Teaching Organization Design in the Digital Age -- Session 3 | Certification of Organization Design Specialists

Speaker A Designers, both from a consulting basis but really often also employees in organizations. This brings sort of the idea into what is the background of people that work with organizational design and many come with a practical background, some have a business background and quite a few have a combination and some even have an academic background. Despite the fact that there has also been talking about the gap between research on organizational design and the practice of organizational design. So the idea and the discussion here, how do we ensure the quality of the design and the design process? Should we talk about a certification of individuals? And we have been talking about how could we sort of have the marketplace? And when you hire consultant or when you in other ways engaged in a design process, how do you know that the people that you work with actually have the knowledge and skills to do the organizational design? Should we have certification of individuals? Some industries have that. Are we looking into accreditation of course providers and do we want to evaluate the process or the outcome? Is it enough to get a certificate of attendance or do we actually want to test that you know something about the issue and are there some basic knowledge and skills that any designer should live up to? We have heard here there is a multitude of approaches, but we also have heard, like Jean said, that when you take all the various approaches you could build it down. There are three core elements that was underlying the elements or any design thinking process. Do we have core elements in organizational design, be it design thinking or analytic design, that we would anticipate that anyone that works with optimization design know. So that could be sort of an interesting church. Know gave a slide to Stephen on what was in his course and I'll just give you sort of a few sort of headlines to talk about what could be in an organizational design course and what could be some basic knowledge. We also heard about that. We really don't know whether what the organization is, is it a machine or is it something, is it something physical or so on. And I think we need to have some kind of discussion of what is compensation design. I think what we hear and what the trend is now that it is more than just drawing the reporting relationships it is to the systematic approach to design processes, leadership, culture, people, practices, metrics that can calculate whether it's good or bad to enable organization to achieve their mission and strategy. So again, this makes it very complex. Rich and I have written a book where we have a model and where we have 14 elements in the organization design space and the idea is that these 14 elements should be linked together. But if you start thinking about if you have 14 elements and you link them together, the number of links become very large, which actually shows that organization design is not simple but a very complex. And if you have this idea of having elements that are linked together just by changing one element, it sort of cascades through the organization and you also see some of the elements that would.

Speaker B Change over time and we had the.

Speaker A Time coming in as a question. The metrics, I don't think we are very good in talking about metrics. How do we deal, how do we measure a good and bad design? We can do that in various ways. I'm struck by the fact that when a company puts a product on the market, it may be designed through design thinking. In many cases it has to go through various tests before it's marketed. It could be a simple product like a Lego break or it could be a more complex product in the pharmaceutical industry. It has to go through serious tests that it works and it doesn't harm. We can now design organizations that are not tested at all, that may do harm or do very good, but we don't know in advance. And so I'm struck that we are allowed to make big changes in organizations without sort of the requirement to test that it actually works. Another thing that we could have in organization design course also would be the design elements and again that could be quite a few. So I think we should hear more focus on the headlines than what is sort of written below the headlines. There could be many. We have also in this PDW already talked about design principles, we have heard fit, we have design thinking and we go back to Jcatwith. The information processing paradigm was a way of principle that you could use. We also talked about organization design drivers and the traditional ones are size environments, technologies could go on and there could be also be user driven drivers and there could be many. But I think we need to look into what is driving a design and how do we measure it, whether it's good or bad. I think well, organizational design thinking and the organizational design or tradition is coming together and also moving into and that's probably why we are here in the ODC. It does not mean to the organization design community. What means the Organizational Development and Change.

Speaker B Division or AI Academy is that by.

Speaker A Talking about implementing organizational design we actually move into development and change of organizations. The good design is worth nothing if it's not implemented. And that was sort of a core focus on the design thinking. We have the type of let's call organizational design in the digital area. We haven't touched much about that so far in the discussion, but I would like to highlight three things that may affect the way we think and work on organizational design. First of all, the digital area change the items that we design. We have more virtual organizations, we have a different way of communication. We can have communication knowledge sharing in visual ways, in completely different ways. There are products that are more digitized than the world before. So when we talk about modern organization design, we need to challenge the old organization design principles from the point of view, what is the organization that we design? We can also talk about it in the way we teach design. We can use that learning with Elearning, we can use different kinds of simulation tools. We can do visualization of things. So I think we can also use that to change the way we teach. And again, well, the Elearning is the way we deliver the teaching. So I think there are three ways when we talk about the digital area that will affect the way we should think about organization design teaching in the future. I think that was what I had. So we could actually say that are we at the point where the organization design has matured enough to be a profession? How should we certify to be in the profession? Thank you.

