Strategies for Organization Design

2Solving the Right Problem

“… Most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to proportions something like this: 94 percent belong to the system.”

—W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (2018)

Organization designers are like architects for groups and systems in organizations—they must come into an environment, understand it, and change it for the better. Humans are intrinsically motivated, and knowing how we tick in social settings (like work) informs the architect to design the right conditions to encourage people to flourish at work. As Deming told us more than 50 years ago, the fact is the system that people work in and their interactions with people may account for 90% or 95% of performance.

A typical work environment is fraught with unclear scope of authority, misleading goals, agreement without cooperation, ineffective motivators, unclear decision rights, wrong information, and misleading structure. When we dig into the research on the common issues that make for an unhappy, unproductive workplace, what do we find?

• Lack of ownership
• Poor collaboration and overlap in roles
• Perception of pay and performance unfairness
• An us‐versus‐them mentality
• Lack of social connections
• Lack of empowerment and autonomy

Note that these are all group‐level dynamics. They occur because we are hardwired to belong, but in today's organizations, the conditions that create that sense of belonging are suboptimal. This is critically important, so let's explore it further.

Lack ...