Happy New Year 2014 to you all! Tobi is back to blogging! Yipeee!!!! :)
I've just been selected to be a presenter at the Organization Design Forum's (ODF's) 2014 Conference schedule for Charlotte, NC, United States in from April 29-May 1, 2014. Having commenced the writing of my first book sometimes last year with its first Chapter titled "The Concept of Organization Design", I decided to share an excerpt of this chapter of my book with you. Hope you find it to be an interesting and insightful read. Peace!
During the pre-colonial era, the rural
and traditional economy of the Yoruba people—an African tribe that inhabited
the West African rain forest—was centered on farming, hunting and fishing.
These were the major activities people engaged in to earn a living. Due to the
difficulty of cultivating land in the rain forest thick with roots and the
strain of clearing trees held in place by jungle vines, it was common to find
the Yoruba people practicing cooperative farming among extended family members.
Thus, families located their plots of farmland side by side in order to
maximize available manpower by working on one another’s farms together.
Not all the men were farmers as some took
on other professions including hunting and fishing. The hunters were known to
be the area experts due to their exceptional familiarity with the remote
rainforest locations and were also experts in forest vegetation. Because of their
knowledge of the forests and their vegetation due to the large amount of time
they spend in the deep forests, hunters often doubled as herbalists, medicinal
specialists, protectors of the village and border guards[1].
The women had their specific role as
well. Their duty was to clothe the family, complimenting the men’s role of
feeding the family. Thus, women and their daughters would spun raw cotton, dye
the resulting threads and weave them into cloth for clothing. However, in times
of imminent famine or related instances necessitating the need for more hands,
women were often called to help with farming.
Bearing on the narrative above, one can
infer that the setting or structure of the Community’s workforce is tailored to
meet the various needs of the Community as a whole. By structuring their local economy in a way to achieve desired
results, these locals seemingly took into cognizance the abilities and interests
of the different individuals—thus, there were farmers, hunters and fishermen.
Remarkably, those with additional skills (in this case, the hunters) filled
other roles that were of importance to the Community—including being herbalist,
medicinal specialists, protectors of the village and border guards. Thus, the
Community had found a way to organize such that all basic societal needs—food,
shelter, health and security—are met, guaranteeing the continual survival of
the Community for many generations to come.
As crude as the setting described above
is, it exemplifies the Concept of Organization Design. Organization Design is narrowly defined as “the process of
reshaping organization structure and roles, or….the
alignment of structure, process, rewards, metrics and talent with the strategy
of the business”.
Jay Galbraith and Amy Kates built on
years of work by Galbraith and affirmed that attention to structure, process,
rewards, metrics and talent with the strategy of the business, is necessary to
create new capabilities to compete in a given market. This systemic view is
expressed in Galbraith’s original work called the "star model"[2].1
Figure 1: The Star
Model
The Business
Dictionary explains that “organization design is the manner in which a
management achieves the right combination of differentiation and integration of
the organization’s operations in response to the level of uncertainty in its
external environment.” It further expatiated by stating that “differentiation”,
in the definition above, refers to the process of subdividing functional or
departmental units, with each of them focused on “a particular aspect of the
organization’s operations”. Whereas, “integration” happens when the
previously-identified differentiated units are linked in a bid to achieve unity
of effort in working towards organizational goals.[3]
Therefore, in doing organization design,
a step-by-step methodology is followed with the basic intention of “identifying dysfunctional aspects of
work flow, procedures, structures and systems, realigning them to fit current realities or goals, and the development of plans to implement the
new changes”.[4]
Future of Organization Design: Organizing Driods
Organization design would hardly achieve
the desired result unless it is able to translate the strategic goals of an
organization into an array of effective organizational structure and culture,
implemented by the right people, in the right position at the right time. Since
it is intended to achieve the alignment of structure, process, rewards, metrics
and talent with the strategy of the business, the process of any organization
design project must consider external influencers (industry best practices,
emerging trends etc.) alongside the internal needs (structure, culture and
processes) in order to attain gainful outcomes.
In his book titled “The Future Is Fluid Form”, Ord Elliott described the process of
creating an organization capable of outpacing the competition. He named it “the
Fluid Organization”—where the right people are in the right place at the right
time—a new way to organize the organization’s people, its business and its
future.
Elliott downplayed the traditional conception
of organizational structures as the pyramidal charts “with ever increasing
boxes as you move downwards”, with work “seen as a set of activities that
belong to an individual or to a unit/department”.
Canvassing for a new way of conceiving
work, Elliott painted a scenario.
“Suppose you started a new business. Instead of hiring humans as
employees or contractors, your organization would be populated by Driods[5]. Think of Driods as
employees that perform only the work required when it is needed. What sort of
organizational structure would you require to support this? Would a traditional
hierarchal system make sense?”
Humans are
different from Driods. Yes! Humans have emotions—they feel the need to move-up
the hierarchy as a sign of progress or success— Driods don’t. Human have
societal needs—feed self and others etc.— Driods don’t. So, it’s insensible to
compare Driods to humans? No, it’s not! Why? The Workplace is evolving.
The future
workplace will be mostly populated by a generation of workforce who is more
task-oriented and less concerned about hierarchical progress. In fact, these
new crop of workers (also termed “knowledge workers”) have less emotional ties
to the organizations they work for, having greater ties with tasks contracted
to them within the agreed time-frame—quite similar to how a “Driod-staffed”
organization would function.
The implication for Organizations Design Experts of
the future lays in the need to increasingly consider networked rather than
hierarchal work relationships within organizations. Expectedly, this will lead
to more vertical than horizontal relationships. Interestingly, work processes
are conventionally vertically charted processes, signifying the ease of
creating network-type of organization flat structures.
