20 Insights from the 2019 Organization Design Conference
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20 Insights from the 2019 Organization Design Conference

December 17, 2019 | Article

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence—it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

Peter Drucker, management expert and author

Transforming Work, Evolving Culture, and Leveraging Technology

Why do organizations redesign themselves? To remain relevant as technology and the world around them changes, to grow or reach new markets, and to meet shifting customer needs and preferences. These disruptive forces are making existing designs obsolete. As a result, organization design is growing in importance. Companies that have the most successful transformations set up formal design and change management teams, make sure leaders are prepared to lead through change, organize the change strategy around a mission and goals, and determine which work will still need to be done by humans and which can be automated.

When 139 practitioners and experts met to discuss organization design, we took notes. Here are the highlights:

Create a model for change. Here are some steps to consider:

  1. Form a design team: Don’t think of organization design as a center of excellence that works as part-time internal consultants. Instead, make it a separate function that can clarify the business case for the redesign, put together a change management approach, and focus on the financial side of HR (understanding the cost of each job task, activity, and the work that gets done—this information will be useful later, when deciding what work to reallocate or automate). When a health insurer merged with a pharmacy benefits manager, the two organizations formed a 16-person design team that included people from all lines of business. In another instance, a medical device company created a transformation office with a dedicated four-person staff and leads in other departments that devoted 15 to 20 percent of their time to change.
  2. Determine or
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AUTHOR

SheriRothman

Former Senior Writer
The Conference Board


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