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Summary
In this Org Design Podcast episode from the Organizational Design Festival 2024, Chris Worley shares his fascinating journey in organizational design. We explore the common signs of org design issues, the importance of strategy in effective org design, and the challenges of power and politics in implementation. Chris emphasizes the significance of curiosity, trust-building, and the role of leaders in fostering psychological safety during organizational change. Tune in for insightful stories, practical advice, and a deep dive into the art and science of creating well-structured, adaptive organizations.
Show notes
Patrick Lencioni's Book - https://www.tablegroup.com/books/
Chris's work - https://bschool.pepperdine.edu/academics/faculty/chris-worley/
Chris's books - https://ceo.usc.edu/archive/?_sft_authors=chris-worley&_sft_kind=books
Transcript
[00:00:00] Tim Brewer: We're ready to go.
How am I going to get, I want a sip of my coffee, but I don't even know how to get to it now.
[00:00:05] Chris Worley: Pour it over the mic.
[00:00:06] Tim Brewer: Okay.
[00:00:07] Damian Bramanis: So live from ODF 2024. Yeah. Organizational Design Festival 2024.
[00:00:13] Tim Brewer: Welcome to the Org Design Podcast. The Org Design Festival is here in Minnesota, in Twin Cities. We are lucky enough to have the keynote speaker, Christopher Worley. Chris is one of the staff at Pepperdine University. Professor. Yep. Yeah. Really interesting talk today. We're going to get into that before we get going, Chris, tell us a little bit about how did you end up being an org design geek?
[00:00:36] Damian Bramanis: Yeah.
[00:00:38] Chris Worley: I'll try and give you the short story. I got introduced to first organization development when I was working for the forest service in the US and I was just fascinated by the way they were doing the work and so I went on and I got a master's in organization development. I realized, that was interesting and fun, but I I kept missing what was happening at the top of the organization
I went back and got my doctorate in strategy, and so org design sort of fits in the middle, what's the strategy? How am I gonna implement it? I got to work with all these people, and so I started building Playing around with structures and systems and processes, and this is probably the pivotal point a guy by the name of Jay Galbraith ended up at USC when I was finishing my doctoral program, he's pretty famous in the org design circles around the star model and I started learning about it from him.
[00:01:33] Tim Brewer: Super interesting. Yeah. So it didn't go, exit high school and like, I'm going to study org design.
[00:01:36] Chris Worley: No. Not at all. I was an environmentalist working with the Forest Service.
[00:01:40] Tim Brewer: We have our audiences is often people that have an organization that do not have formal training or experience in org design, but end up with org design problems.
[00:01:51] Chris Worley: Sure.
[00:01:52] Tim Brewer: I'm sure you've got to go and do diagnosis and observe things going wrong, and we often ask, like, who's got the worst going wrong story? So you're welcome to share one of those, but we'd love to hear, how do you know when you're meeting with people in their organization or maybe have students, you're taking them through org design for the first time. Yeah. How do you help them understand that the problem they're seeing or the symptoms they're having are Org design symptoms.
[00:02:15] Chris Worley: End up being org design problems. Yeah. You know, usually when you get called in, there is some sort of performance. Yeah, it could be an employee engagement. It could be productivity. It could be revenues are declining. Costs are going, there's usually some kind of outcome that you're not getting that you want, and one of the mantras of org design is all organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get. Yeah. Yep. And it's Dave Hannah, he was a former Procter and Gamble guy that did org design there, that was his phrase. And so the issue becomes, if you're unhappy with the results you're getting, you've got to go look back. In those structures and systems and processes, because each one of those elements is sending a signal to the employees. This is how you're supposed to behave, and so you can frame almost any particular problem in an org design way. I think that's, that could be my weakness is I tend to see everything as an org design problem. But as you listen to people, you do have to suss out where is this coming from? And as people talk, I tend to listen to them and I say, Oh, that's a structure issue. Oh, that's a process issue. That's a reward issue, And, you find out from this emergent phenomenon that they're trying to explain what's going wrong, what might be the causes, and you end up, so it's not always a people problem, sometimes it is, and sometimes it's a structure problem.
[00:03:47] Damian Bramanis: One of the things that you mentioned earlier was around diagnosis and looking at the people actually doing the work. Yeah. I'm interested, you talked about there understanding a problem. I'm assuming that's often from a management point of view. Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about how that differs when you, when you start with the diagnosis.
[00:04:05] Chris Worley: Yeah, you have to listen to what the leaders are thinking. They see the organization, they see the environment, they see their customers through a certain lens. Yeah. You need to understand that point of view. The other point of view is the organization is actually producing a service or a product that's meeting some customer need.
[00:04:23] Damian Bramanis: Yeah.
