What is organizational design?

When you put the user at the center of a product design process, it’s called design thinking.

When you apply design thinking to the shared experiences of customers and employees, it’s called service design.

When you apply design thinking to the way companies behave and change, it’s called organizational design (org design for short).

Org design is the next evolution of design thinking, and according to Deloitte, it’s an important concern for more than 90% of senior leaders. But like design thinking when it was introduced, few leaders have experienced org design first-hand or have training in how it works successfully.

But all of us know when work hasn’t been consciously designed.

• In large companies, many of us feel stifled. Bureaucracy stands in our way of moving work forward. We’ve lost touch with our customers and the impacts of our actions. We’re tasked with responding to a faster world by working longer and harder, not smarter. We crave some semblance of work/life balance, but rarely find a calm moment to even discuss it. Work feels like a treadmill from which we can’t escape.
• In rapidly scaling startups, many of us feel lost and overwhelmed. We know that what got us here won’t be what gets us to the next horizon, but we’re unsure what steps to take. What processes should be more defined, which should remain flexible? Will catered meals and ball pits be enough to retain our best colleagues? How do we hire and onboard the next onslaught of new employees, and who will do it? Work feels like a frenzy of uncertain choices, none of which we feel we can afford to flub.

In both large and scaling companies, without organizational design, we measure the wrong things and then the wrong things become our priorities. We amass bureaucracies. We create busy-work. We lose our best people, and suppress the collective potential of the people who remain. Our tools shape us, rather than the other way around. Our products become more of a reflection of our org chart than our user’s needs. We lose the cultures we worked so hard to cultivate, and eventually we lose outright to our competitors.

Let’s be clear, though: you as a leader are not to blame for these conditions. These conditions are the product of a world where technology can scale exponentially, but people cannot. The latter half of the 20th century birthed the first companies large enough and wealthy enough to rival nations, and the 21st century has given rise to companies that scale to that size and power within a matter of years. Humans have simply never had to coordinate and collaborate at this scale or at this speed. No aspect of our lives is immune: we’re struggling with it in our organizations, governments, cities, and cultures.

The challenges we face at work were germinating long before you became a leader, and will continue to accelerate long after you retire. So no, you aren’t responsible for these conditions. But as a leader, you are responsible for taking action in response to these conditions.

The first thing you must do is educate yourself. Organizational design offers a set of perspectives and tools to help you see your organization with fresh eyes and to help you make meaningful, lasting changes to it.

Organizational Design is a human-centered approach to improving how people work together and how companies respond to change.

Organizational design borrows from the design thinking toolkit, chiefly: empathy, systems thinking, co-creation, and experimentation. Through iterative design cycles, organizational designers work with teams, in their native environment, to identify opportunities for improvement and test the fit of potential new ways of working.

What does this actually look like in practice? At NOBL, our outcome is always the same: high-performing firms and enriching cultures. But the format and output of our work varies during the course of a single engagement:

• COACHING: Leadership and team coaching, change management coaching, often conducted in-person embedded with the team
• RESEARCH: Sprints into competitive and comparative organizations (structures, budgets, processes, etc.) and assessing the existing conditions of a team or organization (often conducted, too, while onsite)
• FACILITATION: Team offsites and workshops, critical for developing cross-team collaboration and strengthening social bonds
• TRAINING: Targeted courses to address critical teaming skill gaps (e.g. cultures of continuous learning, adaptive leadership, prioritization, strategic time management, etc.)

At NOBL, these organizational design activities are conducted by teams of people with diverse backgrounds. Some of us are trained organizational psychologists and change management professionals. Others of us arrived at organizational design by leading design thinking or service design practices. A few of us are recovering management consultants. We are stronger for the collisions between our differing experiences, perspectives, and tools. We believe that this discipline can only grow more effective as people from more diverse fields participate.

WANT MORE? WELL, THIS IS JUST PARTS ONE AND TWO OF AN ORG DESIGN 101 ARTICLE. GO READ IT!