Speaker B My name is Mark Lascola and I'm the managing principal of a global consultancy called on the Mark, started 26 years ago. I think the value that I can bring to this conversation, there's many things going through my mind that have been provocative and compelling. But I and my firm have done over 400 redesigns on five continents, over 40 different countries. And the reason I share that with you is about 20% of our business is teaching mostly internals on how to do work design. And I want to kind of keenly focus on not so much design thinking, but really focus in on teaching design in a digital era. And if you look around the room, some of you are taking notes on paper, some of you are working on your iPad simultaneously. And you can't talk about teaching design in the digital era without talking about generational learning and tools and what have you. As I said, about 20% of our business is teaching organization design. And I think all of us can agree that design itself, while you can teach someone the technical parts or the step by step actually application, there's a tremendous art to it. So part of the thing I want to talk to you about is representing our firm. But I also want to let you know that with some of my colleagues in the room, I'm a board member on the organization design community as well as the European Organization Design Forum. And I'm involved with attempting on behalf of the ODC to put together a global certification and organization design registry. So I have the honor and the opportunity to cut across many schools of thought around organization design in both practical and theoretical, as well as working with groups from around the world. And it's quite fascinating. So I'm going to share a couple of insights from both those perspectives. The first is I think teaching organization design is different for someone who's internal versus someone who's external. And I think if you're talking when you talk about teaching organization design, if you're not talking about readiness and teaching about change readiness simultaneously in real practical terms about making that real versus just doing design, I think you're behind the eight ball. If you're talking about change management, you're already ten years out of date, because what you have to think about is you can have the greatest design thinking, but you have to make them real. And what Borg said is you can't implement it doesn't matter what you do. The focus then for us in what we've moved to on a design practice is really focusing on the 1020 70 framework of making design real in organizations, where 10% is maybe classroom based or your classic kind of reading didactic kind of teaching. And the 20 and the 70 be being focused on coaching, mentoring, and actual real application with a lot of support. And we do that digitally all over the world, particularly the 2070 part where we're actually working with people to plan design work. Sometimes we're actually observing it in real time through various channels online, as well as cameras, as well as actually being in the room and then debriefing that design work and actually helping those individuals who are learning design, doing interventions with them all along the way. Almost like the way I learned marriage and family therapy and clinical work with Masters. Being behind a mirror and picking up the phone and saying, you're missing this point. You got to get this in. Gene talked about holding the space, which is a great term. It comes from organization development, comes from the clinical world. I think as designers and as teaching, holding that space is essential for those who are learning and helping them to learn, particularly internal and organization. There's tremendous pressure to move quickly. All of us have experienced that. And I think the challenge is in that 2070 teaching of organization design is allowing people the space to be able to learn, to touch, to make things real, and to be able to debrief. And I don't think there's a digital way to do that, meaning there's no shortcut around that of getting that experience of debriefing. And of course we can do it virtually, but it still has to be done. Let me put on the other hat of the competencies. There are many schools of thought around organization design, from requisite organization, social technical systems you have emerging today, agile thinking out of the It software development, lean thinking, and all of these different solutions and different ways of doing work are actually emerging into organization design. But what I can tell you this is that as I look across all these bodies of work and there's probably 60, 70% we have in common. And while in a requisite organization, they talk about levels one, two, three and four, sociotechnical systems might address it in some completely different way or other schools of design thinking. Organization design thinking. So it's important to understand, I think part of what's happening in our industry is there's a wrestle for who's more relevant. And really what I try to do in my role as a board member is look up above that and say what is relevant to make this practical in terms of teaching organization design, whether you're using one methodology or another. So in summary, what I would emphasize is in teaching design in a digital world, is it's not enough to get it in the classroom, it's not enough to get it didactically you have to apply and then you have to figure out systems and solutions and mechanisms in which to support people's development. And developing internals is very different than developing externals. There are different dynamics that have to be addressed.

