The Self-(Re)designing Organization
Design, design, everywhere
These days, design is in vogue. If something is important, the thinking goes, it should be designed with intentionality. Design thinking, UX design, interaction design, service design…all seek to take a more holistic and user-centric approach. From our perspective, there’s one school of design that especially benefits from user-centricity and a whole-system approach: organizational design.
Org design sure sounds cool and modern (even though it’s been around for decades in different forms), but what value does it provide? If you’re a leader looking to future-proof your team or division or organization in this ever-changing world, how can org design help? And what does “org design” even mean? Is designing an organization like designing a chair or blender, or even a website? Or, is it different in some fundamental way?
From our perspective, org design is essential for ensuring organizations will survive and thrive. But here’s the catch: to be truly effective, org design needs a new approach.
What is org design, anyway?
Often, org design is used as a more progressive name for conventional change management. In other cases, it can really include almost anything that impacts how people work together or how a business operates. If you take it at face value, though, it certainly sounds like a linear and top-down endeavor. Taken literally, “org design” sounds like a process by which you design the organization (whatever that really means), and then instantiate that design (aka, impose it upon the organization). Presto, you’re done! If that doesn’t sound like a conventional silver-bullet restructuring, I don’t know what does. Maybe you can design an organization like you would a blender after all.
One common example of this conventional approach to org design is the exercise of taking the current org chart (reporting structure) and redrawing it. If you’re in an organization that relies on the org chart as the primary source of clarity and stability, it makes sense that changing it would feel like a transformative approach. It may even feel like the only way to shake things loose and create a fresh start.
Except, whether you’re a leader who’s tried this approach or an employee who’s experienced it, we all know that the org chart leaves out an enormous amount of information about how the organization actually operates. As much as (or more than) the formal reporting structure, it’s the informal connections between people, the ways of working they use, and the broader systems and constraints they work within that impact organizational performance. Changing those boxes and lines leave all those things largely unaddressed. Still, how many times has an organization been “redesigned” by moving those boxes around and drawing some new lines? (“New and improved, now with dotted lines!”) It’s no wonder those reorganizations have very little impact on how work actually gets done, and what little impact they do have tends to be unexpected and unhelpful. It’s also no wonder that everyone involved (no matter how high up on that very same org chart) inevitably ends up frustrated.
“Ah!”, you might say, “but design doesn’t have to be top-down! What if you include employees and customers in the design process? And what about other tools for creating more clarity, like RACI matrices?” Those are fair questions. If we’re honest, though, how often are the folks being re-org’d really included in the process? Even if the “organization design” in that sense is participatory–and even if you go into excruciating detail with RACI matrices and decision trees–you’re still left with an attempt to create and instantiate a static design for something fundamentally dynamic and complex: a group of highly interconnected human beings who are in constant motion interacting with tools, processes, constraints, and each other.
For the most part, the reality on the ground will almost immediately diverge from the static design, rendering the “design” a flawed mental model that provides a satisfying-yet-misleading sense of stability. In the few places where the design successfully constrains the organization, it usually does so by bringing it to a stand-still. A static design for something inherently complex and ever-changing just ain’t gonna cut it.
So is “org design” just a hip name for the same old approaches that don’t work? Not if we can help it.
Continuous participatory change and the self-redesigning organization
At The Ready, org design is actually more like “org design design”. Or, if I really wanted to get eyes rolling, “meta org design”. Our work is to help the organization develop the capability of continuously redesigning itself at all levels.
What does that look like? While there are many possible approaches to this, ours is a process we call “continuous participatory change”. Continuous participatory change is a simple (but not always easy) process with three steps that any individual or team within an organization can carry out in their own work. The first step is to sense a tension between how things are and how they could be: something that’s getting in their way or an unrealized opportunity. The second step is to identify a practice or practices (ways of working) that they hypothesize may help reduce that tension. The third step is to run an experiment to test that hypothesis (otherwise known as, go try it!)
Continuous participatory change can happen simultaneously across an organization. And, it can happen fractally across levels; those with broader spheres of control and influence (aka, “leaders”) can use continuous participatory change to evolve the spaces and contexts within which teams and individuals evolve their own ways of working, while being informed by the sensing and experimenting happening within those spaces.
When we work as org designers with leaders and teams, we don’t tell them what structure to adopt, who should report to whom, or what cascading objectives to set. Instead, we help them adopt the initial principles and practices they need to continuously redesign themselves: continuous participatory change and participatory governance (along with a dash of a few other things, like operating rhythm).
In one enterprise client we worked with, the product development area employed this approach to become more adaptive and effective as a whole. Each team used continuous participatory change to evolve their own ways of working to fit their changing context. The Team Lead from each of those teams sat on a leadership team themselves, which formed a “team of teams”. That team also used continuous participatory change to (1) shape their own ways of working as a team, (2) sense together what patterns or tensions they–and their folks–were noticing within the larger domain of the teams, and (3) continuously redesign the broader conditions within which all the teams operated.
The leadership team also set strategic outcomes that were coherent across (and informed by) all the teams, which acted as enabling constraints within which the teams could iterate and experiment. And the leaders of those leadership teams also sat on a leadership team responsible for a larger portion of the organization, and that team also used continuous participatory change.
Because the system was self-similar in its “meta-design”, other members of the teams could write proposals and bring them to the LT for consent across all the teams. Even more common was individual teams using continuous participatory change to notice tensions between them and then experiment together with ways of working (e.g., who’s accountable for what, how decisions are made, how shared work is handled, etc.) to resolve that tension. Often the leadership team never even had to get involved.
