Session

Economists say the next economy is just around the corner – some say it’s already here. The next economy is one that works for the benefit of all; we’re seeing it in trends like ESG, the B Corp movement, DEI, and other shifts in the way we think about business’s role in society.

In this session, Ryan will help participants see organization design through this “B” lens to prepare their organizations for the next economy. They’ll also walk away with a more tangible understanding of the social and environmental impact of their own or their clients’ businesses. A nod to ancient economic structure will give participants insights into a bold new structure for the future.

Bio

Worker-Owner at LIFT Economy, Co-author of The B Corp Handbook and The Next Economy MBA

Along with his LIFT Economy team, Ryan has helped over 50 companies—including Patagonia, Allbirds, and Ben & Jerry’s—become Certified B Corporations and integrate principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion into their organization. He is a co-creator of the Next Economy MBA, designed to answer the question “what would a business education look like if [the economy] was completely redesigned for the benefit of all life?”

Ryan has written articles for publications like the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and Huffington Post. He has been a featured speaker at SOCAP, Bioneers, Summit LA, the B Corp Champions Retreat, the Sustainable Enterprise Conference, several prestigious business schools, and many other organizations.

The Brave New Work podcast hosts, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans, will join us virtually for a discussion on how they see their work in the “future of work” arena is impacting the field of organization design.

Podcast Summary:
What’s stopping us from doing the best work of our lives? It’s the way we work. Whether you’re building a startup or reinventing a global enterprise, every day is a battle between chaos and bureaucracy. But, what if there’s a third way? Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans help teams all over the world discover a more adaptive and human way of working. Now it’s your turn. Each week, they’ll bring you a counterintuitive take on a common challenge at work—and you’ll hear from guests who have been there and found their way to something better. This isn’t business as usual. This is Brave New Work.

Podcast Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/brave-new-work/id1488554600

Socials:
LinkedIn: The Ready
Twitter: @theready

Aaron Dignan:

Aaron is the founder of The Ready, a future-of-work consultancy committed to changing how the world works—from business as usual to brave new work. He helps companies large and small adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. Clients include Charles Schwab, Kaplan, Microsoft, Rabobank, Macy’s, Sweetgreen, Dropbox, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York Public Radio, and charity: water. Aaron is also the founder of Murmur—a platform that helps teams make collaborative decisions without a meeting—and an angel investor who builds partnerships between the startups and end-ups he advises.

Socials:

LinkedIn: Aaron Dignan

Twitter: @aarondignan

Medium: Aaron Dignan

Rodney Evans:

Rodney is a partner at The Ready and a pioneer in adaptive organization design and the future of work. With 20 years’ experience in all things transformation, she’s researched, developed, and taught new ways of working in dozens of complex environments, helping clients like Airbnb, Macy’s, GE, Intuit, and Charter Communications unleash talent and modernize traditional workplaces and practices. Beyond consulting, Rodney regularly speaks about such topics as cultivating self-awareness, creating a team of teams, designing for self-management, and navigating a working world designed by and for men. She believes the future of work is now and that new approaches to old problems are key to our survival as a species.

Socials:

LinkedIn: Rodney Evans

Twitter: @rodneyevans919

Medium: Rodney Evans

Session

The effectiveness of a CEO and senior leadership team’s strategy execution is limited to a few levers, one of which is the design and implementation of the organization. Unfortunately, organization design is often viewed as simply an org chart and not as a system that connects the workforce to their work. To effectively achieve objectives, it is necessary to examine the skills of the workforce as well. Rupert, the founder of Orgvue and author of two books on Organizational Design, will emphasize the importance of a systems view and explain how to design an organization that goes beyond the traditional focus on structure AND the “one and done” mindset that doing this work is a one-off. He will also discuss the need to make this a core capability within the organization rather than something done as part of an isolated transformation or restructure project when it may be too late.

Bio

Rupert Morrison is an economist, industry leader and visionary in data-driven organization management. With over 20 years of experience in industry, Rupert combines a deep understanding of board-level business issues with data-driven methodologies and advanced analytics techniques to create ground-breaking technology products.

