Organisational Design
That we work on organizational change to enhance efficiency is nothing new. That we must design new organizational structures in order to cope with reality, is new instead. There is no more space for exclusion, the patience of climate change is over, the pandemic did not ask if we were ready.
How can Organizational structures evolve to adapt and survive? How should we lead transfomation in groups of people that work together? It is human to feel safe with precise instructions, knowing exactly where our place is and what is expected from us. It is also human to enjoy a setting where we can be ourselves and shine.
An analogy
A classical orchestra is a big instrumental ensemble, a body of sounds that performs already composed music. It is characterized by clearly defined arrangements: the many strings face the smaller, other groups of instruments, like the woodwinds, brass, or the timpanists. All groups have a leader who plays, for instance, the first fiddle.
When an orchestra rehearses, the single groups start to study their part separately, in so-called sectional rehearsals. They must know their part well, before the whole cast presents the “tutti-rehearsal” of a complex work. All musicians know exactly what is required from them to be played, it is written on the scores, created for each one of them. The notes cannot be changed, the musicians are aimed to play what is written in front of them as precisely as possible.
The conductor is responsible for the harmony of all instrumental groups playing together. The probable first conductor of that kind, Carl Maria von Weber, led his orchestra with a rolled-up note sheet in his hands, which was later replaced by the baton. The conductor presents their interpretation of a classical masterpiece to the audience, and the orchestra plays something that delights its listeners again and again.
In Jazz, it is all different: a group picks up a theme, say the melody of “Caravan”, with which all kinds of groups have already dealt with many times. It begins with a further interpretation of the melody, until the musicians detach and start to play around with the theme. The kinds of improvisations seem to be infinite and are only defined by the framework of the tonal system, in which the musicians move around freely.
There is a band leader, who takes on important functions for the group; the leader engages and cultivates a group’s identity, as well as the individual motivation and development of all musicians. While improvising on the theme, each musician is a soloist for a while and gives the very best, supported by the other band members. Often it is the pressing bass or the accelerating percussion, which pushes the soloist to a crescendo, maybe to the highlight of the whole piece. It is not predictable, the musicians can’t know when they will get there, but the listener can sense it at some point. On the way, ’till then unheard, occasionally brilliant combinations of chords and transitions will become audible, even the soloist would not have dared to dream of. The resolution of the trip is the theme itself that is often hastily interpreted once again at the end and tells us where we came from.
Spread
There is a misconception that a flat hierarchy and leeway guided with high level leadership would be cool and relaxed. On the contrary, it is much harder work compared to the classical scenario of working together.
One of the greatest challenges is growth and expansion. If we learned how to work together in a small group where we share values and approaches, how do we grow? How do we integrate new people and groups? How do we make sure they will be aligned with the soul of our group and its overall purpose? How do we explore and integrate new approaches and techniques? How can we design adaptive organizational structures that allow for evolutions?
We want the beauty of a group to spread, to be reimagined, but still relate to the main theme and tone of music. Miles Davis is famous for his stylistic explorations in music — he also influenced musicians for decades, that impacted the evolution of Jazz themselves. His band members read like the history of modern Jazz; Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and George Zawinul, to name a few. They influenced music with their own bands, far beyond the “Birth of the Cool”.
Successful organizations have frequently been seeded with the spirit of a handful of people, maybe even a single personality. When they are growing into more complex structures they cannot be led by an individual. However, we want leaders we can identify with, and we want their time, dedication, and presence. We want their recognition of our work if we believe in what we are doing, it is an assurance that we are part of the group. This family like atmosphere works for some time, very much so, until we get so big that we turn into villages and territoriality cultivated by ambitious sub leaders can take over. I have seen leaders burn out as they could not cope with the size and complexity of the organization they created. I have also seen startups and growing small companies fail because new people on board took on leads in a way that did not match the culture code of the group.
For growing organizations, the most obvious structure seems to be the one of the classical orchestra. We create subgroups, a partner structure, or a hierarchy with project leaders, just like in any traditional organization. There is nothing wrong about that, but the humble recognition that not every organizational setting is a masterpiece that deserves to be re-interpreted time and again, is a healthy one. It is also advisable to keep an eye on those that will play the first fiddle, as the big relief when leaders can finally share their responsibilities has a blinding effect. There is no organizational design that is good enough to make a jazz group perform like a classical orchestra. It’s a backwards evolution and leads to toxic workplaces.