Imagine a product team notices some worrying changes in the market; based on feedback they’re getting and trends they’re seeing, it seems as though a feature a competitor offers (but they don’t) is gaining significant traction with current and potential customers. This team and others are sensing a change, but it takes weeks or months for that noticing to reach a level of leadership with the authority to do anything about it. Because those teams are constrained by inflexible and controlling rules and processes, they can’t experiment and adapt to this emerging risk. Instead, they have no choice but to continue using the same old “best practices” while they watch their competitor gain traction and customers slip away. When the signal from the market finally reaches senior leaders, a new “design” is drawn up for an organization that’s ostensibly better suited to the new reality: people have been reallocated across departments and have new job descriptions and RACI matrices in hand. 18 months of “change management” later, that new design is in place; the organization is now positioned to deliver a set of features that have shifted from a competitive advantage to table stakes while competitors have moved on to develop the next game-changing features. Leaders and teams alike are frustrated, and the cycle begins again.
Now imagine the same scenario, but this time the product team that notices the shift immediately begins experimenting with changes in how they work: they shift what work they prioritize, increase their focus on testing and learning with customers, redesign their own roles to fit the new set of challenges, and propose changes in their working agreements with shared services teams to update shared priorities and enable faster learning.
Simultaneously, other teams are also noticing a shift in the market and also begin adapting. The team leaders (in their weekly steering and unblocking meeting) discuss what their teams have noticed and what experiments they’ve been running. A few weeks later, it’s become clear to the LT that some of these emerging dynamics are specific to the local environments of individual teams but some are showing up as broader market patterns affecting all of the teams. Because each team has already been experimenting, this team-of-teams LT has real world insights in hand about what’s working and what isn’t in their context. Together, these team leaders decide how to shift their shared strategic outcomes to steer towards new opportunities and away from new risks while leaving plenty of space for individual teams to continue adapting within those strategic guardrails.
The best part? Even though no “best practices” are mandated and scaled, the teams are still learning from each other’s experiments; effective ways of working still emerge, spread, and evolve across teams. Because of this coherent adaptation across multiple levels, the org is able to minimize their competitor’s advantage and get first-mover advantage on emerging opportunities made possible by advances in the market.
Is this different, really?
So, is continuous participatory change a persistent process you’re implementing across an organization? Isn’t that still introducing a static design that’s being imposed? No, and for a few reasons.
The first is that we introduce new patterns, principles, and practices in lots of places across an organization, depending on where there’s need and interest. Instead of deploying or implementing a change across big swaths of the organization all at once, we go where leaders and teams are raising their hands to try something new.
The second is that those patterns and practices–and even the principles–themselves enable their own evolution. By embedding and distributing continuous participatory change across the organization, even concrete practices introduced will change over time without external intervention. The design of any organization that has continuous participatory change as a baked-in capability will be different, and that’s because the design will emerge based on the interactions and interconnections within the organization and between the organization and the broader market. As I said above, the organization will continuously design and redesign itself. The design and the designing are dynamic, distributed, and embedded within the organization.
In the examples above, each team is continuously redesigning itself based on what it’s sensing in its environment. As those teams sense and respond to what’s happening around them, the broader patterns and insights that emerge are used by the leadership team to continuously redesign the shared context and constraints under which those teams operate. If teams are noticing they aren’t able to adapt to emerging risks or opportunities within the broad constraints of the strategy (even with significant agency), these signals would likely lead to a shift in the strategy. If teams are consistently diverging from the default set of operating meetings (what we call the “operating rhythm”) because those meetings aren’t working in the teams’ contexts, the leadership team would likely update that default to give teams a more effective starting point.
It may sound like the org design didn’t actually change since there were still levels of teams and leaders, but (as we said above) there’s much more to an organization’s design than the org chart. And, if any of those teams recognized that the team structure was no longer working in their domain, they likely would have redesigned themselves into something new.
If traditional org design is like drafting the blueprints for a house (and maybe helping supervise the construction), adopting continuous participatory change is more like evolving the org’s DNA. These practices are the building blocks from which a healthy organization can emerge, flourish, and co-evolve with its environment.
Design as transformation
This definition of org design applies to another buzz-phrase: organizational transformation. Just as an organization can be “designed” from the top down into a new static configuration, an organization can be “transformed” from one static state into something new via big plans and big changes. Or, at least, that’s what many a consulting firm would have you believe. But if, from effective organizational design, an organization emerges that continuously redesigns itself, that organization is also continuously transforming itself.
And these days, that’s a very good thing. With uncertainty, complexity, and volatility all accelerating (to put it lightly), an organization whose design isn’t changing as we speak is already out of date. An organization whose design isn’t informed by the continuous sensing of external forces and patterns (especially at the edge) has no hope of fitting its context. An organization whose design isn’t simultaneously fostering and leveraging the ever-increasing mastery of its members has very little hope of attracting and keeping an amazing group of people, and of helping that amazing group of people be more than the sum of its parts. An organization that isn’t continuously transforming itself is at an enormous (and most likely existential) disadvantage.
Starting Small
There’s one more benefit to this particular flavor of org design: you can start small. All you need is one team in a cadence of sensing tensions, experimenting with new ways of working, and learning from experience to have enabled an organization that, in one place at least, is redesigning itself. With the right conditions, that team can become two, then four, then, well, all of them. Now that’s an organization that’s not just ready for the future (and the future of work), but is helping to create it.
The Ready is an organizational design and transformation partner that helps you discover a better way of working. We work with some of the world’s largest, oldest, and most inspiring organizations to help them remove bureaucracy and adapt to the complex world in which we all live. Learn more by subscribing to our Brave New Work podcast and Brave New Work Weekly newsletter, checking out our book, or reaching out to have a conversation about how we can help your organization evolve ways of working better suited to your current reality.
Feedback and input from Sam Spurlin and Jurriaan Kamer made this article much better than it would otherwise have been.
