The IllumiLab is excited to bring you another post in this blog series from guest contributor Chelsea Weber. Chelsea has over a decade of experience in organizational design, development, and transformation with private, government, and nonprofit organizations. The IllumiLab’s mission is to equip and empower change-makers to plan thoughtfully, design intentionally, work efficiently, and learn continuously. Organizational design is the bedrock of all those capacities! Take it away, Chelsea . . .
If you read the first installment of this series, you know you had homework: I asked readers to start looking at patterns, processes, and habits in your organization through a design lens.
And now….you might feel overwhelmed thinking, “There’s so much to re-design! We need to overhaul this place! In fact, we need a complete restructuring!”
Slow It Down – Redesign Does Not Equal Gut Rehab
If I told you my kitchen was hard to cook in, would you immediately grab a sledgehammer and say “It’s time for a gut rehab!”? I sincerely hope not! Listen, I love demolition as much as the next person, but I don’t have the budget, skills, or time for a gut rehab. Do you?
Redoing your organizational structure (i.e. the way you organize teams, create roles, organize reporting, or assign authority) as the first front of organizational redesign would be like jumping into that gut rehab – often far more costly than the actual benefit. There are plenty of ways to address the way things are designed before you demolish your org chart. There are also plenty of people who can help you.
Whether you decide to reach out to someone for support or take on organizational design internally, there’s something I want you to do first: Define what it is you’re aiming for.
Your First Stop: Strategy and Purpose
All good design has a clear intention. Your first question should be “What am I designing for?” Organizations should be designed to execute strategy and fulfill purpose, full stop.
A purpose defines why you exist. To close a certain gap, to address a certain community need, to fulfill a certain vision.
A strategy is a clear set of priorities and tradeoffs. It’s not a slide with pillars on it representing the whole of your work or vague directional statements. Strategy helps you focus by clarifying how you will pursue your goals and where you need to put resources to create impact. If our purpose is to fill a certain gap, address a community need, fulfill a vision, etc., our strategy ought to prioritize what we’re betting on to do that.
If your purpose and strategy aren’t clearly defined and articulated, you cannot design your organization intentionally.
This is critical – if you don’t have a clear purpose and strategy, pause. Without it, it’s just design for design’s sake. Energy spread thin and misdirected.
If you do have some clarity on purpose and strategy, your next step is to consider where that critical work is blocked. Does your strategy require you to be great at innovating, working cross-functionally, delivering a certain service at scale? How is the organization itself getting in the way?
What Are You Designing For?
Here’s an example (If you read part 1, this will be familiar): An organization’s purpose is to deliver healthcare services to vulnerable populations, and it is struggling to intake new patients in a timely and effective manner. Perhaps this organization’s strategy specifies particular kinds of healthcare services that their stakeholders really need. For the next two years, the organization is strategically focused on enabling better access to mental health services, an area where intake is particularly difficult, due both to patient factors and internal factors. The trick for mental health intake is both speed and clarity – the team needs to quickly route a person seeking these services to the right care or the organization might lose the opportunity to support them.
Crafting a Good Design Question
Thinking in this way helps the organization ask a better question related to its design. It isn’t “How do we fix this broken process?”, it’s “How might we design things so that we can quickly route patients in need of mental health support to the right care?”
A good design question takes you from a vaguely felt need to a clarified area for innovation. Broken down, the steps I just took were: Clarify strategic priority → identify the thing we need to do more effectively or achieve that priority → target design elements that enable the thing we need to do better. Here a few other examples of turning a vague need into a design question:
- From “How do we help this team work together?” to “How might we design things so this strategically important team has the authority, motivation, and clarity to do good work?”
- From “How do we communicate better among departments?” to “How might we design things so that our intake teams can quickly share information and work on the highest priority cases?”
- From “How do we make our leaders better?” to “How might we design things so that our leaders can make better prioritization decisions in the field, which is critical for our strategy to work?”
Design For the Work
All of this is walking you towards one fundamental principle for org designers:
We design around the most important work. Not the constraints. Not the people.
Yes, the constraints and the people are critical factors. We don’t have all the money, time, or skills in the world. We want people to have a positive and engaging experience in the organization. But designing around those things doesn’t address the real imperative for organizations – creating impact and valuable outcomes for the people you serve.