Change perspectives to integrate new approaches
We design new organizational structures and new strategic plans with the leadership and select stakeholders. Any adaption of new impulses must spread bottom up instead. It is not enough to understand employees and then design for them, based on our insights and our interpretations. What we learned from startups and growing smaller companies applies also to new initiatives within a larger organization — opportunities to evolve a workplace structure should be integrated with carefully designed and monitored initiatives. In contrast to the startup scenario, in established structures co-workers had to integrate themselves into existing systems. There has been most likely less space for self-engaged activities and ownership, which are prerequisites for an organization to evolve from a machine to a living system.
It is not advisable to apply any new design of structures, workflows, and processes directly from a conceptual level with a take-it-all approach. The trial and error of design thinking does not work here either: once damage is made to a workplace experience, there is no easy way back. Employees also lose trust with halfhearted initiatives, like workshops whose results are not implemented. Even worse are applications and procedures that do not capture the value and importance of the human perception of how we work together.
The following are a couple of practical examples. There is not one size fits all, and they only work if they are specifically designed for an organization, as a part of a composition of activities that should lead workplace evolutions following a strategic plan. The underlying principle is always that any change must work from the inside out, cross connect and build an organization that is alive, responsive to internal and external factors that bare challenges and opportunities.
Work without leadership
Shared governance is an ambition in academic settings that I could implement in a project for a growing SME. We had to make adjustments in the elaboration of services that built mostly on the core competences but addressed new target groups and needed adjustments in the way they used to work together. In this project we did not just invite more employees to the round table, nor did we create a structure with sub leaders that took on more decision power in an overall strategic plan. In simple terms, we took away the leadership in well-defined areas and short periods of time. For these specific tasks, teams had clear mandates and agencies, but no project leader. The ask was not to just present the results, but the process they applied to get there. To avoid that their managers felt under examination, they were actively involved in designing the framework for the intervention. There have been two outcomes — the team either recognized that they did not manage to align their work and competences to satisfy the task, or they came up with new collaboration and decision-making models that could be implemented with their manager afterwards. In both cases it improved the communication in the teams, with their managers, and the engagement of all the involved to become an active part in the change process. It allowed the team to evolve with own interpretations, they had the space to do so, supported by the leadership. New solutions, the leaders and consultants themselves did not envision beforehand, came to light.
If we are asked to collaborate without instructions of how we have to do that, in a defined space and with a clear task, we will evolve our rules and establish ways to work together, in order to become efficient in aligning our contributions so that we satisfy the purpose of our work. We can then redefine what we actually expect from leadership roles.
Work with the leadership
Another exercise to align management and the team is the periodical assistance of team members to the lead. Many unknown realities the team leadership is facing with changes and new tasks come to light, and the team member assisting the lead will be the most efficient communication to the rest of the team. At the same time the lead will learn from the perspectives, insights and interpretations the team member can deliver. It would be an inversion of the hands-on management, when the lead participates also in the elaboration of a task — we let team members participate in the management of the group.
If you give five different cooks same ingredients to prepare the same plates, you will get five different tastes.
Change roles
Beyond collaboration, agency, and leadership, maybe the most important aspect for any change process is the cross-departmental functioning of a new or evolving organizational design process. If you give five different cooks same ingredients to prepare the same plates, you will get five different tastes. In organizations, different groups or departments and their leaders will show different ways of integrating new approaches. An organization works as any system: if you change one part, it will impact all the other parts. We are supposed to play together though. Roadblocks and misalignments create dissonances that might sound terrible. To understand how the various interpretations of change processes can fit together we should not only involve all stakeholders in the design of a strategic plan but change their roles: Let marketing work on project development and vice versa. By doing so we can foresee roadblocks and avoid that they will impact in a negative way the implementation of our plan.
Of course, we need to design those interventions for ongoing workflows without disrupting the functioning of a group or organization, but it is those roadblocks, areas taken into hostage, misalignments across departments, that will cost time and should therefore be anticipated.
Time for the new
We learned how to integrate technology in our work and organizations, but we need to be aware that we address a different task here. For diversity, equity and inclusion, new ways to collaborate, and new workplace settings, the integration of approaches and techniques are in an entirely different realm: we address human complexity.
There is no sound of innovation in organizations that work like machines. Any one-person-centric structure is destined to fail if it cannot evolve. The design of living systems requires the courage to let go, and the trust that carefully designed interventions, communication structures, monitoring systems and collaborative spaces will relate to where they come from.
Many companies are facing hardship right now. What they have not lost is their DNA. We can work together to develop a strategic plan to set it free, again, to change and evolve with new, unheard interpretations and innovations we did not dare to dream of.
