Three Challenges

Excerpt from a 2017 podcast with Dr. Chad McAllister at The Everyday Innovator

Systems Thinking

The first challenge is developing a systems perspective and understanding of dynamic systems. We’ve talked about this for over 50 years, yet most business schools still don’t teach it. We train people in business schools in different disciplines. So much so that professors often know researchers and academics in their discipline around the world better than they know their colleagues down the hall in another department or discipline. We don’t organize business schools in systems; we arrange them in silos by discipline (marketing, finance, etc.). We organize the curriculum, the research, and the teaching around those same silos. So, we produce a siloed education in business schools, and then we expect people to figure out how to put it together later as a system. We’ve been talking about this for a while, and everybody shakes their head in agreement, but we haven’t made much progress fixing it. So, the first challenge is learning about dynamic systems and how the organization is a dynamic system. If you can’t get to that, you don’t have a basis for design because you need that understanding as a jumping-off point for good design.

Collaboration

The second challenge that most executives face is their ego. Collaboration is essential to good organizational design. No single person is experienced enough to have all the answers for good organizational design or any part of it. Consequently, collaboration is critical to good organizational design. Good organizational designers have an ego somewhere between arrogance and humility. This intermediate position means they advocate for their ideas and have an agenda, but they don’t think they have all the answers. They involve people to help them develop solutions. So the technical challenge of systems is probably easiest, and the ego challenge is perhaps a little more challenging to address. The last challenge may be the most difficult to address.

Curiosity

The third challenge is curiosity. If the leaders aren’t curious about better ways to design and run the organization, then they probably didn’t make it this far in this podcast. So people listening to this podcast are probably curious and wonder why that may be a challenge. But many people running organizations and occupying organizations aren’t that curious about better ways to run them. They want to get the work done and get out of here. Suppose you’re not curious and not interested in new and innovative ways you might design the organization in a unique way. In that case, you will be very limited in the creativity and innovation you can bring to management and the organization’s design. I contend that management and organization design need a lot of creativity and innovation.

I think that need will only grow. It’s useful to think of the organization as your little petri dish, where you’re conducting experiments and seeing what works and what doesn’t, because so much of what works in business is context-dependent and not generalizable. In fact, from a strategy perspective, we’re not hoping for generalizable organizational design and culture; otherwise, people could copy it easily. We’re looking for unique designs that fit our people, purpose, strategy, and work type. So you need a custom design.

The video is an excerpt from a 2017 podcast with Dr. Chad McAllister at The Everyday Innovator. For more podcasts on innovation and product development, check out the podcast on his website and iTunes.