Organization Design with Naomi Stanford

Ambition, audacity, and optimism

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:50:00 -0400

Last week I got an intriguing invitation that runs as follows:

'I am working on several fronts right now, putting together the most ambitious, audacious conference ever in the State of West Virginia, Create West Virginia's Conference on the Future. ... to take place Thursday, October 24 through Saturday, October 26 2013.

I am asking ... thinkers on the future to come to Richwood, West Virginia, a town surrounded by the magnificent Monongahela National Forest, that has a trout stream flowing through it. Richwood's Main Street consists now of 29 mostly boarded-up storefronts of early 1900 vintage. Once a lumber and coal boom town, its residents now drive 25 miles west to Summersville where the big box stores are located on a four-lane corridor that connects two Interstate highways. Richwood appears to be a ghost town, but its 2,000 residents, led by a creative, spunky mayor, believe that it can recreate itself.

We're casting the invitation to the conference very broadly, to economic and community developers, artists and artisans, business people and would-be business people - we're interested in engaging innovators who relish the challenge of reinventing a place, and who want to engage in dialogue with thoughtful people such as yourself.'

Who could resist investigating this further? I took a look at the Richwood city data. It's lost 17.2% of its population since 2000. The median resident age is 49 and the median income is $26,366. In 2012 the unemployment rate was 8.7% and the number of residents living below the poverty level (2009) was 30%, and there were 12 % of Residents with income below 50% of the poverty level in 2009.

Design, development and disruptive technologies

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 06:38:00 -0400

Disruptive Technologies: advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy, a report from the McKinsey Global Institute came out in May 2013. It's long, but fascinating. There's an executive summary if you can't find time for 170 or so pages.

Researchers considered over a hundred different technologies and came to the conclusion that, of these, twelve were likely to radically – perhaps completely - change organizational and working life. (The report has a lot of data to back up the points they make and a good reference list). However, rather than be dogmatic about their assertions they add the sensible reminder that 'By definition such an exercise is incomplete – technology and innovations always surprise'. They say that the technologies they reflect on 'are illustrative of emerging applications over the next decade or two and provide a good indication of the size and shape of the impact that these applications could have.'

The report should be read by every organizational design and development practitioner, not to mention business leaders and managers, for three reasons that I discuss below:

1. To develop or deepen insight into what is on the technology horizon
2. To assess the likely impact of the technologies on their organization.
3. To take planned action to develop their organizational capability to use the technologies effectively before it's too late

Keeping up with technology trends and planning/acting in relation to them should, in fact, be a continuous activity for OD & D practitioners but in my experience they do far too little of it. (See my blog piece on Business Savvy).

Informal design

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 16:54:00 -0400

The room I was working in for four days last week had two notices that caused merriment to the organization design groups I was working with. One notice pinned to the smartboard said 'Do not write on this board', and the other said 'no hot drinks to be brought into the room'. There were a number of other notices in the public areas of the office all peremptory in tone, mostly beginning 'no .. ' or 'do not ..." . The no hot drinks one led to discussion, speculation and conspiracy – we all wanted to bring coffee into the room. Why were cold drinks ok and not hot? Would a hot drink allowed to stand and go cold still count as a hot drink? Were people checking the waste bins to see if there were hot drink cups in it? What was the penalty for breaking the 'rule'? Why was it instituted in the first place? Would people whistle-blow if a colleague brought a hot drink into the room? Etc. (The no writing on the smartboard was fine because we didn't need a board to write on, although it was still a perplexing notice).

Making or getting a job

Sun, 26 May 2013 11:30:00 -0400

In the way of things as soon as I started to think about self-designed jobs several relevant items flung themselves into my path. Once I read that this sort of event is called 'reticular activation', for example, when you read a word you haven't seen before and look it up you then see it constantly ever after and can't imagine why you didn't notice it before.

The topic of self-designed jobs came my way as I was working on my conference presentation – The Future of Work for The Economist Talent Management Summit and in particular the three types of work that Robert Reich talks about in his book The Work of Nations. He describes three types – routine, person to person, and symbolic analytic (knowledge work). Someone suggested a fourth category to me of 'artisan' which I go along with.

Trade-off decisions

Sun, 19 May 2013 17:23:00 -0400

On the plane I was reading about Starbucks and their 'leap of faith'. The article opens with the paragraph

'In late March, as Starbucks was preparing to introduce its first offer on Groupon, the daily-deal service, the coffee chain's chief digital officer, Adam Brotman, realized he had no clue whether the gambit would pay off. ... We do not want to sit on our hands,' Brotman says. 'If we feel excited about something, we'll get it out there, learn our lessons, and correct the mistakes. It's not always the most stress-free way to launch, but it's the fastest. ... We don't think it's okay if things aren't perfect," Brotman says, "but we're willing to innovate and have speed to market trump a 100% guarantee that it'll be perfect."

What I find useful in the piece is the notion of trade-offs. Here it is speed to market over 100% perfect. The thing is that surfacing the trade-offs isn't that easy and then making the decision to play the trade-off isn't easy either.

Designing incentives – what works?

Mon, 13 May 2013 03:39:00 -0400

Sparked by the topic 'Substituting traditional symbols of power and status e.g. corner offices, for new symbols of power and status (and why this matters).' The action learning group I am working turned the discussion into one on performance and motivation incentives. This surprised me a bit as the three questions we'd been posed were:

1. How much is workplace associated with hierarchy/power/status and is this important to the client's business performance?
2. What questions and approaches would help us understand our clients' emotions around status/power/space?
3. How can the workplace support our client in developing a defensible point of view around power/status.

But what they'd picked up on was a line in one of the pre-read articles Is open-plan working really the future for lawyers? Meet the evangelists "Obviously there are firms that have open-plan offices, but it's something that we're reticent to mention early on in the recruitment process. It's not a selling point. I've never met anyone who says that they actually want to move into an open-plan office. Having your own office – that's an incentive."

Radical transparency

Mon, 06 May 2013 02:48:00 -0400

What information would you share with co-workers, managers, the wider world? Does it make a difference whether it is personal information – like your salary, or organizational information? Would you share all or nothing or some stuff (what and why this?) Without going into the ethics and morals of releasing information (as in Wikileaks) the action learning group I'm learning with had a good discussion on radical transparency the other week.

The discussion was sparked by the Ryan Smith Qualtrics CEO blog piece on radical transparency.
And you can watch/hear him talk about it here. His view is that 'the idea of everyone knowing everything, could actually be a major driver of increased organizational performance. [He] believes that the biggest reason companies fail is because people lose focus and get off track. It's particularly true of young, fast-growing companies driving to meet stretch revenue goals and keep their investors happy. Qualtrics didn't want to fall into that trap so the company made the bold decision to make all employees' performance data available to everyone in the company. By doing so, Qualtrics removes the distractions, fears, and negativity that sap concentration. The entire workforce has access to a host of information about the performance and practice of each employee.'

The group of us were debating three questions:
1. What is the value of radical information transparency in developing business performance?
2. How can we help architecture and workplace design clients determine their point of view on this?
3. What can we do to help clients' built environment reflect their information transparency requirements?

Workspace as a strategic asset

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 16:40:00 -0400

Space as a strategic asset was last week's question. I got it three times in different ways but they are focused on the same idea – how do we know what space we'll need in the future, and then how do we use it to get best possible performance from the space and the people in it? Here they are:

1. In the last week we've been approached on the subject of domestic companies (in China) looking to make significant change to how they use space as a strategic asset of the business.
2. Wondering if you have any info or articles on how companies are responding to contraction and expansion in their real estate portfolios? Efficiency and cost effectiveness – while also maintaining great environments?
3. A client is looking for benchmarking metrics which would tell him at what point in eroding away his vacant space (flexible/soft/surge space) should he look at options to build or lease more space or look at significant consolidation.

The interesting things about the questions are the challenges and opportunities they imply. Although framed as workplace/workspace issues they are also about the design of the organization and the external trends and context that the business operation has to respond to as it develops and delivers its business strategy.

Designing for aging

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 16:21:00 -0400

I've had an instructive almost-three-days with my mother this weekend. She's 96 and lives independently in her own flat with no household support beyond a young woman who comes to clean her place for 2 hours once every two weeks. She seems to do well enough in an environment that she's used to. The Tesco metro is across the street, she is close to bus stops, the temperature in the house is set to maintain a steady agreeable warmth, and so on.

Nevertheless there are things she can't do well: open screw top jars, change light bulbs, bend to get things from the bottom of the fridge, walk outside without the aid of a cane or a walker, see small print, or hear in the presence of any background noise.

She wanted to visit Ireland where she was born. And that's what we did. Although I have spent time with her traveling (we went for the weekend to Paris last year) this time I was acutely aware of the design aspects of aging and started to wonder about this for both older people in the workforce and for older people who have left the workforce.

Collaboration: can we design for it?

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 15:30:00 -0400

Collaboration is one of those frequently used words. People talk about 'collaboration space', wanting to have a 'collaborative culture', and encouraging 'collaboration'. But when it comes to defining and measuring 'collaboration', there's somewhat of a pause. What is the business outcome of collaboration? Is it a new product or service, enhanced productivity, greater process efficiency, happier employees, more satisfied staff, or something else altogether. I haven't yet found an organization that is crystal clear on what it wants to achieve at an organization, work-team, or individual employee level from 'collaboration'.

Neither do we have much clarity on what contributes to collaboration. Is it the design of the workplace, the technology used, the cultural attributes of an organization, the type of work that is being done, or all of these or some/none of these?

So when this week, at my place of employment, we kicked off the first of a series of four action learning sessions the opening topic was 'collaboration'. 'Action learning is a dynamic process that involves a small group of people looking at real problems and opportunities, while at the same time focusing on what they are learning and how their learning can benefit each group member, the group itself and the organization as a whole'. We have set up the group (of about 15 people) with the primary objective of developing some tools and approaches that support our clients in making actionable connections between organization design and workplace design to increase organizational performance. A secondary objective is to try out these tools and approaches on ourselves as we transition to new office space.