(2024-01-27) Cutler Tbm269 Three Organizational Design Principles

John Cutler: TBM 269: Three Organizational Design Principles. I have been thinking a lot about organization design lately and how it relates to how we collaborate and how managers/leaders collaborate.

I have come to understand three principles:

Principle #1: Hierarchical Collaboration Parity

To be sustainably successful, the level of collaboration and alignment among managers or leaders in an organization must be equal to or greater than the level of collaboration required among their respective front-line team members to complete a task successfully.

Teams can make do, but not for extended periods (see Principle #3).

Principle #2: Alignment and Work Style Gaps

three critical gaps constrain team effectiveness.

• The divergence between leaders' perceived level of alignment and their actual degree of alignment
• The mismatch between the level of alignment among leaders and the alignment level required by the real-world demands of the task at hand
• The mismatch between the level of collaboration required to do the task at hand and the practical constraints of the environment (e.g., the ability to work together closely)

To improve, you have to close these gaps.

Principle #3: Elephants and Front-Line Pragmatism

Organizations are optimized to avoid confronting deep-seated tensions or 'elephants in the room' at the leadership level. This avoidance manifests in front-line teams having to navigate these unaddressed challenges in their daily work pragmatically.

In situations where clear alignment from leaders is absent and escalating things don't work, teams resourcefully 'figure it out' through informal adaptations and agreements. However, this approach invariably leads to increased stress and sub-optimal outcomes

Ashby's Law

also known as the Law of Requisite Variety, states that to manage a system effectively, a control system must have at least as much variety as the system it is managing

The variety in responses and strategies at the managerial level must match the complexity and variety of challenges faced at the front-line level.

If leaders are not truly aligned with the realities of the front-line work, they cannot provide the necessary variety of responses to manage these challenges effectively

Front-line teams adapt and create workarounds for challenges, often without adequate guidance or alignment from leadership.

For an organization to navigate complex challenges effectively, it needs diverse communication methods

Just Trust Each Other More: this advice often overlooks the hard limits on the number of deeply collaborative and trusting relationships we can realistically maintain

We expect escalating levels of 'heroism' from middle management in juggling these competing demands