Design Management: Org Structure
Taught by Karen McGrane, written by Tony Chu at the MFA interaction Design Program at the School of Visual Arts. Part of The Common Class Project.
Class 2: Organizational Structures and its Consequences
Why do we care about a company’s organizational structure? For better or for worse, a company’s structure tells a story about its priorities and its processes. How a firm understands and organizes its design activities shapes the work that it does, and the outcomes it achieves. It also determines the work and the influence you wield as a designer in the organization.
We began class discussing Managing the Form, Function and Fit of Design, our reading for the past week.
How a company understands and organizes design activities can have a profound impact on innovation. To conceptualize this notion, four models are defined, each of which describes how firms address the issues of form, function and fit.
- Managing the Form, Function and Fit of Design, by Angela Dumas and Henry Mintzberg
Dumas and Mintzberg’s article began with the observation that design involves finding form, function and fit. In any non-trivial design endeavors, this usually requires coordination between disparate disciplines e.g. engineering, design, marketing, etc. Dumas and Mintzberg outlined four common models for organizing this coordination effort. They are: encompassed design, decomposed design, dominated design, and cooperative design. Summarizing briefly:
Encompassed design: where one group takes care of all the components. e.g. fashion design, where the designer can conceive of the form, function and fit of the product single-handedly.
Decomposed Design: where groups responsible for different components work on decomposed parts of the project in isolation. This approach is simple, but rarely feasible unless a project’s different components fits together in an obvious and well defined way. e.g. the design of a pen.
Dominated Design: where one particular group takes a leading role in a project, and dictates specifications to other groups. As a result, one group’s perspective is prioritized over others. This is a common model for coordination across many domains of design. Dumas and Mintzberg cites examples from construction to automobile manufacturing.
Cooperative Design: where groups must interact regularly and informally to keep each other informed through out the process. This is the proverbial design democracy where everyone gets their voice heard throughout a collaborative process.
Idealism and Pragmatism
“Everyone wants a collaborative process until they actually get a collaborative process. Then people just want someone to be in charge.”
- Karen, in class, commenting on cooperative design
It was interesting to observe Karen’s attitude towards each of the four models. The article has an obvious bias towards the cooperative design model, which it cites as the model to aspire to. Initially reading the article, I felt the same way. Of course we want to have a cooperative model, right? We want to value the perspective of each discipline involved, in order to arrive at a superior and holistic solution, right?
Karen takes a more pragmatic attitude. For each model, Karen asked us to consider whether each model is feasible in an interaction design setting. It was easy to see that interaction design is too complex for an encompassed design model (too many specialties involved.) Decomposed design is also obviously a poor choice. Thanks to Paul Pangaro’s class last year, we are keenly aware of the need for cross disciplinary feedback.
Cooperative Design is Not the Holy Grail
The discussion around dominated design and cooperative design, however, was less clear cut. Karen asked, “If cooperative design is so great, why do we still see so many instances of dominated design?” The answer is simply that cooperative design is difficult! Getting to cooperative design requires a certain level of mutual trust, a shared language, the right set of personalities, and a process that accommodates fluid feedback. Karen also points out that in a cooperative design model, the difficulty often lies in recognizing the bounds of roles, and the coordination of boundaries between people working together. It’s great when it all comes together, but it is a finicky process.
… and Dominated Design is not so bad
Dominated design, while less fluid and holistic, has the advantage of being more efficient, predictable, and easier to implement. Karen’s earlier quote, while half in jest, points to people’s desire for clarity in a project. A dominated design approach is great at providing clarity.
In the reading, the authors cites a variant of dominated design called visionary design, where a common vision is established up front and championed by a leader. This seemed promising! Of course, in order for this to work, the leader must have credibility amongst the various collaborating groups, and must continually champion the vision to keep the teams in line. Finding a leader of this caliber may be just as difficult as establishing a cooperative culture.
“Your Process Has to be Based in Reality!”
In a design agency, where a company’s success depends on maintaining its profit-and-loss balance and fulfilling its deadlines, the more dependable dominated design approach often wins out over a potentially cooperative design approach. Even in a product driven company (e.g. a start-up) often clarity is easier to achieve than consensus. How we are to organize our design process depends on numerous constraints, both within the domain of design (e.g. scope, goals, and disciplines involved) and outside of it (e.g. staffing, resources available, time constraints, company culture.) There is no single prescription.
This appears to be a recurring theme in Karen’s class. Often what we consider as inferior choices in design processes are shaped by pressures originating from outside the considerations of design.
Looking at Org Charts
In the second part of class, we looked org charts the class gathered as homework assignments from the past week. Based on what we could scrap together from company websites, linkedin, and phone calls, we each presented a hypothesized org chart from a company of our choice. Amongst those presented are: IDEO, Smart Design, Etsy, Microsoft, Spotify, Fab.com and Twitter.
Be a detective. What can you find out about this company? What titles, what departments? How many major silos do the companies have? How many levels of management?
As a designer, you can really be a wide variety of groups in an organization: engineering, IT, strategy, marketing, creative groups. Where you report will make those jobs wildly different!
One of the saddest thing I’ve heard in interviews is this, “It’s really frustrating working here. My job shouldn’t be to convince you that I should get to do my job!”
- Karen, when she explained the org chart assignment in class 1
That last line really stood out. My job shouldn’t be to convince you that I should get to do my job! As a designer, you don’t want to work somewhere that tacked design onto its processes as an after thought. Else you’d end up with … that. Karen emphasized that we need to find out about a company’s priorities and processes, and one way to do that is to look at its org chart.
Reading Between the Reporting Lines
No one wants to be equal. Or, everyone wants to be equal until someone wants a raise. - Karen McGrane, during class.
Our assignment for the week was to research various companies’ organization structure. Amongst the companies we presented are IDEO, Smart Design, Etsy, Microsoft, Spotify, Fab.com and Twitter. Throughout the discussion around the organizational structure, Karen asked us to look outside the scope of design and consider the political, economical and managerial pressures that shapes the structure. We considered a series of questions:
Size and Silos: how are the functions of the company divided? What are the labels? How big is each silo? How big are they relative to each other? How much coordination or crosstalk are there between silos? Do you think there are conflicts between the silos?
The size and division of silos in an organization hints at the relative importance of functions that organization. The size of an organization also tends to dictate how specialized roles are, and how much flexibility there are around role boundaries.
Access and Influence: How many levels of reporting are there between upper management and the average employee in the company? How are teams organized? Where are the profit centers? Who hold the purse-strings?
We can see some indication of access and influence in a company by looking at the depth, breadth and linkages of the branches in the org chart. Karen talked about how the distribution of budgets have a dramatic effect on how much collaboration happens between silos, citing universities as prime examples of needlessly duplicated functions due to a distributed function.
Legacy and Politics: How did the company start? Where is its organizational emphasis? How does it handle staffing, HR and promotions?
A particular group may have outsized influence because of a company’s legacy being from that group. Or it may be that’s the company’s profit center. A company may have a deep reporting structure might reflect the complexity of its operation, or it might simply stem from the need to give promotions to people.
Would You Work Here?
At the end of the day, all of this detective work is meant to help us answer this question, “Would you work here?” By looking at these’s companies’ organizational structure, we can begin to decipher whether a company is a good environment for a designer. We can also start to understand what role we might play, and what kind of problems the organization is hiring us to solve.
