Strategies for Organization Design

1Right Intentions, Wrong Focus

“Every problem is a gift—without problems we would not grow.”

—Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within (2007)

Too many organizations bring in consultants and coaches and architects and a host of other people to try to “fix” employees' experiences and performances, as my experience with the aforementioned global conglomerate showed, in the all‐too‐often vain hope that these changes will translate into company‐wide improvements in productivity, growth and product quality. After more than 20 years of organization strategies consulting, I believe the same three challenges plague traditional organization design:

1. Design decisions are not linked to behavior.
2. Design solutions are focused primarily on the individual.
3. Design ignores the power of horizontal networks.

Design Decisions Are Not Linked to Behavior

The first fundamental gap in the existing models is that they do not clearly link the big, macro decisions that happen at the system level of an organization to the individual and group behaviors that result. However, due to a set of hardwired evolutionary conditions in human brains, the environment an individual or group is in has a direct and predictable influence on feelings and behavior. By understanding the context that has been designed and combining this with the psychology of how humans think and feel, we can understand individual thoughts and behaviors that are the direct outcomes of these design choices.

Let's say Company A wants to ...