In 2008, Rupert founded Concentra Analytics, leading a merger of management consultants from A.T. Kearney with technology firm, Concentra. As CEO, he has steered the company to become the 26th fastest growing technology company in the UK (The Sunday Times’ Tech Track 100, 2011), with a rapidly expanding presence in North America and emerging in Asia Pacific.

Rupert is the pioneer behind Orgvue, the leading organizational design and planning platform, which has won numerous accolades including Gartner’s ‘Cool Vendor’ in human capital management software (2014).

Session

For decades, leaders have recognized that organization designs are transient, often bouncing back and forth between polarities like centralization and decentralization. While this may be good from the perspective of generating business for organization design consultants, it points to a truth we would rather not discuss: much of our hard work in optimizing organizational design simply doesn’t last. When leaders use organization design as a tool to address internal politics, satisfy external stakeholders, or demonstrate that they are taking action in the face of performance challenges, they sometimes end up creating confusion about what really matters. Rather than creating sustained commitment, frequent redesign can cause people to sit back waiting for the next shakeup to occur. While designing for organizational agility has taken a front seat due to the turbulence of our times, there is also value in designing for permanence, at least in a few desired characteristics, competencies or strengths that should endure. If asked to embed these characteristics in an organization’s DNA, how would we go about it? Beyond designing in enduring strengths, our times are characterized by an urgency to address oversights that have been allowed to persist for far too long, to the point that they now threaten both the pride we feel in our society and our future existence on the planet. As leaders come under increasing pressure to address these concerns, organization designers will be challenged increasingly to invent structures, processes and arrangements to fortify and sustain our commitments to values such as DEI, ESG and ethical governance. What should our response be? Training alone, or impassioned appeals to our better angels are insufficient. In our work with ground-breaking organizations, we have come to learn that as in other areas that demand real changes in behavior to improve performance, quality or agility, a high-engagement socio-technical response is required. We think of designing values into organizations as equivalent to gene replacement therapy or changing the fundamental DNA of the organization to support desired changes in values and behavior. This session invites participants to share their ideas and experience in making organization design features permanent.

Bio

Bill is Professor of Practice at Columbia University and SVP at the Center for Creative Leadership. As a thought leader in the field of organization design and development, he has published thirty books and numerous articles, including Advanced Consulting, Leading Continuous Change, Braided Organizations, Designing Effective Organizations, Creating Strategic Change, and Research in Organizational Change and Development. As a practitioner, he has been advising leaders and designing organizations for decades. His clients have included Lupin Pharmaceuticals, Google, Slalom Consulting, Anglo American Mining, Unilever, Pepsi, Wal-Mart, BMS, United Airlines, The New York Times, Levi Strauss, Getinge, and many more. He and Jack Sherwood offered workshops on socio-technical systems design for a decade, followed by workshops with Gary Frank and others on the Fast Cycle Full Participation approach to organization design. More recently, he, Stu Winby and Chris Worley conducted research into digital transformation and offered workshops on digital organization design. Currently, he is helping to launch a Minority-owned consulting firm that will use participative design methods to address issues around DEI and organizational performance. He resides in New York with his wife, Mary and is the proud father of two professional women pursuing careers in consulting. Bill holds a BS in Aeronautical Engineering/Industrial Management and a Ph.D. in Administrative Sciences, both from Purdue University. Find out more at www.advancedchange.com

Session

How do you get a new organization design function to “stick” in an large organization? New org design functions face unique challenges in an organization, especially large organizations where components of org design were previously owned and executed by other groups–and other components are completely new to the organization. They face challenges in building key partnerships and stakeholder relationships across the organization, which are needed for garnering work and who have their own ideas of how to approach org design. They face challenges in navigating multi-workstream and cross-functional projects, where HR is still working through internal processes and capacity constraints while trying to meet their business area client’s needs. They are building custom tools and processes to adapt org design frameworks and approaches to the organization’s unique culture, to create pace in execution and foster confidence in those approaches with business area leaders. They also are still building credibility where they don’t have “proof” the methods will provide sustainable value in the organization.

