Designing Organisational Revolution

Abstract

Organisations find it more and more difficult to deal with our changing times, as our world has drastically changed over the last decades. This has led us to believe that organisational theory and practice from the last decades just does not hold up anymore. They have created organisations that made sense then, but do not necessarily now. Organisations themselves need to change in order to keep up with this sped up world. To achieve better success, many organisations are (constantly) entrenched in large-scale change efforts. However, these do not guarantee improvement, with various studies suggesting only about 25 to 50% of these efforts succeed, and numbers are declining. Given the shortcomings to current organisation design theory and change management practices, a new approach could better link theory and practice to increase practical validity.
Therefore, strategic design is used as a new approach to describe organisations, their design and change processes. The research question following this idea is:
How can strategic design be of value in the understanding of and quest for progressive organisations, their design and the design and realisation of accompanying change efforts, to survive and thrive in the context of 21st century challenges? The research focuses on progressive organisations: those that are as ready for the present and future as possible and that (aim to) achieve three distinct abilities: engagement amongst employees, organisational agility and organisational ambidexterity. The focus on design leads to a new view on organisations as a set of organisational blocks and their connections. The approach, based on literature on progressive organisations, insights into design and prototyping and learnings from practice, is specifically human-centred. Organisations are defined from the viewpoint of the employee. The goal of this approach is to understand the organisation in a different way and make it possible to build a new organisation together with the employees in an iterative manner. The various organisational blocks are: raison d’être, environments, culture, grounding and action agenda. In order to achieve a progressive organisation, built on the aforementioned blocks, lessons from design and practice are combined to argue that the only way to deal with complexity is through iteration and repeated learnings. Based on this understanding, (semi-) controlled revolutions become the new approach to change efforts. The end-goal should not be to design or deduce static organisational plans, but to (constantly) adapt to the changing conditions, with the realisation that not all things can be predicted or controlled. This iteration is depicted in the figure to the left. Given this understanding, a revolution is guided by three principles: going from planned to hacked, not forcing, but inviting people to join the effort and to stop managing the effort, but going viral.
In order to increase the probability of successful change, and to increase the usefulness of this research, a revolution checklist is presented. Together, they encompass all aspects of the revolution that should be actively pursued and monitored. The checklist consists of six categories (depicted above), with various additional elements each. These categories are: be broad about it, approach from all angles, talk about the future, change by changing, take one step at a time and build on 21st century technology.