Organization Design Coffee Club
January 17th
3rd Tuesday’s @ 11 AM (ET) | 5 PM (CET)

Join community member, Mark LaScola & Chris Furnell

Let’s talk all things Organization Design! ODF will host a monthly virtual coffee (or cocktail depending on where you are in the globe) club for people interested in or working in the field. Would you want to join? What are you fascinated by? Let us know!

January Topic: What challenges do you face when working with operating models?

Much organization design work being done today sub-optimizes the enterprise-wide operating model. While fixing one part of an operating model, it results in fragmenting and driving costly operational complications and misalignment into the wider operating model.  We believe, one root cause is an inadequate understanding of what an operating model truly is and more importantly, what it takes to optimize it.

On one end, large consulting firms approach this work doing “strategic organization design work” manifested with lots of slides ultimately leading to a re-shuffle of management and core jobs based on their idea of organization design. Maybe they help implement, maybe not.  Typical implementation is delivered through a load of compliance-based Change Management activity to ultimately push change onto affected stakeholders.

On the other end, you have internal practitioners usually embedded in HR doing micro-organization design work focused on a particular parts of an operating model such as spans, layers, management jobs, “distributed decision making”, RACIs, reward calibration, work levels and job levelling, etc. This is the result of two forces: 1) this micro-work aligns with most HR professional’s comfort zone, and 2) organizational leaders’ tolerance to do substantive organization design work is severely lacking thus muting any internal expertise.

Our experience with many unsuccessful org design projects is the limited practical understanding of what an operating model is and applying the appropriate breadth, depth, and pragmatism required to modernize an operating model.

Have you experienced organization design work that has led to sub-optimization and the fragmentation of an operating model?  What can/have you done about it?  What is wrong with taking a Change Management “push approach” to operating model transformation?  What challenges do you face when working with operating models?

We welcome any and all questions and would love to dive into this topic for discussion!

The Org Design Coffee Club will meet monthly for group conversation on topics of special interest in the field. We encourage people at all levels of experience and a vast array of interests to attend.