Many organisational design projects are like confetti – neat on paper, pretty when thrown in the air and very hard to clean up!
Many organisational design projects fail to deliver their desired outcomes, and often leave organisations with significant gaps in their corporate memories as many people take the opportunity to seek greener pastures. So how do we get organisational design to deliver something better?
Here are our ten tips from leading and supporting more than a dozen organisational design programs.
Define the problem you are trying to solve and why it needs to be solved. Test whether process, policy or leadership levers will deliver the desired result. Don’t use a redesign for the sole purpose of removing people your organisation has failed to manage. Don’t solve the wrong problem!
Know how you arrived here. Talk to the ‘old timers’ who have lived through the various iterations of your organisation and take a change history in as much detail as a good doctor takes a medical history. Understanding the organisation’s journey will help to narrow the field of options.
You need to know the strategy, purpose and the principles by which you will test and choose your organisational design and the defining characteristics of the organisation. If your design principles can be cut and pasted between organisations or industries, they are not specific enough.
Be clear about what ‘good’ looks like. You need to be able to describe what the benefits of the redesign will be for your staff, clients and stakeholders. You need to be clear about the desired results and outcomes this process is trying to achieve.
Communicate honestly about the purpose of the redesign, how this will be achieved, how staff and stakeholders will be engaged in the process and when you expect to have it implemented. Your staff will spot a disingenuous communique in an instant.
Be conscious of any formal consultation requirements in your organisation’s industrial agreements and contracts. Ensuring compliance with key timeframes and requirements will make for a smoother transition process. Don’t underestimate the time and resources required to conduct effective consultation processes.
The new organisational design should not be drawn up on the back of a coffee stained napkin with the incoming CEO and their new BFF. The team working on the organisational design need to show the core functions being delivered, how the work will get done, and the relationships required - not just who will be in it.
Consider how little can you change to get the desired effect? Organisational design projects are disruptive, and when you tinker with relationships in an organisation you need to do so with pure strategic intent, not with Machiavelli as your partner.
Test your organisational design for delivering strategic value and HR indicators (for example span of control, layers of decision making). Imagine pouring water (strategy and communication) in the top of the organisational diagram and if you can’t get water to every box – there is something wrong - especially if water is leaking out a number of dotted pipes (lines) reporting relationships. In the same way, a bubble (innovation and feedback) needs to be able to rise from the bottom to the top without too much interference.
Empathise with those people whose roles will be changed or impacted by the changes – try to put yourself into their shoes and understand how it impacts their working environment, team, career opportunities and progressions, and perceived status. Are you doing change for good or change for fun?
Organisations must evolve to survive. You should not seek to create an organisational design for eternity. Design one for now that achieves your vision and has some resilience and flexibility to survive the most likely changes that will occur over the next 5 – 10 years.
Organisational design is important for renewal and to achieve new strategies, we diminish its value by allowing it to be used for nefarious means.
This was originally posted by Jennifer Bennett in 2016 and has been updated to reflect our current thinking on how to make organisations work by design.