How to Rapidly Test New Organization Designs

Instead of blindly adopting industry best practice, companies can pilot new organizational designs

Photo by Vardan Papikyan on Unsplash

It’s no secret that there are no universally applicable organization designs. What works in one context may not work in another because each organization has a different history, culture, and cast of characters. And yet there is a thriving segment of the management consulting business that specializes in implementing “best practices”—or sometimes “flavor of the month” organization designs—in companies that vary widely in terms of age, industry, and background.

One might hope that research and theory would help predict which designs work best in a particular context. However, having studied the topic for two decades, I believe this hope is unlikely to become reality anytime soon. Put simply, organizational contexts are dauntingly complex and vary in ways that we can’t fully observe.

This makes it hard to definitively recommend design interventions based on theory alone; context matters enormously. It is nothing short of foolhardy to adopt a new organization design or practice with no evidence that it will work in your organizational context.

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Comments

Playing games with people's jobs.

"Put simply, organizational contexts are dauntingly complex and vary in ways that we can’t fully observe."

So how are you going to control these contexts well enough to perform a fruitful RCT on a realistically sized and realistically diverse team?

A business is a process: not a population. Use process statistics to improve processes.

If you think that a change for your business is a good idea, articulate what the improvement is supposed to be, implement the change, and use a process behaviour chart to determine what outcome, if any, was likely attributable to your action on the system. Right or wrong, you learn something no matter what. Rinse, and repeat. This is what continuous improvement is.

Or, you could do what this author proposes, and turn your employees into test subjects for an experiment that will likely tell you very little, if anything. Unless your team is simply massive, there's no way to truly randomize the allocation of talent and adaptibility, which are highly variable from person-to-person... also, you are not comparing a new process to an old process in this RCT, but rather one random team who does what they are comfortable with against another random team who does something foreign to them.

I'm not a software guy, but I can't help but think that this sort of experiment will leave you with a big, messy, confusing data analysis effort and more questions than answers at the end of what will probably be a frustrating and demoralizing experience for your teammembers.