Survey on Hidden Patterns
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Radar
Daily observations on organization design.
31 posts
Design Feeling
Naoto Fukasawa designs objects that disappear into use. Most org design disappears into frameworks. What if we took feeling as seriously as thinking?
The New Five Forces
Porter's Five Forces are worth critiquing but we've got to adopt structures that actually allow organizations to adapt to big shocks.
A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences
Don't treat human systems (exclusively) as engineering problems.
INSEAD: AI Changes the Org Chart
It is an article of faith among technologists that artificial intelligence will make workers more productive. A new field experiment suggests it may do something more interesting: make them more social.
The Decision Bottleneck
More flattening, more information, not a ton of good practice around decision-making.
Structure Is Not Organization
Going back to the archives with the original attempt to join hard and soft elements of organization design. Also, I missed a day. Oops!
Divisions as Differentiators
Every (big-ish) box on your org chart should have a connection to your strategy. (Almost missed today due to bad wifi on my United Flight.)
The Unbundling of the CFO at Coke
Coca‑Cola is radically reshaping how it leads and innovates to accelerate digital transformation and better connect with consumers—shaking up top roles and creating an entirely new executive seat to unify tech and strategy.
Great Leaders are Great Followers
...an unpopular and uncomfortable truth for the already powerful. Also: is followership a _stage_ of development or truly a permanent practice? Probably the latter, but how do we reinforce that?
Anthropic’s AI constitution is an exercise in rule-of-law governance
I solemnly swear that this is not an international relations blog, nor is it an AI blog, but THINGS ARE HAPPENING
Enterprise AI is getting stuck on people
AI AI AI but also can we pour one out for Mark Carney's historic speech? Hoping saner impulses prevail and as an IR major I'm very bummed about all the Melian Dialogue stuff of late.
AI and Obsolescence: Anthropic Research
Anthropic's research into Claude Code may signal the end of ideas like "role clarity" and "opportunities for growth and development." Is that a good thing?
Introducing ccccharter
I built a living Team Charter tool because PowerPoint is where org design goes to die
The Changemaker's Skills Maturity Matrix
This development tool is designed to give change-agents inside organizations clarity into their path forward, help them define and deepen strengths, and maybe give us some shared language about what we do.
The Matrix Design Canvas
A tool that helps managers and individual contributors design systems that get better performance out of dual-reporting roles.
Netflix, Democracy, and ~Operational Excellence
Why Netflix's approach to complexity – going all the way back to 2001 – creates better results.
How Internal Capabilities Evolve
Platform teams are an alternative to matrix orgs and siloed, repetitive SBUs.
Activist Presentations & Corporate Structure
TLDR: Activist investors want lean SBUs, and they don't love that matrix
Shopify's Meeting Diet
Shopify cancelled 76,500 hours of meetings. I think that's great.
Skills Maturity Matrix + Organizational Pace Layers
People love Skills-Maturity Matrices, and with good reason – they help bring clarity to next steps and learning opportunities. We can make them better by applying Pace Layers to them. Here's how.
Use DICE instead of RACI
RACI is vague, hard to use, and reinforces the "what the hell is happening here" status quo. DICE is specific, easy to use, and shines a bright light on dysfunction.
Scheduling at Black Glass
I adore shared scheduling as a tool for designing business. tl;dr At Black Glass we're synchronizing five "office closed" weeks and four mandatory (at a minimum!) weeks of PTO.
Software for Scaled Organizing
TL;DR: PowerPoint is a terrible tool for organization design, and we need a trusted alternative designed to match our values. And, sorry, leader-owned maps of reporting lines aren't the answer.
The Trouble With Hierarchy
Hierarchy lets leaders learn more; it pushes the org to learn about itself, not about customers; it creates busywork. A network of teams is the answer.
On Advertising
There’s a lot of back-and-forth on the internet about the value of banners, the value of social, and whether or not it’s a good idea generally to advertise on the internet. I’m not sure where we’ll all come down on this – ultimately I think we all
Boris Cube
Last week, my lovely and talented colleague Vlad wrote about three steps to eliminate/mitigate risks in strategy – understand, assess, neutralize – and offered a chart that caught my eye. Vlad adapted a piece of HBR chartery that was fundamentally similar to a Boris Cube, something used by aerospace engineers to
Connectedness
Looking at connectedness is interesting. For a post on Undercurrent’s Theory blog, I’m looking at the emailing habits of colleagues as a proxy for the connectedness between people. Every pixel in line width represents 100 emails sent/received between two people. Darker nodes represent individuals that have been
Skunkworks
To spare you the extreme displeasure of going to the Lockheed Martin site to find the operating principles behind the O.G. Skunkworks, I’ve pasted them below. The bolding is mine. 1. The Skunk Works manager must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects. He
Principles for Pattern Implementation
The following seven principles are from a book called A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al., and they describe the method by which builders should implement the “patterns” laid out in subsequent chapters of the book. The patterns used by the book are essentially design guidelines, and they range
Make Things for People
This one’s near and dear to my heart. And it hurts when companies get it wrong. So it’s exciting to see it done so, so well. Muji’s just released a set of iPad apps that parallel their products, that align with the values they hold dear, and