The Feng Shui of Organisation Design

When we ask people with responsibility for organisation design what they actually do day-to-day, they usually respond by telling us that they advise leaders or groups of managers about the most effective structures, processes, reward systems etc. for their particular organisation. A colleague recently remarked to us, that these items could be viewed as the ‘organisational furniture’ – which begs the question: is organisation design the art of (re-)arranging furniture?

Well, it’s a starting point and, if we extend the metaphor and work with it, it raises a number of questions.  How will people who use and/or depend on that furniture engage with it? Do the team like their armchair in front of the TV? Does this department keep tripping over the coffee table on the way to the kitchen? It’s one thing to design the organisation on paper, but the acid test is when it comes up against the lifeblood of organisations – human beings – who determine whether the Feng Shui is right and can support the organisation to be successful.

So what are the ‘simple rules’ for the Feng Shui of Org Design?

Rule 1: it’s not about the number of rules, golden or otherwise.

Chris Worley, in a recent post on LinkedIn, made a powerful case, arguing:

“Professors, researchers, and consultants do not help organizations develop effective redesign capabilities by giving them nine rules and telling them to ‘pick six.’”

In a nutshell: it is a little bit more complicated than that, and the craving for certainty that leaders and managers have, and the attempts by those of us in the ‘helping professions’ of academia and consulting to mollify and dampen that anxiety, too often lead to collusion. As Worsley also says:

(Rules) “fail to give executives the information they need to understand the complexity and choices they face.”

Rule 2: It’s about the big picture and the small picture

Yes, you need to have an overarching understanding of the question(s) and needs your organisation design seeks to address. You may rearrange the furniture in a way that meets a strategic imperative for more cross-functional working and collaboration. And equally organisation design is completely dependent on the micro relationships of day to day life.  For example, a global organisation we work with had recently restructured to merge two divisions and move to a matrix structure, both to integrate the differing parts of the business, and foster collaboration and change the culture accordingly. The barrier, having moved the furniture around beautifully, was that the behaviour of the top thirty leaders in the business was unchanged. Therefore the old ways of working that the re-design was intended in part to address were still prevalent, just with people sitting in different chairs or sofas.

Unless how people interact is attended to, and the organisation design takes into account what else needs to be in place to amplify or dampen particular patterns of behaviour, no amount of ninja-like Feng Shui skills will make a difference.

Rule 3: Get the data

All of it and from the sources you need and not just the easily accessible ones.

Stretching the furniture metaphor a little further, you wouldn’t put a sofa in an alcove unless you had measured it first. And that is not enough. Organisations have a multitude of different data sets that often are not accessed when it comes to organisation design, often because it is deemed too fragmented or dirty. Now there are various tools that allow you to have a data-driven approach to org design.

Rule 4: did we mention it is not about the rules?

Without wishing to labour the point, we are going to labour the point. Organisation design is too often viewed as an either/or practice, and as a science. Our view is that if it is not entirely an art, it certainly requires a more philosophical approach coupled with ruthless pragmatism, which is maybe best explained by the Monday Morning 9am Question: when you get to the office at 9am on a Monday to ‘do’ organisation design, what is it you will actually do, how, why?

Roffey Park’s Organisation Design in Practice Programme seeks to answer this last question, offering participants a way to engage with organisation design to not only begin to understand how to think about the field, but also to translate that into practical, pragmatic, useful action.

For more information about Roffey Park’s Organisation Design programme please visit their website