Speaker C Thanks very much. I'm Nuno Jill. I'm a professor of new infrastructure development at Manchester Business School. Civil engineer by training, then I moved into management and Manchester Business School is one of the largest schools in the UK and there's history of reaching out both students that are interested to go into the for profit sector as well as non profit. So we used to have an MBA and an MBA program. In what I teach I introduce a lot of organizational design theory. So I develop and teach two electives. One on a megaproject leadership and governance and another one on a new infrastructure development. So it's kind of picking ideas from new product development and bringing them into a different empirical setting, the setting of delivering large scale infrastructure engineering systems. And I use an organizational design approach to try to illuminate and really make students aware of the way in which these things need to be designed. So these are large organizations that need to be created to design artifacts, whether it's train systems, airports, power plants, but the organizations are not only designing those things, but the organizations themselves need to be designed. The structures, the government structures, the contracting strategies, the decision making processes through which these design artifacts are going to be created and delivered by these organizations. So in the class I found space to introduce a design lens as a means to communicate to students that actually a lot of these leaders or these people in positions of authority are actually designing organizations. So when I accepted this invitation to talk at this panel, then I saw that there was this interest to connect to certification and I was a bit scared because this is not really what I do. So I thought about I could link to the thing that is central to this third panel which is certification, because I find relatively easy in the classroom to introduce design and to try to some extent I guess, I suppose indoctrinate my students about the value of organizational design as a means to help them become better professionals. Now, when I interview a lot of people, I do empirical research, a lot of it's qualitative research, and I talk with the leaders of these large schemes that design the governance structures, design the processes, they design the contracting strategies. And what I find interesting is that they don't think themselves as designers. They find themselves they identify themselves often by the title, by the titles that they have. So I'm project manager, I'm a project director, I'm a chief executive of this project, but not necessarily. They see their job as a job of design. Then when I'm doing the research, I'm asking them about the things that they design, even if they are not consciously aware that they are designing those things. And sometimes even they can provoke me and say, no, what I do has nothing to do with design. And then sometimes I provoke them back and say, well, but you just recruited 200 designers to design high speed tools, this train, and you are saying that this has nothing to do with design. And you have two under 300 designers in your organization. So some of the challenges then, from a certification point of view, which seems to be the interest of this panel, then, seems to me the way in which the existing bodies or what are they doing and in which way they are training the professionals. And it seems to me the challenge there is to reach out these incumbents, perhaps, and try to engage in a conversation as to whether they will consider modernizing some of their curriculums, as opposed to perhaps try to enter into a political fight and say, yeah, we have a superior certification that is better than yours. I saw that, for example, in my field with lean management and lean construction, as you mentioned. And so the incumbent in my field tends to be project management, because I study project based organizations. So the Project Management Institute is an organization with a global footprint and is very large and very powerful, influential. And they run these certification programs all over the world and are quite well established. And it's a very good machine from a scholarly perspective for many years now, actually been criticized for well, they have something called PMI book of Knowledge, which is really very primitive in many areas. It's incorrect, definitely needs to be modernized to capture old and new thinking. And although they are, I think when you talk with individuals within the organization, they seem to be aware of that. And so, for example, as an individual, they will be receptive, perhaps to introduce some of these ideas that we are discussing here into their curriculum. When it gets into the practice of modernizing these bodies of knowledge, which are the basis of the certification, then we see a lot of inertia. So they may sponsor research about the things that should be done, but then they don't walk the talk because we don't see the research feeding into the basis of the manual that is the basis of the certification. And at the same time they are certifying all these project managers that are going to be designers, they will be designing the governance structures, the contracting strategies of the organizations, of the project based organizations that they will manage. And this is why I really don't know how to help Lean Construction, for example, because what the community of scholars that deal with lean management principles and theory that in some way they would feel it is a superior paradigm to the traditional project management literature. So what they tried to do is because they got so frustrated with this professional organization, Project Management Institute, they decided own institution. So it's the Lean Construction Institute and they kind of coexist. Definitely their ambition was to replace PMI saying well, we are so if you go back to 15 years ago when they started Lean Construction, they thought well, our ideas are so much more powerful and so much more interesting for businesses and for governments that we believe that in ten years time there will be no BMI. And the option for professionals that want a certification around project management within the world of construction, large infrastructure will be the Lean Construction Institute affiliation. Well, and that never happens because few people in the industry, they see themselves as project manager. So that's my job role. That also relates to the way in which jobs are advertised in the industry. So you don't see jobs being advertised for a Lean Construction specialist, but you see jobs being advertised for project managers or program managers. And as a result of that, it becomes really difficult for many professionals to drop ditch their membership with PMI, even if they as an individual, they think also the content is not very good and embrace an alternative professional based organization that arguably would have more interesting ideas. So kind of people have these divided loyalties between an organization that resonates a lot with the way the job market is structured, the titles of the jobs that appear on newspapers, and the way in which then the content of the ideas that the professional organizations are conveying. And so perhaps they end up playing in two games at the same time. One is that fits the job market structures and another one which fits their career development ambitions and expectations. So I guess as I'll wrap up my intervention for going back to the central theme of the third panel, that seems to be the challenge here that you'd have. Of course I would find that a lot of these ideas should fit certainly in these for example, Project Management Institute should embrace a lot of these ideas should we can make people way more aware of what they do as a job of designing things, structures, processes, contracting strategies. At the same time, I'm not sure, I really don't know. I have no limited advice as to whether the best strategy is try to compete with an alternative certification or to try to engage in a dialogue with this incumbent and persuade them that there is opportunity to cooperation and collaboration and try to improve their curriculum without at the same time not diminishing the job that you are also doing here. I think these are different strategies. I don't know which one is if one is superior to the other one, if both can be done at the same time. But it is difficult to what I also find is it is really difficult sometimes for these incumbents that own very large structures and deliver certification on the basis of existing manuals that have been printed and that they have all these professional trainers that are qualified to deliver training and certification based on one particular body of knowledge. And suddenly for them to they have a lot of inertia to modernize themselves, even if at an individual level, they understand that they should.

