The future of organisation design

Last week this email arrived: “I hope this note finds you well. We are in the final weeks of the organisation design program for cohort 2. Your slot, part of session 10, is ‘the future of Organisation Design’.?You can have up to 45 minutes right after the opening. Will you want to include some slides? ... “.

Although I’m told that the session outline is ‘straightforward’ – mine is the slot after the session on reflections on session 9 – the topic itself is not straightforward.?I ask myself, ‘What is the future of organisation design?’

Sometimes, in training courses, I’ve shown one of the several ‘from-to’ graphics showing the future of organisations.?Look, for example, at Tanmay Vora’s sketchnote that goes ‘from purpose to profit’, from ‘hierarchies to networks’, ?etc. or the Booz & Co from analogue to digital culture which has, among other dimensions, from process and task orientation to result orientation.

?It’s easy to get seduced by these ‘from-to’ graphics: they look good, and appear convincing.???But are they the future of organisation design??I no longer think so.?They imply a smooth movement, from left to right, in a stable context.???We are not in a stable context.?

?In my forthcoming book I say: ‘The late South African economist Ludwig Lachmann once wrote:?“The future is unknowable, though not unimaginable”. ?... Because we can imagine different futures, we can act to create the better version. We have the creative ability to draft scenarios and possible outcomes, so we can prepare for what is more likely to be. And [we can] attempt to bring it about.

?There is a design tension inherent in designing for what is?in front of us in the immediate future and what we imagine in the further out future. ... ?Leaders and designers must recognise and manage that tension, perhaps taking guidance from the authors of the book The Design Way, who say “Design is the ability to imagine that-which-does-not-yet-exist, to make it appear in concrete form as a new, purposeful addition to the real world”.

We can do this by acknowledging that the immediate future?is not entirely unpredictable. Specific future events?and trends may be unpredictable, but it is possible to envisage the implications of possibilities as sets of potential actions that the organisation may have to be ready for, and?designed to take. ‘?

Taking that perspective means detecting signals in the current, unstable context that we could take forward as possibilities into the future, searching for patterns the signals generate, and making collective meaning from the signals and patterns. (See article ‘On the role of collective sensing and evolution in group formation’). These activities give rise to scenarios that it is possible to imagine and, take some steps to prepare for.

Three newish signals that I noted this week that caused me to think about the possible future of organisation design are:?

?Metaverses:?These are a shared online space that incorporate 3D graphics, either on a screen or in virtual reality. They came up in the New Scientist article that piqued my interest, not least because it mentioned Second Life , launched in 2003, which I used about 3 years later when I was doing some work with the American Red Cross.???At that point I had high hopes that Second Life would become integral to organisation design, but it didn’t happen.?Now I see Roblox ?co-founder, David Baszucki, saying ?“Just as the mail, the telegraph, the telephone, text and video are utilities for collaborative work, we believe Roblox and the metaverse will join these as essential tools for business communication.” Maybe he’s right???

?Metaverses give rise to a possible scenario of big tech companies holding in their thrall all their users, having access to their users’ data, and being able to control their users in various ways – extending this one can imagine big tech will someday supersede governments, and change the idea of national borders.?People will be nationals of a metaverse.?(See the novel, ?He, She, and It by Marge Piercy for a variant of this idea). ??How would organisations be designed in this scenario?

Individuals as networks: ?I then read a fascinating piece on individual selves as networks.?It says, ‘[Individual] selves are not only ‘networked’, that is, in social networks, but are themselves networks. By embracing the complexity and fluidity of selves, we come to a better understanding of who we are and how to live well with ourselves and with one another’.?It’s left me wondering if and how this could influence organisation design.??I’m thinking it ?may give a different take on the phrase ‘bring your whole self to work’, and also challenge current approaches to health and wellbeing that organisations are increasingly preoccupied with.?

?A scenario that could come from this is one of very different career paths, skills assessments, and employment expectations as our networked self focuses on different or new aspects of itself.

?Gillian Tett’s book:?Anthro-vision provides a compelling case for using anthropological approaches to business life (and by extension, organisation design).?You can listen to an excellent video of her talking about this and I came away thinking that her view gave impetus to ‘human centred’ organisation design in an actionable way. Thanks to the EODF newsletter for the link.?

The interview brought to my mind the various Covid-19 legacies around building design/ventilation, biophilia, etc. ?The pandemic has brought to the forefront the relationship between physical space design and human performance.?Typically, organisation designers and facilities managers/workplace designers are siloed.?A scenario that could play out is one where organisation design and workplace design are integrated, perhaps using tools like digital twinning to model human and workplace design options. ??This could give organisations a very different design from currently envisaged ones – much as 3D printing has enable innovative building design.?

Three more ubiquitous signals came up again this week – ones that are now becoming patterns.

Geo political landscape shifts.?Think how many organisations have had a recent high-profile brush with governments in a way that has forced re-design of aspects of the business.?Amazon, Alibaba, Uber, Google, Facebook are some that spring immediately to mind.??Think too of other effects of geo-political shifts, for example, on supply chains (e.g. semiconductors).?These will have profound effects on the design of organisations.?Will multinationals exist in the future??

Cyber security/threats – recent ransomware attacks have had a crippling effect on some organisations, for example ‘In the recent Colonial Pipeline and JBS attacks, cybercriminals disrupted gasoline and meat supplies, causing an artificial run on both commodities.’?Given the acceleration in such attacks what are the organisation design implications????

Climate-tech This article notes that ‘many corporate giants are going beyond hollow commitments of greenery and “net zero” carbon pledges by investing directly in climate tech’, again these actions will change the design of organisations.

?Answering the question ‘what is the future of organisation design?’ is best answered by saying there are multiple possible futures.?A further question to ask is 'how do you design organisations to prepare for an unknown but not unimaginable future'.?Is your organisation doing this??Let me know.