Speaker A Wraps up the formal part of the program in terms of presentations. But we do sort of set aside this last bit here for what we call reflections on the day. I don't know quite its genesis, but it seems to be a good thing. And it's really a chance for everyone in the audience to kind of sort of reflect on what's occurred maybe across presentations, across discussions, and either offer a comment or an observation or maybe even a question for one of our speakers or maybe even for our academic audience who are thinking about research questions. And to sort of get us started, I've asked Rich Burton to maybe offer his thoughts on the day.
Speaker B Well, I think this has been a fantastic day and one of the things that comes across, at least loud and clear to me is that organization design is complicated and it is not easy. One of the concepts that well known in organization, if you like, is the differentiation and the integration. And there are sort of two sides of the same coin and that's namely we have to worry about what each of us is going to do, but then we have to worry about how we're going to put it all together. And we have been typically, if you think about most of what we talked about today, was the real difficult problem. And that's namely the integration is namely, how do we put it together? And so one of the things I'd like to talk about just for a second is the integration of ideas and then the integration of, shall we say, tasks that we have. And just for argument's sake, is that we have divided the world into research, teaching and practice for the most part. And that part of the fundamental of why we're at ODC. And what I heard here today is the world of research, teaching and practice is not differentiated. It is highly integrated. It is much the same, shall we say, task. And one of the great things that I heard was that although we have different jobs, shall we say, in research and practice and so on, we were all having a conversation, we're all listening together, and the amount of commonality in terms of the fundamentals is really important and came across, shall we say.
Speaker A In.
Speaker B Depth in all that was said. Let me change this slightly and then we'll open it up. Is that what is the organization design? Well, as I've said before, it's very complicated. We've all agreed about that. And one of the contrasts, but also the integration differentiation, but also the integration is we started out with talking about culture, values, identity and so on. That kind of language has been more academic. But then it was also very apparent, as all the practitioners she always say talked about, that we're doing, but they didn't use quite that language to the same degree. The other side of organizational design, which in some sense has been part of our literature and is very much a part of the practice, is namely dealing with, shall we say, uncertainties interdependencies. What are the tasks, what are the communications, what does a team look like that we just talked about? These organizations are large, 100,000 people, but they're also very small in terms of teams and how do I get a team to work together? So I think that what I would suggest is that we have had too much differentiation both in terms of tasks across organizations and institutions. And that fundamentally, what we found out is that we have integration on a whole bunch of dimensions. Integration, shall we say, with what is organization design but integration across our institutions that make up the membership, shall we say, of ODC, that's really, shall we say, a very high level of what I've heard today. But I think it's been really a fantastic day.
Speaker A So we can open it up to other comments or questions or thoughts.
Speaker C Thanks, John.
Speaker D I had one quick observation and then one question. So the observation is a follow on to Richard's point about organization design being very complex. So you might appreciate this because there's a reason and a way to think about this complexity now that I find quite persuasive as to why the problem really exists. And it goes back to this picture. So Stefan Belizier asked a very interesting question why don't we just put all the same colors together? So it turns out that this is exactly the problem that network scientists are now grappling with in an activity called community detection. They even use the language of modularity to describe these communities. And the answer is it can't be done. It's a computationally very hard problem to find clusters of these things which are fully self contained with no interactions between them or with very few interactions between them. Even so, the moment you say the system is not decomposable, you can't solve this problem. And the fact that you can't solve it means we have a job, right? Because if it could be, you'd be out of a job. So I think the complexity in the system is what keeps the problem alive, one and one that engages and interest and also provides gainful employment to all of us. Then there's the question, which I think is, based on my admittedly limited sampling of the sessions today, I had to.
Speaker C Be in and out.
