Crippling Epistemologies and Governance Failures: A Plea for Experimentalism

CHAPTER 6: Organization design neglected

. . . bringing people together to make something different happen .. . — harlan cleveland (2002: 000) Organization design is to governance what engineering is to science: the essential process of operationalization without which good reflective work is bound to remain fruitless. Yet this design work is poorly understood and quite difficult to execute, and is therefore not well done. It is the Achilles’ heel of governance, the weak point not very carefully attended to, and it is likely to be the source of failures of governance and of poor performance. For various reasons this weakness is more important nowadays than it used to be. Forty years ago it was merrily asserted that “structure follows strategy” and structure was seen as a mechanism through which strategy would be realized (Chandler 1962). This may have been the case in the relatively placid environments of earlier times, but in turbulent environments such as the ones the world is experiencing these days it is no longer true. In today’s contexts ex ante strategizing is, in a wide range of instances, quickly made obsolete by transformations in the context. Making the highest and best use of an existing organization’s properties and capacities CHAPTer 6 Organization design neglected PART II: WEAK INFRASTRUCTURE 147 AND INADEQUATE SCAFFOLDING is often the best that strategists can do. Consequently, the nature of organizations has come to play a more determining role in the decisions that are made and the strategies that are chosen. In the short run, ideally, a designer must try to shape the relatively more “inert” dimensions of an organization, in such a way that they will tend to provide the greatest leverage and the widest margin of manoeuvrability when strategic decisions have to be made. If this is not done, an organization may be trapped by its flawed design into drifting in very unpromising directions. In the longer run, an organization ’s design must be adjusted, through social learning, to keep the organization in line with new missions and contexts. In fact, this does not necessarily occur. An organization’s design is often inherited from tradition and history, or is the result of improvisation by newcomers eager to make their mark on the organization they have just recently joined. In both cases there is often not a good fit between the design, the mission and the context. However, because of the prevailing myth that strategy should determine structure, back-of-envelope strategies are often hastily drafted, and the ensuing job of carpentering the appropriate organization, regarded as part of routine management, is delegated to junior executives as part of the implementation of the willed strategy. It is hardly surprising that what ensues is not of great significance. It is only when catastrophes hit the organization that redesign takes a front seat. Yet in such critical times, again, panic strikes, improvisation prevails and what is presented as organization design is nothing more than trite tinkering with the organization chart, on the basis of something too often sketched in an amateurish way. A second reason why the design function is often performed badly is that it is not widely understood that organizations are not static fixtures but living entities. Very much like buildings, they evolve, despite their constraining structures, as their occupants take hold 148 CRIPPLING EPISTEMOLOGIES AND GOVERNANCE FAILURES of them, and transform their functions and missions in ways that were never planned. The only difference is that evolution occurs at a much faster pace in organizations , and often in more dramatic ways, as a result of the unintended consequences of all sorts of interactions, planned and unplanned. Consequently, organizations suffer from various forms of fibrillation, arteriosclerosis or the like, signalling that the old organizational form is no longer adjusted to the challenges of the day. As a result of these tensions, the organization evolves, but often in ways that go undetected, so a chasm develops between the formal shape of the organization on paper and its real-life counterpart, and a new and quite different organization emerges under the veneer of the formally acknowledged one. A third reason why effective organization design fails to materialize is that this sort of architectural work requires a different way of thinking. It cannot be guided by the sole sort of logic that dominates science, the search for general knowledge and the subsequent test of its validity, but instead is guided by an inquiry into systems that do not yet exist...