Effectively navigating these factors are critical to the long-term success of any new function. Join us in this interactive session where we’ll be applying our collective org design experience and best practices to addressing these challenges. The presenter’s will share lessons learned on how we were able to “move the needle” to start enabling and scaling our new org design function at a large organization through the development of an org design Center of Excellence (COE).

Bios

Session

What if you had the opportunity to design your organization from a clean sheet? Where would you start? How would you do it – in a data-led way?

In this session we will discuss our latest thinking on clean-sheet design principles. This is rooted in the idea that when designing an organization, we should start with our growth strategy and then focus on the right work that delivers against our strategy, complimented with data driven methods using workload drivers and complexity factors to arrive at a fact-based blueprint.

Our clean-sheet approach is not only future oriented in terms of concept, but also proven in terms of applicability having been implemented at various clients over recent years. We will bring this concept to life by sharing an example from our own Accenture story.

Bio

Mithuna Bhatt specializes in value targeting across the enterprise with an emphasis on quantitative benchmarking and data-led organization design.

Mithuna leads teams to bring the right data and methods to solve our client’s operating model challenges. Her experience spans industries like consumer goods, life sciences, retail, resources and aerospace and defense.

Session

Today’s workforce is increasingly fluid. Many have spoken about where people are located (say, at an office or remote) and when work is happening (at the same or different times), but fewer have broadened the perspective to consider additional sources of fluidity, including who is doing the work, what kind of work is performed, how information is shared, which skills are required, and why people are doing their work. Organizations have an opportunity to carve out a unique approach to composing their workforce, gaining competitive advantage from leveraging specific sources of fluidity most relevant for their given business and talent context. Join us for this session to explore how fluidity can be a strategic choice rather than a tactical response to plug short-term talent gaps.

Bio

Session

“Arizona State University has been named the most innovative university in the US for eight years in a row. In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Enterprise Technology (ET) at ASU began the journey of transforming from a traditional unit that was largely seen as a utility for the university to the strategic partner that it is today. In addition to transforming the organization’s culture and leading digital transformation across the ASU Public Enterprise, ET changed the way work is done by creating an agile organizational structure.

In this highly interactive session, participants will learn how the Strategic Collaboration framework for change guided much of the transformational journey at ASU. They will engage in the first two practices of Strategic Collaboration – Radical Appreciation and Disruptive Inquiry – to collectively discover the essential elements for transformative change at scale and the challenges and gifts along the way.”

Bio

Christine Whitney Sanchez is the Chief Culture Officer for Enterprise Technology at Arizona State University and President of Innovation Partners International of the
Southwest LLC. She’s a social entrepreneur, consultant, coach, and architect of large-scale transformation. She has worked across five continents to build the capacity for mindful leadership, strategic collaboration and thriving organizations and communities.

Known around the world as a pioneer in blending collaborative methods and mindful practices to engage groups of 10 to 10,000, Christine has trained thousands of consultants and change leaders in strength-based approaches to leadership and organization development.

Integrating her expertise as a psychotherapist into her work as a higher education executive, consultant, professor, and coach, Christine has guided tens of thousands of stakeholders to dissolve barriers to communication, resolve thorny issues and generate new opportunities. Taking a holistic approach to change, she engages the whole system to build on strengths, disrupt the status quo, envision a desired future and create the conditions for success. She has facilitated some of the largest intergenerational conversations in the world. And that is what brings her joy.

She has a BA in Sociology from the University of Hawaii and a Master of Counseling degree from Arizona State University. She has been on faculty at Arizona State University where she taught leadership and at Claremont Lincoln University when she taught mindfulness.”

