own life".

I've glossed over the debates he has on why 'knowledge work' is more valued by society – at least in the US and UK – than craftwork or trade work. It's a rich, carefully researched book with personal touches which make me want to pick up the phone and talk to the author. It's certainly reminded me of the disparity of value that organizations put on the different skills that make them profitable and led me to another debate to pick up with clients as they undertake organization design projects.

I've just started to read The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton. It's a very entertaining book not least because he appears to me to have such a tongue in cheek attitude to his subjects. The sort of innocent way he almost pokes fun at the seriousness of the workers he meets is delightful although I am surprised that he got permission to publish names.

The United Biscuits' story works well as a case study in job design – and also prompts me to go out and try Moments – which I never have as I'm not a biscuit (cookie) eater but the story of how they got their name and are made merits at least a taste test. Working at British Airways I was close to Hayes, where the factory is, and sometimes passed it on the train – the smell of the baking was like a tunnel the train passed through.

The closest I've come to working in such an organization was when I was at university and spent the summer vacation working as a temp secretary in the Hovis factory in Rotherham. I remember next to nothing about it, except that employees got a free loaf of bread each day. And another summer I spent in France in a bottling factory putting the silver braid around bottles filled with fruit in brandy – workers did not get any free product there.

He also visited Ernst and Young, the other chapter that I've read so far, although for some reason he never mentions its name always calling it the accounting firm. However the name appears in one of the photos beside the text. I have been in the building he describes and having worked for Price Waterhouse myself am also familiar with the whole audit process – worked over in the book with his uncanny eye for both the ridiculous and the real. This chapter focuses on the role of HR in keeping staff displaying energy, enthusiasm, and integrity. And then there's the description of his meeting with the senior partner – in both instances what's not said seems to be spoken as loud as what it.

In the two chapters I've read so far he captures organizational life to a tee – but he doesn't offer suggestions for different or improved versions. It's all more of a baffled shake of the head and a kind of 'why do they do this?' curiosity – as if he's trying to make sense out of nonsense. I found myself laughing. But then again I thought I could easily use the studies in my organization design workshops.

At our staff meeting (face to face) yesterday we were discussing collaborative technologies and how we could use them, and which ones to use, to improve our collective productivity and effectiveness. We're a small number of people but work on different client sites, and on very different projects. So using technologies to stay in touch, share ideas, develop white papers collaboratively, and so on makes good sense in theory.

One of the emails I subscribed to from McKinsey Quarterly dropped into my mailbox just as I was mulling this over. Its topic 'Using Technology to Improve Collaboration' was about just the issues we'd been discussing. The authors suggest a method for determining which technologies to match with which type of interactions:

1) Classify workers by their workflow profile – the daily activities they do to perform their job and identify their types of interactions
2) Select the technologies that support their interactions by:
• understanding the specific requirements of interactive tasks
• identifying which tasks create disproportionate value for the organization
• determining the types of inefficiencies and wasted efforts that bog down many interactions

Reading the article I began to wonder various things:
• How easy it is to categorize interactions (although the article makes a stab at this)
• How much the technology has to match the user skill and interest in using it
• Whether the cost investment in the technology is worth the enhanced productivity (assuming it is enhanced)
• Whether designing an organization around the types of interactions that workers had in the workflow process would result in a more productive and successful organization than one designed around tasks in the workflow.

None of this led me back to what collaborative technologies we should be using in our company but the article offers useful paths for investigation on this.

I wonder how many managers have the skills to sketch, draw, paint, etc. It's a paradox that organization design doesn't seem to involve many of the visual skills commonly associated with artists or graphic designers. An article, by Tom Ehrenfeld, Managing to See from Strategy + Business (August 2008 Issue 52) which I just re-read makes the point that:

Visual management has become an essential discipline for managers today. The practice involves communicating with images, organizing and directing work through visual controls, and creating clear graphic depictions of complex ideas-for example, to enable workers to see how their work fits into a value stream flowing directly to customers.

But in very little of the work that I do does visual communication come into play. In fact, I mainly see it in organization charts (which are constructed on Powerpoint and hardly count as visual communication) and in process mapping (constructed on Visio). What I don't see – probably because I don't think of myself as being capable of communicating visually – are sketches of what the organization design would or could look like, and I'm not talking of 'vision' style collages that facilitators of 'blue sky thinking' workshops try to get participants to do.

I have occasionally used graphic artists who attend workshops and visually depict what's going on as people speak – which can be very powerful. But now I'm provoked into thinking maybe if line managers could visually communicate their new organization design it might help them be more innovative in their thinking about the possibilities and help them communicate more effectively to their staff.

One of the knottier issues around an organization design is estimating the costs of getting from the current to the future organization. Questions like

• What are transitional costs?
• What are opportunity costs?
• Are we including qualitative costs as well as financial costs?

All start to come into play as the design process proceeds. What happens in many projects is that the design process proceeds without an ongoing cost estimation, and it is hard to get to actual costs before the design is completed.

