What is designable in organizations?

In search of a practical framework for Org Design

What is Organizational Design? Better yet, what is designable in organizations? Since 2020, I’ve been working through the Either/Org Project to explore these questions. This month, as the Either/Org Project opens public access to our Inspiration Library beta, I’m reflecting on the geometry of organizational design that is emerging through this grassroots community research adventure.

How it started: Crowdsourcing Inspiration

In 2020 the Either/Org Project began collecting examples of interesting organizational design choices. The goal was to build a really diverse set of options that could inspire folks to be more creative and brave in designing their own organizations. We were inspired by pattern languages developed in other design disciplines and thought something similar for organizational design would be really valuable for the field. There were already some awesome collections out there [e.g. Reinventing Organizations wiki, Indigenous Governance Toolkit, Liberating Structures, New Ways of Working Playbook, Open Org Resource Library, Sociocracy 3.0, Pluriverse Pattern Language] but they tended to have a niche and didn’t take as broad a view of organizational design as we were hoping for.

Hundreds of people contributed — from all sectors, backgrounds, and around the world. After a year, we had hundreds of examples and case studies, but the AirTable database was a hot mess.

We thought about categorizing them using an existing framework (see below). But in keeping with our core value of emergence, we decided to collect first, categorize later. Over the years, a set of categories and tags has emerged that has been refined many times in response to new clusters of examples. We expect it will keep changing. But even though we didn’t set out to create a practical framework for organizational design, we find that this one emerged quite elegantly. It reminds me of the Buckminster Fuller quote:

“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

In this spirit, here is our working model:

Unveiling our Framework: The Essential Design Questions

Today, our inspiration library is organized into these five categories, which connect to 31 essential design questions. We expect this number to change as our research progresses. For now, our research shows that every organization is defined by how they answer these 31 design questions (whether they see these as intentional choices or not).

Does the world really need another framework?

There are already a lot of helpful frameworks for organizational design out there. It turns out, our emergent framework is different in a few key ways:

• DESIGNABLE CHOICES — The Either/Org project is interested in documenting the organizational design choices every organization must make, and the range of options one might consider for each choice. Like other pattern languages, we are concerned with “what is designable within organizations?” So while other frameworks include inputs to and outputs of organizational design, we are focused on these “designable” features. We are interested in the hard things that create the soft things…climate, culture, behavior, health.
• QUESTIONS — To be practical, we are attempting to organize the patterns around realistic questions we hear people ask. As such, each category anchors a scaffolding of design questions.
• PERSPECTIVE — All the taxonomies below were created by white men in the last 70 years. We were curious what emerges from inquiry led by women and people of color.

Echoes and Extensions: Relating to Existing Frameworks

We all stand on the shoulders of other thinkers and theorists. These are some of the org design frameworks our project is building on and reacting to:

Brave New Work — The OS Canvas

Created by Aaron Dignan, this model emerged in the 2010s in the United States. It was featured in Dignan’s book, “Brave New Work,” to help organizations navigate and implement new ways of working. Love it!! If we were going to pick an existing framework to map the Either/Org Project to, it would have been this one. But as you can see, it left out some features of experiential context that were important to us.

Burke-Litwin Model of Organizational Performance and Change

Developed by W. Warner Burke and George H. Litwin in the late 1980s in the United States, this model integrates organizational and psychological theories to understand organizational change.

Mintzberg’s Organizational Configurations

Proposed by Henry Mintzberg in the 1970s in Canada, this model categorizes organizations into a set of configurations based on their structure and management style. He uses these fun little diagrams to compare each configuration.

Leavitt’s Diamond

Created by Harold J. Leavitt in the 1960s in the United States, this model focuses on the interaction between technology, structure, tasks, and people in organizational change.

Weisbord’s Six-Box Model

Developed by Marvin Weisbord in the 1970s in the United States, this model identifies six key areas to consider in organizational diagnosis and development.

Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model

Formulated by David A. Nadler and Michael L. Tushman in the 1980s in the United States, this model focuses on the alignment between an organization’s components for effective change.

McKinsey 7-S Model

Developed in the late 1970s by Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., consultants at McKinsey & Company in the United States, this model addresses seven internal aspects of an organization that need to align for success. Points for alliteration!

Galbraith Star Model

Created by Jay Galbraith in the 1960s in the United States, this model is a framework for understanding and designing organizations. Despite its age, it’s still one of my favorites when I’m looking for a simple framework for a group brainstorm.

Reinventing Organizations, Frederick LaLoux

Frederic Laloux published Reinventing Organizations in 2014. His work presented a color-coded theory of organizational evolution and case for “teal” organizations that emphasize self-management, wholeness, and a deeper sense of purpose in workplaces. LaLoux’s work is a huge influence for the Either/Org Project.

Nerd Alert: Here’s an exercise to compare our emergent framework with other organizational design frameworks. It was really helpful in pointing out potential blindspots in our research and ultimately helped us refine our framework.

As the Either/Org Project opens our Inspiration Library to the public, we invite you to explore a fresh perspective on the designable elements of organizations, enriched by diversity and guided by questions that challenge the status quo. Join us in this ongoing adventure, where your contributions can help shape the future of work.