Speaker D I get the strong sense that a lot of the conversations today have been about design as getting people to do that which cannot be enforced. If I think about structure and culture, if I think about essentially what the last two gentlemen spoke about, which is really institutionalizing boundary signing, that's what they do. This is really about using design principles to get people to do that which cannot be enforced contractually. And that's very powerful because on the one hand, of course, the new contracts were incomplete and you have to be very naive to think design is just about designing contracts but the moment you get into the world of making people do things you can't enforce where do you draw the line between that and brainwashing? You start engineering with the references for instance. Some of the structured culture discussion was quite close to that issue I think. How do you get people to endogenously change their preferences to align more strongly with their group and community? We do it all the time. We call it onboarding as we call it. Where's the ethical line here? So how far do we go down that line? When do we know we're interfering with free choice? Is free choice an illusion? Maybe we should be worried about this. So I think it's a very interesting question for us to think of as a community that if you see our new role of design, not as being finding the contract that forces people to do what we want them to do, but of their own volition. But now redefine it as coming up with instruments that make people do what you want them to do, even if they didn't start out wanting to do it. And they would do it even if they're not watching. Right. And that I think is kind of a tricky question for us to think about.
Speaker E Just wanted to follow up on that point going to a point you made about value integration in terms of integrating values and how the conversation around social enterprises and goal alignment where there seems to be tension between social and economic objectives. I just thought this you mentioned there's a model that looks at value integration as a sort of softer mode of integrating potentially competing objectives. So I just thought that was an interesting point that could really bring social entrepreneurship and that kind of context into all design.
Speaker F It.
Speaker G I think this is my third meeting here. I think the format really worked very well for me. The senior, the junior in the business, I was energized by that. And the whole planning is very impressed with. And so I'm here representing an organization I would encourage. I would come back and try to bring several people from our organization. There are two theme areas that occurred to me that might be interesting to consider in the future one of them comes out of Mark Lascolla's presentation and the effort to bring together is to invite people I mean the Goldbrech star model was mentioned and other the Requisite model was mentioned, sociotech was mentioned. I think to explore some of that commonness and difference in dialogue before this group would be very interesting. So I think those could be running conversations over time because we see much of it complementary, but it's important to see why and where the areas are. But I think that would make very good dialogue. And I know none of these methods are taught purely in many academic settings, so I think it might be enriching to those who do teach design to hear something about these. So when they do mention them, there's more background. We have a former dean at Asper who said, no particular system is ever taught. Even when it becomes madly popular, we still don't teach quality at the University of Manitoba business look, quality has done everything. We don't teach depth, we don't teach any approach to management design. We always teach this broad survey, so no students ever learn any of it. So anyway, that's one theme. The other theme comes from reading a book right now called Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford. One line 50% of all job categories in North America will be substantially automated in 20 years. That single factor has massive implication for the size and design. I mean, retailing, I mean, think about it. Truck driving, cabs transportation, self driving. This has such massive implication that organ designers and HR will totally have to redesign ourselves to know how to redesign these organizations. I don't hear it in any circles on design of this extraordinary, fast impact of technology, except we have to talk to each other digitally. That's the only impact I hear. We all got to be connected and work in real time. So those are two themes. One, comparing and contrasting the methods and dealing with this future, which I feel coming on.
Speaker F US.
Speaker G Had an amazing clip.
Speaker A I just want to respond to fish and then I'll give it to Ray. I don't think we have to worry so much about the control, because I think one of the other themes that came out was this idea of emergence that no matter how much planning or control we try to build into the system, there is going to be this kind of emergent. And whether that is the culture or the conflicts going on in the organization sort of counteracts that. And ultimately, I think there's an attempt to sort of get an alignment there. But because of, I think, the nature of organizations and this contrast between the structure and the planned and the emergent, it's never gonna get never going to quite get there. Thank you.
Speaker F So much, participants today for a very stimulating set of presentations. When I think about themes over the course of the day, I've heard several people talk about new forms of organizations that require people to redefine their identity. So Hilla's presentation was about NASA scientists redefining their identity as what you call problem definers or problem. Well, they were problem solvers. Now they're what, problem specifiers, solution seekers, whatever. And then this Walmart presentation was about getting functional managers to let go, I think, so that people lower down can communicate directly with each other without using a hierarchy. And so many of these adaptations to new organizational forms require, I think, in general, decentralization, because we live in a world of people who've used Facebook and Google and Pinterest and you name your favorite social networking site where anybody with a smartphone is not a consumer of media. They're a co creator of media with everybody else and they will not accept detailed instructions coming down a hierarchy that they just have to follow blindly. And so when we live in a world of people who are co creators of media, they're also co creators of the workspace that they work in. And so managers have to learn the way the agile software people do or the way the military has with special forces to push power to the edge. And managers have to redefine their roles, I think as setting high level goals and then removing obstacles and providing resources. And that's a fundamental change from it goes across generations and if the managers are older and the workers are younger, it's especially more challenging. But I think technology is actually helping in some ways and I haven't heard it talked about today. But hierarchy originally evolved for a reason, which is that people get overloaded with information if everybody talks to everybody. And the kinds of technologies that Hayes and Alberts talk about in their book Power to the Edge. These are two military folks who talked about radical decentralization a long time ago. You can actually get that book online for free. And what they talk about is technologies that allow publish and subscribe to be done intelligently mean that you can publish everything you think might be interesting to anybody and they can subscribe to the things that they're interested in. And we do it by filtering email, by deciding who we friend or follow on Twitter or on Facebook and so on. And so all of us are beginning to do this. And I think this technology is allowing this real time, face to face problem solving both inside and outside of organizations in a way that's moving very, very fast along with automation which the previous speaker referred to. So I thought some very interesting themes came out and some challenges for all of us as organizational scientists.
Speaker A I'll stop here and then I'll call.
Speaker D My way back to that.
Speaker H Yeah, perhaps just building on what you were saying right, I think the importance of what you just said at the.
Speaker D End because I really pick up during.
Speaker H The day the importance of real time emergent, high quality information sharing mechanisms. I think that is fundamentally changing the way many organizations work and there are.
Speaker D Now both at the same time much.
Speaker H More autonomy and decentralization and much more integration effective. And that was perhaps pioneers reasonably in some of the special forces in the military. But organizations, corporate organizations can work in the same way. And I think that's probably going to be metaphors around saying a lot of work is going to be displaced and I think also interactions are going to be deeply modified by this availability of abundant real time information. And we have not really drawn issues in around for a long time. I remember a student right here 40 years ago visiting Ti and Texas Instruments was already at the time writing themselves off, knowing what was going on in.
Speaker E Every plant, every day.
Speaker D I don't think we have coped up.
Speaker H For it cluster and lost that's.
Speaker C I came to learn and I was not disappointed. It was really a positive experience for me. And one of the takeaways for me, one of the takeaways for me, I'm.
Speaker D Not one of those people who can.
Speaker C Speak without microphone, is that just reinforcing the iterative nature to deal with emerging issues. There is a faster pace of change. The last time that I heard Jake Albright speak, he was talking about big data and the influence of big data in organization design. The need to change faster. So the pace is increasing and that iterative nature. That the cycle that we revisit our organizations, not necessarily structurally, but from a health and process point of view is increasing. Question I was reinforced my thought to deal with these issues as quickly as possible. It's probably proactive as being a little bit optimistic as quickly as possible. And then also I was reinforced in the idea that organization structure is not the main deliverable.org chart, is not really.
Speaker B The output of this.
Speaker C The output is our articulation of how we expect this thing to work. So that came out very clearly in many of the presentations today.
Speaker B So thank you very much.
Speaker A Last word, anyone?
Speaker G You're?
Speaker B The last word?
Speaker A Okay, well then I will use it as a moment to say thank you very much to all our speakers today. Thank you for those who came as part of the academy. Thank you for those who came far and wide to add to our body of knowledge here. Thank you again to the organizational design community and Simon Fraser University for hosting us. It sounds like there's opportunities for more discussion as we move into the cocktail hour. I'll just add that again, they're clapping back there. I will add that the drink tickets are available here, so please do stop so we can they have been spread.
Speaker B Out and if you miss one, I have more.
Speaker A Okay, there you go. So that's your drinking instructions. And I just want to say thank you again on behalf of myself and Maggie, and we'll see you next year in Anaheim.