Session

From the outside, government organizations often appear complex, impossible-to-navigate monoliths full of cushy management jobs. We’ll pull back the curtain and peek at one municipality’s efforts to anchor its structure in organization design theory and shift the narrative, putting the pieces together to support a more positive employee and customer experience. In this session, participants will review a case study about the questions the City of Edmonton faces regarding its ‘middle management’ positions and how this set the stage for a journey to mature its approach to organization design. This workshop includes:

• An opportunity for participants to learn from each other about how to manage expectations in the face of external pressures
• An overview of stratified systems theory and how it can be adapted in a modern context, using it to combat the negative narrative around hierarchical structures and middle management
• A facilitated conversation about a draft organization design maturity curve, including where participants’ organizations fit and their future evolution
• A chance to look at and comment on organization design tools created to facilitate decision-making and a draft set of core accountabilities required of managers at different levels in a stratified structure to build horizontal and vertical alignment

Participants will engage in a world cafe and table discussions

Bio

Georgina Fairbanks has worked in a variety of strategic, operational, and human resources leadership roles. Her background in leading teams that deliver front-line service to the community drove her to transform the City of Edmonton’s HR service delivery model into one that is client-focused and data-driven. She has won multiple City Manager’s Awards of Excellence for projects related to diversity & inclusion, occupational health & safety and workforce optimization. Georgina currently leads the City’s HR Strategic Services team, which provides strategic support and advice to senior leaders across the organization.

Originally hailing from across the pond, Georgina now lives just outside of Edmonton, Alberta and holds a BSc in geography and education with certifications in change management and project management. She led the creation of the City’s organizational design dashboard, a data integration and visualization tool that complements the City’s Organizational Design Framework

Pam Sharpe worked in the private and not-for-profit sectors before shifting into government roles, working at both the provincial and municipal levels. A communications and change management professional, Pam’s always had a passion for enabling a positive employee experience for the people who deliver critical frontline services. She currently leads the organization development team at the City of Edmonton, which supports improved team effectiveness across the organization’s 70 service lines. She won a City Manager’s Award of Excellence for her role as project manager developing the foundation of the City’s respectful workplace program.

Pam lives in Edmonton, Alberta and holds a BA in Communications with certifications in organization development, project management and change management. She led the development of an Organization Design Framework to guide the City’s work in this space, and works in tandem with Georgina’s team on organization design projects.

Session

Over the last 20 years working to design organizations to achieve improvements for the business and for the people, I have discovered there are three issues to how we think about design today. First, we design for machines, not around humans. Second, we design for individuals, and ignore how humans behave in groups and systems. And third, we design knowing only a small amount of information (hierarchy, sticks, boxes, jobs, compensation, targets, authority) and ignore the majority of the information (networks, trust, relationships, roles, teaming, incentives that drive behaviors, empowerment and agency). Now that we have data and insights to uncover all of the information on networks of trust, and make the previously invisible visible, we can transform work and our experience of work as humans. In this interactive session, we will introduce the Peopletecture model, an innovative approach to architecting the organizations around humans, and you will leave with practical experience and tools on how to make work better for all. We will spend 90 minutes with real cases, applying proven methods and tools, to transform the design of our organizations to get increased trust, intentional collaboration and connected silos, better teaming, a heightened sense of belonging, and improved performance.

Bio

Tiffany McDowell, PhD is an Organization Design Strategist, Author, Consultant, Educator, EY Partner. She has advised dozens of CEO’s and hundreds of executives and team leaders on the topic of organization design, has published in academic and business journals innovations in the field of organizational design, and has taught the subject at multiple universities over the years. Dr. McDowell is uniquely positioned to be the authority on this topic, having bult one of the largest and most successful organization design practices in the world by bringing scientifically proven ideas together with a long and successful consulting career. Dr. McDowell focuses on delivering operating model, organization design, network analytics, decision optimization, workforce strategies, and change management solutions for large-scale transformation projects. As clients design and implement digital, agile, cost reduction, and future of work programs, she helps them with capabilities assessment, decision rights, role and accountability design, leadership development, talent planning and workforce transition. She completed her BA in Psychology at the University of British Columbia, her MBA at Simon Fraser University and her PhD in Industrial Psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology.