Organization design blog- May 2013

The Rollo May quote came to mind this week: "Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (in The Courage to Create) .

I thought of it because I was on several telephone conference calls where there was little leadership agreement behind the 'one response toward which to throw our weight'. Each leader felt the stimulus and was irritated by having to pause and choose, rather than just take the individual knee-jerk reaction he/she wanted to but when the pause situation was engineered the differences between the team members became evident. With this came the realization that the team had to stop, think, decide more in concert than individually.

When I looked at a report on Project Oxygen, Google's approach to determining how to make more successful managers that someone sent me during the week I noticed that this too had the suggestion of stopping to pause between stimulus and response and also to align an individual's thinking with the wider interests of the organization:

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Which of these groups of names sound more familiar to you?

Group 1: Chris Arygris, Herbert Shepard, Warner Burke, Larry Greiner, Harry Kolb, Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt, Ralph White, Richard Beckhard, Warren Bennis, Robert Blake, Paul Lawrence, Jay Lorsch, Douglas McGregor, Edgar Schein, Fred Emery, Reg Revans, Eric Trist, Elliott Jaques, Abraham Maslow, B. F. Skinner, Carl Jung, Roberto Assagioli,

Group 2:Margaret Mead, Karen Horney, Mary Parker Follett, Mary Gilson, Jane Addams, Jane Mouton, Margaret Wheatley, Edie Seashore, Elizabeth Bott Spillius, Isabel Menzies Lyth.

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Last week was one of surveys and tests. I'm involved in a review of a telework pilot project involving a survey and also the implementation of a survey on work style and work practices. Plus that week a couple of the dissertation students I am working with are planning their research design which involves selecting a survey instrument and devising methods of using it effectively. Additionally I got an email saying I had to take a mandatory training and pass an end test on this. I found myself doing lots of thinking around getting the most from tests and surveys, and having some interesting discussions on this.

On the telework pilot project we're going to take multiple approaches to data gathering. So we spent a full day working out the time lines, the methods (including: survey, 1:1 interviews, focus groups with randomly selected participants, review of measurement data collected e.g. sickness and absenteeism rates, customer satisfaction scores, etc. and review of the communications strategies and materials) so it will be a labor intensive next few weeks on this. What we're hoping is that we will get information that we can use to develop best practice guides for others who want to introduce or extend teleworking practices.

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Last week I was sitting in a 'finish concepts' meeting with a group of architects and designers looking at floor tiles, color swatches for wall coverings, and so on. There were five concepts presented. Each one with an accompanying photo of something from nature - flower, rock, etc - than inspired the concept.

This was all interesting to me as I haven't been in one of those types of meetings before, and it was fascinating to see the way the participants handled the samples, discussed the pros and cons, and went into all kinds of details like how would you join carpeting and tile in a 'designed' way?

What they didn't talk about was what effect the color and finish combinations might have on worker productivity. I was pretty sure I've read articles on that topic and surely in designing office space (as we were) worker productivity and motivation should be part of that discussion.

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The Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies here in Washington DC, has been running a series of roundtable discussions on various aspects of technology and innovation. Last week I was one of the panelists at the discussion on policy and innovation.

Since I'm not a policy wonk and nor a technology nerd ("A PolicyWonk is related to the Technology Nerd, but understands people" according to Policywonk.com). I was a bit baffled about how to contribute effectively, however, once I got the email telling me that I was to provide an overview of my point of view, to go in the participant info pack and reminding me that I also had to speak to for ten minutes on this, I knew I had to get my act together.

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Several people during the past week have asked me what I see as the organizational trends that are having an impact both on organization designs and on the Human Resource/Organization Development functions.

It's an interesting question that you can look at from a macro/global level, or at a single small organization in a specific market sector or geography. It seems that the people who were asking were more interested in what the macro level trends were that they would then be able to interpret and assess the impact of in their local markets.

But how useful is to know about a macro level trend? Everyone knows that rapidly advancing communication and collaboration technologies are having a major impact on organizational operations, but maybe that macro level statement is too general to be useful. Would it be more helpful to ask "Are there some specific communication and collaboration technologies that are having more of an impact on organizational designs than others". For example, is Twitter more of an organizational game changer than Facebook? Or Google more than Microsoft? Or Cisco's telepresence more than webcams on individual computers?

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