Speaker D I think we have a few moments for questions for this panel.

Speaker E I would like to continue on the last kind of argumentation going towards Project Management certificate as an analogy. So I've done a bit of research on that. So one additional issue I think that has really cropped up was the different levels of in this case organization that are competent would have been better sort of only the knowing, but also knows how to do or has done in the past. So that you can say someone has actual competency in applying things they just know. The second thing, there's another study I just have seen as a reviewer, so it's not get out, which looked at do 35 project managers have any effects on the actual success of projects? And I think for one of the three major specific cases actually the side negative correlation process and so that is probably the outcome, a limited effect. So it's probably more like making it visible as a PMI of the IPMA.

Speaker B It'S an interesting intersection between what we're talking about here and focusing on certification. So PMI, I don't want to talk about that, but it's a good example of kind of the challenge for us for certification and organization design. If you imagine you have CIPD, which is the UK's HR arm, you've got Sherm in North America, you've got the Organization Design Forum in the US, the European Organization Design Forum, Sociotechnical Systems Group, Roundtable, Requisite Organization, ODC among many others who all have an interest in certification and in some ways looking to stay relevant, right? Which is PMI's challenge, which is how do they stay relevant and do they become insulated from anyone competitors or do they open up and really have a relook? The same issue for us in organization design, as I said earlier, 60% to 70%, we may call it something different and I think Gene alluded to it is there's some very common skill sets and commonality but to give voice to something Ken and I were talking about earlier. It's very important in certification to differentiate between, okay, you know, something about organization design doesn't mean you can do it, and I can do it, but I can't do it for a large, complex, global organization. I might just be able to do it for a small function. And the intent on the certification that we're attempting to bring to market is a collaborative effort. So one of the things, as I said earlier, is you have to think about the change. Work simultaneously with the design work, and if you're not, you're going to get hit by one or the other. And in our instance, we have to work all the way across all these different organizations because everyone wants to fight for relevance, right, and stay relevant to their people simultaneously. We're trying to do something for a group of people who want certification, want recognition, want to be able to say inside their businesses, hey, we're certified. So it's an interesting dilemma for us, and I think the place we're starting with is what's just common, and the intent is to iterate years 2345 and get more specific about registry certification at a certain level. Like, I know arc design, but I can't do it. I've done small functional organizations in small companies, and now I can do global. But that's going to take time. So all these dynamics are happening simultaneously. It's an interesting I think, on that.

Speaker D Note, we have one more session to do. Yes, we should probably move thank our panelists for this session.