[00:04:24] Chris Worley: So part of the diagnosis is listening to that one perspective. And the other part of the diagnosis is going in and understanding what's the work. What's the work that's being done? How is that work being done? Do the people at the bottom of the organization, whether you're a nurse or a minor or a technician and a software developer, do they have the resources they need? Have those work processes been thought about? AI is a big deal right now, right? How is AI being used to support that work? So you really go into detail. You kind of go into, tell me how you do your job. What gets in the way of you being effective? Do you know what the customer wants? You just start being curious.
[00:05:06] Damian Bramanis: Yep.
[00:05:06] Chris Worley: And sort of trying to understand what's going on.
[00:05:08] Damian Bramanis: So, in the moment, how do you actually do that? How would you start to do that discovery work?
[00:05:14] Chris Worley: Part of it, for me, is over the years, I've been a nurse, I've been an electrical technician. I've been a gamer. I've done different jobs by just going down and talking to people. There really isn't anything particular you can, I mean, if you're going to do research in this area, you get very specific about things, but if you're a practitioner, you just go down there and start talking to people. Tell me what you do. People love to talk about what they do. What gets in your way? What's your best moments? What's the most frustrating part of the job? You just let them talk, and as they talk, they'll start talking about is my role clear? Do I have the resources I need? Am I being incented properly? Do I have some authority to make some decisions about certain things? So there'll be certain categories that tend to pop up over and over again, and It doesn't start with anything more than just being curious about people and how they do their jobs every day. It's simple. You know, I make it sound simple, but it really is. You just go talk to people. It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun.
[00:06:23] Tim Brewer: Chris with that discovery, that was a really good question, Damien. If you're a leader in an organization that might not be big enough to have their own internal design team, how do you suggest when they're kind of at 110 percent busy that they stay in touch with that or can take some time? Do you see the best leaders taking time to go and be curious about their organization? How do you see people overcome that when they're in the machine and not working?
[00:06:47] Chris Worley: That really is a good question and I make a fun a lot of times I'll make fun of executives because I'll look at over their shoulder at their schedule or their outlet calendar or something. I said, that looks like a barcode for some grocery item in the store, right? And I kind of look over their shoulder and say, where is the space in that day for you just to think about the organization? Do you create that space? I don't have time. I don't have time. I said, well, if you don't have time, who does? If you don't have an internal organization that handles this stuff, who is thinking about the organization? And if it's not you, who, so you, you know, I mentioned in the Q&A a little bit, you do have to find ways to speak truth to power and challenge them a little bit. Too often I think the executives live in a bit of a bubble and people telling them what they want to hear. Somebody has to tell them and ask them a different set of questions. From a different perspective.
[00:07:42] Damian Bramanis: Yeah. Yeah. I'm putting my place, myself in the place of that that leader. I've gone and thought and done some digging, and I've decided this is a structural issue, so I'm going to solve this by changing the structure, and I'm sure that's going to fix it. It'll fix it. What do you say to me?
[00:07:57] Chris Worley: The first thing is I want to see what your structure is. Yep. Alright? Draw. Okay. I love making people draw. Because the draw becomes the manifestation of their logic. Okay. Okay, yes. What they're thinking and why they're thinking, so why are you moving this, why are you moving this position or creating this position from the other way? What was your thinking?
And what we draw out of that conversation is what we call, some people call them design criteria, design principles. What kind of organization are you trying to create? Okay. Tell me how this organization that you've drawn here creates that organization. It focuses attention and resources in a different way than your other structure did.
So that's the way I start the conversation, and then I ask them, Will this change who makes certain decisions?
[00:08:50] Damian Bramanis: Yes. Okay.
[00:08:52] Tim Brewer: So I go almost directly from structure to management processes and thinking about decision rights. Because the organization is in some kind of equilibrium, right? I know that Tim makes this decision and we make this decision. Okay, with this structure now, does Tim still make that same decision? Mm hmm. Because now they start to see, oh, It's not just structure. There's more to it than just structure. Will the current incentive systems work for these people now? Or are we going to have to change the way these people are incented? So, once you get, you let them talk about the structure, because everybody thinks org design is structure. That's fine. Let them talk about the structure, then start asking them questions so that they begin to see it as a system. But let them start, let them start where they're comfortable.
[00:09:41] Damian Bramanis: Absolutely.
[00:09:42] Tim Brewer: What is the funniest or craziest thing you've seen? No names, no organizations, but what is the, you've come in,
[00:09:50] Damian Bramanis: You can, you can say names.
