Practicing Organization Development, 5th Edition

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWOOrganization Design that Transforms

Amy Kates and Julian Chender

Afoundational understanding of organization design frameworks and methods should be in the toolkit of any organization development (OD) practitioner. While not all OD practitioners will engage in design, most will be asked to help activate the resulting changes—to bring to life the assumptions that business leaders have made about how strategy should be executed, where the power and resources lie, how decisions are made, and what behaviors are essential to that organization’s culture.

This chapter discusses the relationship between organization design and OD, highlights key frameworks and methods in the field, and suggests some of the competencies needed for those who wish to pursue a deeper practice in organization design.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ORGANIZATION DESIGN AND OD

Organization design is the link between the development of a business strategy and its successful execution. It is a decision science for selecting among competing alternatives to match the optimal operating model to the strategy (Boudreau and Ramstad 2007). An operating model is the basic architecture of an organization through which strategy is executed in day-to-day activities (Kates et al. 2021).

Organization design is necessary but not sufficient for executing strategy. Design answers the important questions about organization architecture, while OD is the practice of bringing these design decisions to life. The fields ...