Why 'Doing the Do' is not enough in Organisation Design...

A while back I started chuntering on in series of posts about organisation design. After an elephantine gestation period, the last in this series has arrived. In keeping with the thread I started out on back in November 2019, I am finishing off my reflections on the different types of learning it helps to engage in if you are going to make an impact with your organisation design practice. I am using what Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester offer as a frame for learning in 21st Century organisations and leadership, and end with the last of these now:

•  Learning to know;
• Learning to be;
• Learning to be together;
• Learning to do.

The ‘do’ bit is arguably the most important, or it is often framed as such. Everything that comes before is moot if there is no change, no action, nothing that we experience that is different. However, if doing something was always a) the most appropriate response at a given moment in time and b) when done the correct kind of ‘do’, then organisations and society generally would be more efficient, profitable, healthier and happier places to be. A glance at any news feed tells us that the quality of what is being ‘done’ often falls short of expectations, both in terms of who is doing the doing and the eventual outcomes. If ‘doing’ was all that was needed to get test and trace sorted, clearly the UK would have Boris’s world beating system. Lack of do is not the issue. The Mad March Hare was full of 'do' as well, and how far did he get?...

In organisational terms, anyone who has experience of change in organisations will probably have come across instances where change is something that is ‘done to’ rather than ‘done with’. Whilst it is possible to construct an argument that some change initiatives require significant elements of the former e.g. significant downsizing and restructuring of organisations, responses to global pandemics etc., that is on the assumption that those involved by definition cannot be trusted to engage and work with what is being planned. That, however, is to move away from the central thrust of this post.

Three things to do before you do (if you see what I mean)

The following are three suggestions, based on my own experience of working with clients across multiple sectors/contexts. It is not definitive, and none the less useful in any preparation before getting to the delivery stage of a project, Organisation Design or otherwise.

Get on the Balcony

If ‘doing’ is your first move, you have a problem. I have worked with many leaders of change over the years and one of the most common revelations they have is that it is vital, before they act, to ‘Get on the Balcony’, which is a metaphor popularised in the literature on change by Ronald Heifetz. The essence of the metaphor is that you need to step back, see the bigger picture, and reflect sufficiently (which could be seconds or months, but some pause for thought is necessary) on how and where to intervene before acting. One senior leadership talent programme I ran, which lasted fourteen months and was developing the next generation of senior leaders in a global motor manufacturing business’s European division, was striking in what most participants said was the most important thing they were taking away.

It was a business that was great at crisis management and delivering at speed, that also needed to become more innovative and strategic. The participants came to realize that they needed to get perspective and think before they acted, because they started to notice that often they were reacting to orders without pausing to consider the why or whether what was being asked was appropriate. In short, doing was not an issue. They were knee deep in ‘do’, much of which was ultimately diversionary and/or misdirected given the changing context.

What’s the question?

The second pattern that shows up in my work is that many organisations are not always clear on the question(s) they are trying to answer with a given intervention/initiative. If you cannot articulate the question your organisation design project is seeking to answer: STOP. Stop also if you have many potentially contradictory questions.

To sharpen the latter, and this is particularly true of organisation design, where the neatness of the models and methodologies, particularly when sold into senior leaders by suited and booted consultants who offer the illusion of certainty, deludes us in to thinking that simply changing an org chart and line reporting is enough.

To put it another way, rearranging the furniture is never enough if people are still going to be using it the same way. One organisation I know, of some 6000 people across two continents, completed a major organisation design transformation and moved from a divisional structure to matrix. The client said that the restructure had gone well and was complete. The problem was nothing had changed. I asked why. The answer?...

“The top 30 people are all still behaving in the same way.”

In this instance, the question should have been: how do we change the conditions to influence the senior leadership culture and behaviours, and in turn the organisation more widely? There may have been another question to do with structure that had utility, but certainly in the telling of the story to me, that was now far less important: the project was not deemed a success, despite the furniture having been successfully rearranged. 

Has the lived experience changed?

Even if you have clarity on the question, it is important to connect that to what you might see, hear and feel that is different, once the project is complete. Take the example above. Had the client really connected with the need around behaviours, and gone deeper into what they might see (e.g. different behaviours), hear (e.g. changes in the narrative and stories about leaders in the business) and feel (e.g. changes in sentiment and climate), a lot of time, money and effort could have been saved and real needs attended to. Asking what needs to be different using simple language like see/hear/feel helps bypass the trap of over-complicated language and the tyranny of ‘best practice’ solutions that are fine in one situation but rarely others, because context matters.

In summary

In this series, my intention has not been to say that knowledge and action are unimportant or not useful. In fact, the reverse is true. I believe that knowledge is vital, enough knowledge to make informed decisions without leaning into the fetishising of models, graphs and charts in fancy slide decks. Those decisions then translate into action that is aimed at answering the right question(s) and maximising the possibility for the difference that makes a difference to be manifested as reality.

Too often, knowledge acquisition in education becomes a synonym for learning: they are not the same thing. That is true, sadly, in many educational contexts (SATS at ever younger ages is a case in point). Management and leadership education is no different, and in the case of organisation design, that is particularly true. I would also add that knowledge is not the same thing as knowing, but that is for another day…

Learning to ‘do organisation design’ is about both the concepts, ideas, methods etc AND understanding what happens when theory meets reality, in this case the messiness and dirtiness of organisations today.

As I end this series, I am reminded of conversations I have had recently with change practitioners of various hues in large organisations. All are experienced and well qualified, and each needed my support and challenge with issues they were facing that are exclusively in the domain of Learning to Be and Learning to Be Together. There has always been a gap between the leading edge of technology and change in organisations and social processes. Organisation design often takes place in that context.

The challenge is that the rate of change we are experiencing is making that gap widen, faster and no amount of Learning to Know or Learning to Do will address that without attending to the other two.