[00:09:54] Chris Worley: I have, I make the joke. I'm covered by so many NDAs. I'm surprised I can talk to anybody about anything. I'd have to say that the craziest thing that's happened lately is the question of, we need to redesign and, they give you a pretty decent set of reasons why, and we need to do it in two months. That's the craziest thing that's been happening lately is, here's the situation, blah, blah, blah. We have to get it done in two months. So, no, no, you don't understand, part of design is a conversation and explaining and understanding. Talk to the hand, Chris. I don't care. Yeah. It's got to be done in two months. And then trying to figure that out. That's, I don't know if it's, that's certainly not funny, but it's crazy. And I'd say the last three that I've done, that's been kind of the overall sort of request, is how fast can we do this? It puts a lot of pressure on the process.
[00:10:53] Tim Brewer: Chris, do you think about if I was a leader of an organization, should I be thinking about an amount of time change should take based on my size, based on what I'm wanting to do? And how much time should people taking to do the process leading up to maybe announcing or communicating change. Yeah. And how long should they be spending post the change ensuring that the change beds down well?
[00:11:13] Chris Worley: Yeah. So that gets back to, you know, if I was king for a day and could do it the way I wanted and everything's going to be different. The scale of change. It's going to make a big difference because the number of stakeholders that have to be involved, that's going to expand the time. If it's a more narrower scope, it's with a single function, you know, the stakeholders are easy. So, there's a couple of contingencies you always have to worry about.
Usually you've got to have a few days on the front end just to get everything settled. You know, a little bit of, a little bit of, are we clear about the direction? I don't start anything unless the strategy is clear. The joke I make about that is if you don't have a strategy any organization design will work. So you can so I gotta have a strategy if I don't have a strategy I got to go clarify that takes a little more time. But at some point I got to have everybody together and say here's the scope of the work. Here's the design principles. We're gonna use. This is the kind of organization that we want. I need to get the leadership team and sometimes it's an extended leadership team or a design team. I have to get them Collectively smart about what we're going to do and that takes a little time. So there's usually a two or three day thing at the front end about pulling everything together and make sure we got all the essential ingredients. Then I think you can break it into work streams and do work in parallel And again, that can take anywhere from, a week to several months, depending on the scope and the pressure that you're under. Then you can, then you've got a, you've got a blueprint of some sort and you can announce. Yeah.
[00:12:45] Damian Bramanis: You, you talked about strategy having, not having a clear strategy is a thing that is a roadblock or really can slow down the process particularly at the beginning. What about later on when change starts to happen? What, what would slow down or impede organizational design at that stage?
[00:13:01] Chris Worley: I, I think there's a couple of things that, that, that get in the way. One is as you move down through implementation, you may learn that the strategy isn't clear and you have to go back Mm-Hmm. and sort of tweak it a little bit and say, okay, if I'm, if I, 'cause I use strategy and I use design principles and design criteria and capabilities. Those are my tie breakers. You've got to tell me if we're going to put a structure or a system and process in place, you've got to tell me how that structure or system and process satisfies the strategy or contributes to it or something, and so that becomes the, that tends to be where the roadblocks come because. You have a certain interest. You're motivated. You want to build your organization. You may even be empire building. Okay, now I have to come back to you and say, "okay, tell me, as you're adding these 200 people in your organization, tell me how that's gonna make your capabilities better or your strategy".
So a lot of times as you get as you cross over from design to implementation You have to start dealing with power and politics And that becomes one of the constraints that you have to address. You can mitigate a lot of that by more participation early in the process. But downstream, people's jobs change. Structures change, that changes your job. Do I have a future in this company? so those kinds of things start to pop up.
[00:14:26] Damian Bramanis: You mentioned power in politics. There was something you said earlier that i'm interested to dig into a little bit more which was that bureaucracy is not a dirty word, correct, tell us why.
[00:14:36] Chris Worley: Okay, so there's a there's the popular sense about what a bureaucracy is and the images that it conjures up of paperwork and and all that sort of thing. Traditionally, right, bureaucracy is a form of organization. It is a particular kind of design that actually was, If you think about it, bureaucracy explains why our society grew so fast. We figured out how to divide up work into specializations and expertise and coordinate that work through hierarchy.
So there, there are certain characteristics of a bureaucratic organization that have nothing to do with this negative, pejorative, if you're frustrated with an organization, you call it bureaucratic. That has nothing to do with, that has nothing to do with the actual design of a bureaucratic organization, which is actually very elegant and, it fits a certain circumstance very well sometimes.
[00:15:37] Tim Brewer: Chris, you talked a lot about trust during your session here at ODF. Particularly it being, I don't know if I'm rephrasing your words too much, but being a criteria to effective change or it being really important, what are the practical things you do as you're dealing with that process of meeting people on the front line? Liaising with senior leadership, working inside of the bureaucracy, acknowledging the politics. Yeah. Maybe the empire building, the other non-intentional incentives that are happening in the organization. How do you build trust in those big, complex environments? Got it. And, and what should, you know, if I was sitting in the middle of an organization just be like, Hey Tim, we are buying five other companies could you just lead the integration effort? Right. What would you sit and give me, gimme advice to make sure that I'm got it. Managing trust building through that process?
