CHAPTER 21
Opening Up Organization Design
We close this book by opening up the process of designing organizations. Here are some thoughts to keep in mind.
Customizing Design
Every one of us is unique. Hence every organization is unique, since it is made up of our unique selves. And so, every structure has to be customized, more or less, even if only to adapt to the idiosyncrasies of its people. Part II of this book introduced the building blocks of organization design, and Part III showed how these can be assembled into four different forms of organizations, like a jigsaw puzzle. Parts IV and V added more pieces to the puzzle—seven forces and three more forms—and Part VI used these forces to open the space between the forms, by showing how they moderate, combine, and transform themselves. Here, we consider how to play LEGO: to construct structures that combine the pieces in customized ways.
The eminent organization theorist Herbert Simon, in a book called The Sciences of the Artificial, wrote that “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”145 This include, not only architects who design buildings and engineers who design products, but also educators who design courses and managers who design structures, even authors who design books. How do they do this? Maybe not in the way you might think.
Four Approaches to Design
Jeanne Liedtka and I published an article titled “Time for Design,” in which we identified four approaches to designing organizations.146
• A formulaic approach based on following preexisting principles more than engaging in open-ended experimentation.
• A visionary approach that relies on the personal imagination of the designer, thus affording more responsiveness to opportunity.
• A conversational approach that opens the process beyond the designer, to the insights of the people who have to live with the design.
• An evolving approach that enables the design process to keep adapting as situations change, problems arise, and opportunities appear.
The formulaic approach is pat rather than playful. By itself, it is insufficient for customized design. The other three approaches can be playful, by their use of imagination, conversation, and adaptation, respectively, to consider forces and forms, culture and conflict, efficiency and proficiency, centralization and decentralization, craft and creativity. We have learned quite a bit in this book from the bees, but please see an important exception in the box.
Paving the Pathways
Think of designing this way. There is a park in Prague, also perhaps where you live, that was designed formulaically—by designers who knew better. They paved pathways where they decided that people should walk. One of these, designed to take people from a busy street to a bridge, was paved in an S-shape. The designers formulated, but the people of Prague did not implement. They took control of the situation and walked straight across, on grass that became earth. Thus evolved the people’s pathway to the bridge.
This suggests that there are two kinds of designers: those who really do know better, and those who, by believing they know better, do worse. When a surgeon is about to begin an operation, we don’t say: “Could you cut a little lower please?” The surgeon knows better. But an architect, educator, or manager who knows better can be a menace to good design, because this precludes the experience of the users.
There are, of course, architects who know what they don’t know, and so allow the people to walk the park, so to speak. Their practice is visionary because it is open to the vision of the users. And it is conversational because it listens to the users, and this makes it evolving, because, as the walkers keep walking, the pathways keep changing.
None of this should be different in designing organizations. Instead of designers who know better as they pave the structures for everyone else, the users who have to live the consequences of the structure need to participate in the design of it. They have to formulate by implementing: learn their way to the pathways that suit them best.
Sally and Sam decide to start a project, and ask Sylvie to present it to management—that is, to be the de facto manager. As their efforts succeed, and consolidate, it may be time to pave their pathway (namely formalize their structure). But not too solidly, because no one can be sure when the pavement will have to be torn up for a better way.
Emergent Structure
Hence, we must beware of immaculate conception in designing our organizations. Doing so in one shot, however common, leaves little room for the users to adapt and correct mistakes. That’s what the architect of the city of Brasilia did, to the chagrin of some of its residents to the present day. In a similar respect, I once spent a couple of days at a meeting in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I was told that the woman of the house hated the place: everything was fixed, even the furniture. That house remains famous: architects who have never lived there love it!
“An old saying has it that architecture is frozen music. With organizations, however, there is never even a momentary freeze” (this from Yoshinori Yokoyama, in a fascinating article titled “An Architect Looks at Organization Design”).148 Organizations require emergent structures, just as they require emergent strategies: when possible, start marginally, tentatively, and let experience take it from there. In other words, allow structures, like strategies, to be learned, beyond being planned. To quote Yokoyama again: “The wiser, though less obvious, approach, is to leave the new design deliberately incomplete. Let life fill in the spaces.”149
The Design Conundrum
Here is a central conundrum of organization design: when to change a structure that has to be stable? Every structure must eventually settle down—otherwise, how can we call it a structure? But for how long, and how fixed? Organizations are always changing, at least informally, yet they need to fix their structures for a time so that people can get on with their activities—hiring others, buying equipment, programming computers. People need structure and they need flexibility, but each can obstruct the other.
The machine organization is inclined to hang on to its structure for as long as possible, until the tension becomes intolerable and it must make the leap to a new structure. The professional organization is even less inclined to restructure, since so much of its structure has been built for the dictates of its professions. The personal and project organizations are the ones inclined to adapt more readily—one at the behest of its chief, the other by the comings and goings of its projects.
Design Doing
Design thinking has become a fashionable phrase of late. On its website, under “What Is Design Thinking?” the renowned design consultancy IDEO has described it as an “iterative process” that proceeds through these phases: empathizing with the users, defining their needs, problems, and own insights, ideating by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions, prototyping to start creating solutions, and testing them.150
Why is this called design thinking when it reads more like design doing, based on design seeing—more conversational and evolving than formulaic? As Hannibal said when faced with having to take elephants over the Alps: “I shall either find a way or make one.”
The Liberated Unstitution
Finally . . . I know a seven-year-old who came up with a novel answer to the question posed at the start of this book: “What are these ‘organizations’ you keep talking about?”151 When my daughter Susie was seven, she must have been watching me sketching those logos for the original edition of this book, because she suddenly came up with the drawing below. I kept it, no doubt serendipitously for its use right here—a perfect way to end our quest to understand organizations.
What do you see? It’s a Rorschach, so you can decide for yourself. For me, I see divisions within divisions, each with the head of its leadership lopped off, to release a phoenix-like bird that liberates this “unstitution” from the institution.152 Is this the organization of the future?
I’m not sure that we shall see such a liberated unstitution any time soon. But I do hope that this book has helped you liberate yourself from the orthodoxies of organizing, so that you can design better organizations in the future. While doing so, please keep in mind these wise words from Alfred North Whitehead: “Seek simplicity and distrust it”. . . finally!