Five Org Design Things N° 10
Pattern languages and org analysis; RTO is bad, even if offices are good; old maps made 3D; diverging values worldwide; exit interviews
I'm an organization designer at Black Glass. I was a Co-Founder of August, and the Managing Partner of Undercurrent.
Pattern languages and org analysis; RTO is bad, even if offices are good; old maps made 3D; diverging values worldwide; exit interviews
Challenges facing creativity; owning ideas from beginning to end; opinionated palettes; are we doing zines again?; randomness that didn’t fit in the first four categories
4 ways to use Pace Layers in strategy and OD work: 🚀 As a career planning tool; 🎓 As a strategy tool; 🔬 As a diagnostic or sense-making tool; 🎨 As a design tool for value-adding layers.
Organizational health essential for firm performance; Avinsa; the heat death of Google; team performance research; platform teams @ PepsiCo
Most of the time when I ask teams how they make decisions, I get a lot of ... silence. And then either: a) "nobody's ever asked me that"; or b) "I don't think we ever know when we are making a decision"; or c) "we make too many decisions to have a 'way' to make decisions."
Prioritization isn't a tool problem. Or an individual performance problem. It's a strategy problem, and not one that you can fix with a better slide deck. It's about good diagnosis, a clear guiding policy, and truly connected actions... *made memorable* and *made practical.*
So you want to improve the performance of your team? Start with good team design. I started doing this method with clients and teams in 2013? 2014? and it’s still the undisputed champ.
Sometimes, it's hard to get teams and leaders to understand that *most teams* have a ton of performance upside. I think that stems from thinking that the average team has pretty middling performance: not great, but not terrible. The truth is that the average team is low-performing.
My ~sorta default setup for a workshop these days is to run these two sessions back-to-back: Future Backwards (from Dave Snowden/Cynefin), to sort out key topics that the team needs to address, then World Café, to actually work on those topics.
Don't use a RACI. If you must use something like it, use DICE (Decides, Informs, Consults, Executes). It's easier to understand, and shines a brighter spotlight on problems.
…and give your business a chance to complete projects that make a big difference in terms of growth.
A quick look at two change management models that are good for consultants and bad for companies, and one good one that you should actually use.