Getting organizational redesign right

Principles of Organization Design

1. Free Yourself From the Past


2. Design With Knowledge of Your DNA

If you concentrate on org structure alone, you can fix whole class problems by tweaking the culture or changing the incentive system. Every solution to an organizational design problem requires restructuring. There will always be problems in a newly formed organization, just because you haven't discovered or experienced them yet, but that's the big... See more

It probably gives you an idea of context discovery when doing organization design in a large corporation. To understand what might need to change and why Microsoft's CEO Steve Sinofsky had to go through 'three months of 100 meetings. Windows leadership had to balance incentives with the structure for the organizational change to be successful. Sino... See more

With this in mind, here are the basic steps to organizational design: 1. Figure out what needs to be communicated. Start by listing the most important knowledge and who needs to have it. For example, knowledge of the product architecture must be understood by engineering, QA, product management, marketing, and sales. 2. Figure out what needs to be

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It makes sense to him to look at organizational design from a more practical perspective by referring to it as 'searching for form-context fit.' You can make small changes to your team or observe how changes percolate throughout the entire company. You just have to watch, try things out, and then reflect on what happens if you want to learn how to ... See more

Seeing design as part of a living system applies equally to more subtle design tasks, like the “design” of guiding ideas. “Organization design is widely misconstrued as moving around boxes and lines,” Bill O’Brien used to say. “The first task of organizational design concerns designing the governing ideas—the purpose, vision, and core values by whi

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