I was intrigued to find a patent application (which is not a totally straightforward read) titled Organizational Design Approach To Transition Cost Assessment For Business Transformation filed by IBM. I couldn't locate the date of the filing and don't know if the patent has been granted yet so I submitted a query on these points and am awaiting a response – though whether I will get one or not remains to be seen. The abstract reads:

A method for facilitating in assessing transitional costs in business transformations using a computer-aided organizational design system is provided. The method comprises creating a first organization design model representative of the current organizational design state of an organization using a graphical tool. The method further comprises changing the first organization design model into a second organization design model representative of the organizational design state of the organization after the business transformation. The method further comprises generating a report identifying the transition cost factors and the transition cost of moving from the first organization design model to the second organization design model, wherein the transition cost is determined based on predetermined calculation algorithms or heuristics.

Reading through the application it looked as if it would be just the thing to satisfy the finance department or anyone else interested in getting some numbers behind the design. It appears not to cost out the human factors like the stress of potential redundancy, the disruption to social networks, the learning or career opportunities available in the new design, and so on – but maybe there are intelligent algorithms (are there?) that could cost out the qualitative elements of an organization design.

I was talking to someone about organization culture on Friday and she asked whether I knew of Gilbert's Behavior Engineering Model (BEM) – which I didn't. But now I've done a bit of digging around and found out that in 1978 Thomas Gilbert's book Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance was published. For some reason the title struck me as odd. Can you 'engineer' performance, and what is 'worthy'? (But then I read Michael Lewis's article 'The End of Wall Street's Boom' and felt that there would be nothing better than to engineer worthy performance).

So I persisted with the Gilbert line of thought which I found was well-explained by Roger Chevalier who published an updated model. Chevalier comments that Gilbert's approach:

Provides us with a way to systematically and systemically identify barriers to individual and organizational performance. The BEM distinguishes between a person's repertory of behavior (what the individual brings to the performance equation) and the environmental supports (the work environment factors that encourage or impede performance)

Inevitably the Behavior Engineering Model is summarized in a matrix but not the familiar 2 x 2 which seems the favored format for most management models. His is 4 x 2 – and so is the updated one. I realize the content of each cell is more important than the dimensions of the matrix but I am always struck by the apparent need to put things in cells – maybe it's the rule oriented US culture from whence most management models originate, and/or a reflection of the imprisoning there of office workers in cubicles.

Developing this last idea I have never been able to understand how putting workers into cubicles (cells) engineers worthy performance. I prefer the European open plan tendency. I wonder if European management models are less prone to be presented in Boston boxes and are more free form – clearly an academic research topic for someone. But I've wandered off point here.

Anyway from the reading of the Chevalier article I decided that the BEM merited a bit more investigation so I've ordered Gilbert's book from Amazon. (I couldn't face going into my local bookstore and trying to engineer worthy performance from one of the sales associates there).

I spent a lot of Sunday wandering around concepts of 'responsibility' v 'accountability' – trying to answer questions like 'Are the words used synonymously?' 'What does each mean?' 'Does it matter?' etc.

One blogger, a Dutchman called Jurgen Appelo led me, via his assessment of the difference, led me to another of his posts this one on leaders v. rulers. In this he comments that:

"In his presentation Step Back from Chaos Jonathan Whitty (University of Queensland, Australia) shows that managers are often not the hubs in a social network. It's the informal leaders in a network through which most of the communication flows. It's the managers' job to make sure that leadership is cultivated, and that the emerging leaders are following the rules".

I was following the responsibility v accountability path because I was specifically interested in 'cultural accountability' which turns out to be a whole area of academic endeavor. But, ever curious, I clicked on Jurgen's link and tuned into the Whitty presentation. I was glad I did. It was totally fascinating stuff. He has a wonderful teaching style – completely non-jargon, lively, graphic, and engrossing in the way he explains the myth of small world concepts.

He invites us to "consider a world with no project managers – where projects are self-managing". He says that it is "simply not true" that every orchestra needs a conductor. This is particularly pertinent for me at this point as I have just recommended to a client that they get a project manager. But maybe that isn't necessary. However, I'll have to listen to the lecture a couple more time and then do some more research before I can confidently assert that I was wrong in suggesting a project manager.

He talks about self organizing and synchronicity where patterns of behaviors will emerge. But he urges us not to equate complexity with randomness. "A social system has a hidden blueprint – a structure beneath it which drives its behavior that adhere to rigid laws".

Bits of the presentation that stick out for me relate to 'hubs' – the people who are at the epicenter of a network. Whitty makes the point that "If you remove hubs then the networks will fall apart. Networks dominate our society. Society has its hubs and there are people who are far more connected than the rest of us. They allow people and information to travel far and fast. Once a virus penetrates a hub it can spread unstoppably through the network. We could apply vaccines to the hubs rather than randomly." He talks about "preferential attachment" and notes that "as a group we follow patterns. Popularity is attractive. Those that get connected to … are more likely to be connected to …" As a throwaway he suggests we look at Sociopatterns (which I duly did), and urges us not to underestimate the strength of the weak links. His arguments are definitely thought provoking and offer a new line of investigation for my organization design work.