Achieving strategy by design

Our Acting CEO, Kaarina Phyland, talks about how the City is redesigning its organisation to achieve its strategy.?

How does your organisation achieve its strategy??

I’m sure if you consider that question, you’ll be thinking about long-term and short-term tactics, lots of stakeholder engagement, plus a variety of measuring and reporting.?

Perhaps also you’ve been part of organisations that have recognised the need for some internal change in order to achieve particular goals.?

However – how many times have you endured or witnessed the disorientation of an organisation change that felt like it was designed on the back of a cafe napkin, by a leader who felt they instinctively knew what was best??

And how often – after the disruption, maybe redundancies, and lengthy re-recruitment processes - were the problems they said they wanted to fix, still there??

Change is a necessity in all organisations – if we don't do it ourselves, it will be done to us. But the challenges to be overcome can rarely be fundamentally resolved with a reshuffle of our workmates and their reporting lines.?

Two years ago, at the City of Greater Geelong, we started with a rather ambitious question: if we were to redesign the City to better serve our community… what would that look like??

With a range of external and internal pressures, plus a new focus on achieving our first-ever organisation strategy, we set about completely reimagining our organisation so that it worked better for our community, and for our employees, through a practice called Organisation Design.?

What is Organisation Design??

Fundamentally, Organisation Design is the design of an organisation’s future state, using data, research and guided by strategy. It’s a process of aligning all elements of an organisation (including people, process and technology) towards an agreed goal – in this case, our organisation strategy – which in turn helps us achieve our Council-led Community Plan and community-led 30 year Clever and Creative Vision.?

Creating a future state view through Target Operating Models??

The core product of organisation design at the City are our Target Operating Models, which provide a detailed ‘future view’ of how the organisation should work and function, and then help guide our work as we design ourselves to meet that future state view. Think of a Target Operating Model as being like the architectural drawings of a building – they set out the design vision for how all the crucial components will interact.??

In many organisations, organisation design is an activity outsourced to consulting firms, who will provide a future view, and then leave it up to the business to deliver it.??

We’re doing things differently at the City, with an experienced, expert internal team working in deep collaboration across the organisation, both in the design and the delivery of these Target Operating Models. This work, at every step of the way, is guided and shaped by the input of the City’s employees, who possess deep knowledge of our services, and a driving passion to support our thriving community.??

Our aspirations for our future state are ambitious but achievable – and critical in achieving our strategy and meeting the needs of our growing and changing community, now and into the future. Have you ever “designed” your organisation for the future? What steps did you take to make it happen??