10 years ago I could not have answered this question. I knew about change management from the movie Office Space and the Two Bobs. But actual organizational design is, not surprisingly, different than. MIke Judge movie starring Ron Livingstone (the most underrated actor of his generation).
If you’ve read the first post on the site about “they way we’ve always done things”, you’ll know that I don’t like legacy processes. If you can’t give me a reason why something is the way it is, it makes my brain hurt. For me, organizational design is the “why” that connects to these processes.
The Stack
In some cases that means choosing systems and tools. This is called your tech stack. This can be as simple as what email provider you’re using. It can be what project management tool you use. But if you go deeper, it’s about HOW you use those tools. For example, let’s say we’re talking about using Slack as your internal communication tool.
How you use Slack is indicative of what you value as an organization and it can be as simple as looking at where conversations exist. If conversations happen in channels, where everyone can see what’s going on, it’s a signal that you value transparency and that has an impact on your organization. If conversations happen in 1:1 chats or small group DMs that involve a handful of people, that’s a signal that maybe you don’t.
In a lot of organizations that I’ve worked in, when we’ve started to look at this very simple aspect (how they use Slack or another communication tool) people have started to get very defensive. They think that you’re criticizing THEM, the PERSON, but organizational design goes way deeper. That’s why it’s called organizational design and not “things people do wrong for no apparent reason.”
In almost every case I’ve ever seen, when you start to poke and prod these systems, you discover an underlying core value that exists in the vast majority of organizations; people want to do good work.
Yes, there are people that suck. A long time ago I worked with a guy, let’s call him him Wilbur for now. Wilbur sucked. Wilbur didn’t want to do good work. Wilbur didn’t care. As we started to clean up systems and recognize that we could do better work, faster, it became clear that Wilbur had no interest in that.
To this day, I couldn’t tell you why.
I think that Wilbur had been in bad systems for too long and I think it had honestly just ruined him as a human being. That’s what bad organizational design does. It does what it’s supposed to do. Legacy systems were designed to extract value from resources and unfortunately one of the resources that you can extract value from is people. And when you extract enough from people, you’re left with a shell of a human being.
Sounds serious, eh? Well, I think it is.
i think that we should be ashamed of the way that we’ve designed systems, as humans, that make humans less human. And as many people suggest about systems like systemic racism and the patriarchy, these systems aren’t broken. They’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to.
“Ok. But I’m a small business and I have no employees so what in the heck does organizational design have to do with me?”
Even as a solopreneur, you’re still using systems to design the way that the work gets done. And in a lot cases people are so used to “the way things have always been done” that they can’t fathom what different looks like. It’s like those eye puzzles where if you stare at it long enough you can see a sailboat. The fact is that some people don’t see the sailboat. But once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. Another example is that Post Malone’s moustache looks like two capybaras kissing.
I promise you that there is a better way for you to do your best work. There is a way to upgrade your systems, or tools, or processes, or the way that you physically work, that can lead to you doing your best work but if you haven’t seen it, you don’t know what it looks like. And that sucks.
So, for me, organizational design is about making work not suck.