Organisational Design In The World Of Work

Organisational Design

Organisational design, which is sometimes known as organisational architecture, is the process of deliberately designing the key mechanisms that organisations use to function so that they are as effective as possible. This is an ongoing process with involves assessing current mechanisms, designing improvements to them, implementing improvements and then repeating.

The purpose of organisational design is help organisations achieve their strategies, and it is somewhat different to organisational development.

Organisational Mechanisms

There are many different mechanisms used by organisations to shape their ability to perform and meet their organisational objectives. These can be thought of as the levers of organisational performance.

Several different business authors have defined what some of these mechanism are, but as yet there seems to be no firm consensus. Some of the mechanisms are as follow:

• Strategy
• Structures
• Business Processes
• Systems
• Culture
• Communications
• Roles and Responsibilities
• Rewards and Incentives

The Organisational Design Process

The organisational design process is not too different from a fairly standard organisational change process. At its simplest, the organisational design process is as follows:

1. Agree that the organisational design is required and obtain sponsorship,
2. Understand the current state of the organisation,
3. Determine what the desired future state of the organisation is,
4. Devise a plan and design the interventions required to move from the current state to the desired future state,
5. Implement the plan, and
6. Review, learn lessons and repeat the process.

Of course, this is a very simple summary of what is a considerably more complicated process which may include designing new operating models, deciding on and implementing new systems and ways of working, recruiting new leadership teams and refining organisational strategies.

Good Organisational Design

Good organisational design work has one eye on the current needs of the organisation and the other on the future needs of the organisation. Overall, organisational design work should aim to be as simple as practicable, flexible to meet the future needs of the organisation, reliable under a range of scenarios, economically viable and acceptable to the people within the organisation.

We don’t have much to say about organisational design. It is simply an effort to design the key factors of an organisation so that it’s more effective. At its core it’s a strategic change process, like many others.

We do like the fact that organisational design appears to be fairly systemic in its thinking. However, we are somewhat wary of the fact that organisational design work is often done by agents external to the organisation, which in our view diminishes the probably knowledge of the designers as well as making organisational buy-in more difficult to achieve.

As we said at the start of this little reflection, we don’t really have much to say on the subject of organisational design…