What We Do In Org Design

“We help organizations improve their design and innovation capabilities.”

“We help organizations be more collaborative and human-centric.”

“We help organizations learn how to utilize their talent and execute on their creative and innovative ideas.”

These are just a few of the lead lines used in the various pitches and introductions we’ve had for Mad*Pow’s Organizational Design practice over the last year or so. And while they aren’t wrong, I feel like they sit just on the cusp of buzz-wordy, hype-fueled meaninglessness as well as only scratch the surface of what we do.

Our practice grew out of the realization that a few of us have had that the challenges we most enjoyed tackling in our design and strategy efforts weren’t just whatever challenge we were designing a new app or service for, but the challenge of figuring out how to get all the people involved in the project, designers, writers, developers, analysts, stakeholders, lawyers, whomever, to work effectively together. To get them to explore challenges and opportunities, generate and share ideas, and make effective decisions toward some shared objective.

Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by the “creative process” and how people not only make things, but imagine them and then move from that inspiration to action. Studying and understanding this in individuals is one thing, but understanding how it best works in groups, where people bring their own perspectives and motivations and many of them aren’t even there with any aspirations to ever “create” anything — now i could think and talk about that all damn day.

Organizational Design isn’t a new label. It’s one that’s been around for decades if not longer. And it’s a wide umbrella. Loosely it refers to making decisions about how an organization should be arranged (roles, structure, processes, tools, etc) in order to achieve a set of objectives for its operations. That set of objectives can be anything.

For us at Mad*Pow, right now we’re focused on objectives related to how well an organization understands the needs of it’s “customers” and uses that understanding to create and design solutions that address those needs.

This isn’t doing the work for them. As a consultancy born out of digital and service design, that is often what we’re asked do — work with our clients to design and execute these new solutions. But this practice is different. It’s about helping them do that work for themselves.

It’s not unlike hiring a personal trainer or nutritionist. At first that person is going to work to understand who you are. What your habits are. What you like and dislike. What motivates you. Where your strengths and weaknesses are.

Then, combining that information with an understanding of your goals and their understanding of health/fitness/wellness, they’re going to design a plan or program for you: new activities to incorporate, things to change or stop doing.

As you work at making these adjustments your personal trainer will work with you to help make the changes and iterate on the program as he or she learns more about where you excel and struggle.

This is how our organizational design practice works. Teams and organizations that approach us want to improve their abilities, capacities, influence, etc. with regard to design and innovation. Sometimes they have an idea of where they’re stuck. Sometimes they want to focus on just one aspect like cross-functional collaboration or prototyping, sometimes they don’t really know how or where to start.

An easy thing for us to do would be to just take a project of theirs and run through it with them using the process we use at Mad*Pow explaining what we’re doing as we go. While we’ve had clients emulate our processes in the past, it’s always proven to have hiccups. Namely, this approach has two big shortcomings:

1. It doesn’t connect the ideas, process and rationale to the “culture” of the organization. The approach we use is built around our (Mad*Pow’s culture) and what we’ve found working as a consultant with clients. This is a specific type of relationship and as such, our process reflects it. Organizations have their own set of beliefs and behaviors that act as defaults for how they approach things and interact.

2. It doesn’t account for the surrounding/supporting beliefs and behaviors that affect organization’s abilities to execute and leverage the new practices. Focusing on the activities and techniques in a design process is great and important to making sure organizations understand what they’re doing and how each activity/phase/etc flows into the next. But outside of the process itself there is a range of beliefs, behaviors, characteristics, etc that allow the team and the larger organization to support, execute and make use of the new approaches they’re learning.

There isn’t a one-size-fits all approach to design, innovation, human-centricity, whatever. Many approaches look similar and have similar components, but they have their unique qualities and approaches. Additionally, because not every organization is exactly the same, the changes that organizations need to make to their existing ways of working order to adopt these practices differ.

Essentially, this demonstration-based approach gives teams one or more examples of how the thing they want to do can be done, but it leaves figuring out how to make it fit their organization (adjusting things on either side-the existing organization or the new process itself) up to them. And it’s not that organizations can’t do this. With the right dedication to learning all they can about various ways of reaching their goals, examination of their own organization and iteration, they absolutely can, and many do. But in approaching a group like a consultancy they’re hoping to ease that workload.

It’s in this space that any effective organizational design practice works. It helps an organization figure out how to make a approach work within it both by tailoring the approach and helping the organization itself shift what it needs to to adopt the practice.

This has been our perspective as we’ve “designed” our organizational design practice. We approach these efforts as a personal trainer would–as someone working through a design process would:

• We learn about the people we’re working with. How do they work today? How do they make decisions? What types of events or activities do they excel and struggle with? How do they interact? How do they handle success? failure?
• We collaboratively devise a plan by combining these insights with their goals, and what we’ve learned over our combined years of research and experience about where to focus our efforts, what activities, practices, etc they should work on and how. We, like many others, have learned that change is best undertaken when the people making the changes are part of the process to determine what changes to make.
• We monitor progress, iterate and evolve the plan collaboratively, and support the team through ongoing coaching, training, hiring, restructuring roles/processes, design support, etc as applicable.

It’s in no way a quick or easy process. It takes patience and dedication from both the team and from us. But for those groups with the right motivations as I’ve seen from our work and from the work of others approaching things similarly, it works.

My impetus for writing this this morning was a re-realization that I’ve done a piss-poor job at putting these ideas and perspectives out into the community. This is something I believe is truly important, not for marketing or business development purpose, but for further evolving ones own thoughts. What are your perspectives on organizational design, whether it be efforts by consultancies like Mad*Pow or internal efforts. This is not something that only consultants do. Organizations take action to change the way they work all the time. What have you seen work and not work? What ideas do you have?