HR Insight Issue 18
Once upon a time, not that long ago and not that far away, there was a large palace. The palace was ancient. Over its long history the palace had grown and many modifications had been made. In places, the palace walls were now incredibly broad and strong, while some of its décor was very intricate and ornate. Yet other parts of the palace had fallen into disrepair.
The palace had many long passageways which sometimes led to dead ends. So sometimes people found secret passageways, or shortcuts, but these weren’t widely known about or consistently followed. Our story of the palace tells of feuding barons, King’s proclamations, failed attempts to re-build, hiding from the census and shifting sands. And all the while enemies were camped outside the palace walls, looking for weak spots and ready to move quickly. We think you might recognise it…
Our report on Organisation Design uses the story of an old palace to consider the challenges of design in a complex and highly connected world, where organisations are expected to be agile and innovative, work globally in a seamless way and to continually engage talented employees with an attractive employer brand. We explore the topic of organisation design from multiple perspectives by:
- asking fundamental questions such as ‘Why re-design?’ and ‘What is the relationship between organisation design and organisational development?’
- considering the models, metaphors and language that we use to understand organisations – from tops, middles and bottoms, to the edge of chaos
- exploring important topics such as productive relationships, meaningful work, physical space and managing risk
- discussing what ideas about complex adaptive systems and social movements bring to organisation design and proposing a shift in thinking from ‘organisations’ to ‘organising’
- offering some ideas on managing a redesign such as learning from the design sciences, applying a positive lens, and testing the design
- concluding with a set of questions, inspired by the previous chapters, to prompt some useful design conversations. For example: ‘What are our current metaphors in use?’; ‘How will relationships change?’; ‘What impact does our physical space have on culture and behaviour?’; and ‘How can we involve customers and staff as co-designers and developers?’
The Palace: Perspectives on Organisation Design is the third in our series of reports on developing organisations by Valerie Garrow and Sharon Varney. We thank David Stephenson for his thought-provoking story.
If you are interested in finding out more about our work in this area, contact [email protected]
