The Organizational Design Star

Let us take you through the star.

1. Strategy and value creation are the organization’s visions, offerings, products, services, and KPIs. What is valued, and what kind of value do we want to create? An example of a change in strategy and value creation may be that we decide to work with triple bottom lines instead of just a monetary one. Ignoring ESG is almost impossible today, but one thing is writing it down on a piece of paper – it’s an entirely different thing to operationalize and begin taking on all the consequences of a more nuanced value creation.
2. Structure is the skeleton of the organization: the hierarchies and the formalized roles with responsibilities attached. An example of a structure change may be how we put together teams. We may have a practice in the organization that dictates that someone with a specific role must be part of a team, e.g., a manager. But is it really necessary? Or could we set the team without managers?
3. Processes make the world go round. That is all the meetings, the formal (and informal) workflows, all the “how to’s” – how to hire and fire, how to conduct employee development conversations, how to run the budget process, etc. An example of a change in processes may be how we communicate with each other. Do we have a shared understanding of what to expect from our colleagues outside office hours? Should we explicitly agree to delay sending emails till 8 AM the next day to enhance a culture of not working outside office hours?
4. People and competencies are all the people who make up the organization. All your colleagues – the CEO and the student workers – and their skills, training, and experiences are vital to how the organization functions. An example of a change in people and competencies may be that you realize you need to find a new colleague or develop the skills of an existing colleague. The colleague may need to take on the task of coordinating and developing the work on sustainability across the organization because the range of it has expanded since CSR moved from primarily being a communication or legal matter to being a core strategic matter.
5. Space and technology are all the surroundings and equipment – the coffee machine, the systems for registering time, communicating with colleagues and external collaborators, and the office space with rooms for concentration and development. An example of a change in space and technology may be the look of the board we use for our Monday briefings. Which aspects of our work do we highlight? Is the board used most effectively, or could we structure it differently to enhance the behavior we seek from our colleagues?
6. Culture and beliefs are the assumptions that we build our organization and our behavior in the workplace. This dimension covers the more intangible stuff – one could call it our organizational DNA. These aspects of the organization are difficult to change because they are often implicit in everything we do, and our thoughts and actions are, therefore, colored by them. However, we can make them explicit and use our preferred version as a guideline for how we want our organization to function. In that case, it is a powerful lever to steer organizational changes. Culture and beliefs are not very approachable places to begin change. Nonetheless, this was where we started when we changed DDC’s organizational model. We formulated our beliefs, What we believe about people, back in 2020. They allowed us to test all our structures, processes, and how we approach people in the organization from this point of view. That has – and continues to be – a validating criterion for whenever we introduce a new way of doing things in the organization.

Breaking the organization down in these dimensions enables you to see interconnections and either bring you closer to or further from realizing your future vision. We use these dimensions in various ways when working with the organizational side of businesses – from a mere backdrop to a more operational tool. One of our aims for 2024 is to make it easier to work with. Even though the model’s logic is easily comprehensible, it is not easy to pick your organization apart.

It can be a numbing task to start changing the organization. And from a sustainability point of view, complexity does not end here. All six dimensions can just as well be used to evaluate all your external relationships with stakeholders, customers, suppliers, etc. How can your transactions with them serve as stepping stones towards a more sustainable future?

You may feel an urge to burn everything down and start anew. A natural urge that originates from that feeling of disharmony we touched upon in the first article. Even though entirely resetting an organization is possible, it is still costly and jeopardizes the company’s foundation. So, how do we create a sustainable change without calling for a time-out for the whole company?

To us, taking the design-driven way calls for experiments.

Experiment your way forward

Restructuring for sustainability involves a commitment to innovation since no one – not even the organizations that are furthest ahead on the sustainability journey – knows what lies ahead. Experimenting with your organization takes some practice but will, in turn, boost the culture of change that we spoke about in the beginning as an essential component of the muscle needed to imagine a different future and, consequently, a different organization.

When experimenting with your organizational design, we use this framework to help guide the process, and then we utilize a range of different design methods as we go along. As with the organizational design star, the framework is easily comprehended but not as easily implemented. 

To help you, we link to some of the tools we have on our website that may be useful in practicing organizational experiments. These are just examples – we always tailor the specific processes to the specific organizational reality, and we would love to hear if you have any tools or methods that could be helpful when working with your organization this way (send Gry or Sara an email).

Below, we explain the logic of the framework for organizational experiments. We have already covered the first two steps in detail above:

BONUS: If you get stuck!

As mentioned in the first article, we are often met with a sense of urgency when working with organizations and the people in them. Employees who start working seriously with their imagination- and the associated desire to act, will relatively quickly detect the organizational structures working against them. But starting the work with restructuring the organization, in parallel with the sustainable transition, can be overwhelming – so they feel stuck. 

To get unstuck, we try to apply a more playful and imaginative approach to our work on leadership and organizational change. Inspired by Dr. Joost Vervoort from Utrecht University, we argue that instead of seeing seriousness and playfulness as two opposing states of being – and working that cannot interact, we should see them as interrelated and strive for a state in between the two where we approach overwhelming tasks in a more playful manner. In fact, this is the only way to free our minds to develop new innovative ideas and solutions.

Expand your leadership

As a manager who wants to bolster your organization for what lies ahead and push for sustainable change, the most important things for you to facilitate is 1) a strong shared vision of the future you want to achieve together as an organization, 2) managing the stepping stones – the portfolio of possible changes in the organizational dimensions and 3) a learning, playful culture that enables continuous experimentation as an organization.

Working this way does not mean that all parts of the organization should be up for debate. You have to be very clear on which parts of the organization are open to change and which are not.

Opening up your organization in a process like this tampers with the existing power relations. Organizational strategies and tactics are now “owned” by everyone and not just the regular management.

Therefore, it will inevitably create ripple effects – placing other demands on both management and employees. However, if you can balance this as a leader, the reward is dedication, employee buy-in, and a new and expanded version of your leadership.

The role of the manager has indeed changed – from the manager being the go-to person who knew it all to being the facilitator opening up a space for questions and opportunities to flourish. And we need a new kind of leader to succeed with the sustainable transition. We need mission managers who focus on a long-term vision of change and who can visualize how the company and its offerings – together with a range of other stakeholders – can achieve it.