[00:16:26] Chris Worley: What I try and tell people is trust is the flip side of risk. Think of a coin. You build trust quickly by taking little risks. You don't want to take a huge risk at the beginning. You know, first time I meet you, I hate your company and I hate the way you run your company. That's probably not going to build much trust, right? Rather, if you think about the metaphor we often use is the teeter totter, the seesaw. I'm going to put a little something out there, see if it makes sense to you. It might be a risk. It might be a risk to me. I don't know, but it might be a risk to you. Let's try something about that. Tell me why you run the organization this way. And see what you put on the other side of the teeter totter. Are you keeping things in balance? Or are you just going to, throw everything out and Use up your reservoir of trust quickly. How hard do you want to, how fast do you want to go?
So back to the thing I was talking about today, I think a lot of change can happen very quickly in small increments, that are designed and just a little bit at a time, a little bit of, take a little risk, make a little challenge, see how it's received. I like to get people to just play with that notion and say, tell me something that's a little risky from your point of view. The other thing I do is I think I got this right. I think it comes out of Lencioni's books on dysfunctions of teams. In his book, he talks about leader goes first. Yep. Who takes the first risk. It's got to be the leader, right? And I think people at the bottom who live inside of a hierarchy and an authoritative sort of structure, telling the emperor they have no clothes is a pretty big risk. Yeah. Right? So, first, leader goes first. You get to be a little vulnerable. You get to talk a little bit about how scared you are because this reorganization is really risky and it's there's a lot of worries there. Ways that it could go wrong. You get to go first and then see what happens. See how the rest of the people respond.
[00:18:35] Damian Bramanis: Build that feeling of safety.
[00:18:36] Chris Worley: Yep. Yep. Yep. That's a great one. Everybody keeps talking about psychological safety. I don't think anybody disagrees with psychological safety. I want to be safe to say what I need to say. It doesn't come out of thin air. No. It has to be built. Leader goes first. You get to talk about what's a little, what's a little dangerous for you in this change process.
[00:18:58] Tim Brewer: You talk about that need for small incremental change in an organization, you can make a lot of change if you do it in little parts, but we've all observed the behavior of most companies isn't to make any change, wait three years, the ceiling falling out, the chandeliers have dropped off, someone just got electrocuted, the board's freaking out, and now like, oh, we've got the answer, we're going to get McKinsey. We're going to get the most expensive slide deck money has ever purchased and we're going to solve this problem. Why is it that you think organizations struggle so much with making these incremental changes as problems occur when they're small and much easier to see and talk about and implement?
[00:19:46] Chris Worley: I think that the description of change that you gave is the way it used to be. We equated stability with performance. I can six sigma things to death. Yeah. So they're nice and neatly and under control and I'm efficient as hell. Then, the chandelier falls. Technological disruption happens. New technology comes in, right? And now we have to just, everything that we knew worked doesn't work anymore. We got to rip the bandaid off and we blow the whole organization up. The problem with that worked for a long time. I did my dissertation on that model. The problem is those disruptions, now are getting closer and closer together. And so when I talk to organizations, are you in transformation? Oh yes, we're in transformation.
How long have you been in transformation? Eight years. Ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah. Right? So they're in, now they're in continual transformation.
[00:20:41] Damian Bramanis: We'll get there one day.
[00:20:42] Chris Worley: Yes. And, and, hence the problem. The problem becomes, people get tired of change. Because somebody told them it was gonna be over. Somebody said, this is a big project, we're going to do this. Big hairy audacious goal, we fixed that, we're done. We're going through a reset. Which means at the end of the reset we'll be done.
[00:21:06] Damian Bramanis: Yep, everything will be set.
[00:21:07] Chris Worley: Everything will be done. And then you say, Oh, we've got to change more. And I talked to this one employee. It was a great conversation because she was talking about the change fatigue that she was experiencing in the organization, and I said, So what how do you, what does it feel like when they come up with another change? She says, I feel betrayed. I feel betrayed. And so I think one of the things we have to start doing is telling people change is now normal. That is the normal state of affairs. And we're going to try and, we're going to try and do a particular initiative, a product. We're going to do it for as long as we can, because it makes sense to do so. And then we're going to change it. And you should expect to change. And I think it just sets a completely different mindset for people in the organization. I think the other thing that contributed to that, you know, blow it up is, is we over committed to a certain way of doing things and that in that over commit, we build in inertia. We have long term contracts. We tell leaders, this is the way they're supposed to behave. Then we reward them for behaving that way. We get into habits. We do six sigma things to death and we take out all the slack resources, and that's the only way to do it right and now people And now you say you want me to change? Wait, you just, we just went through years of trying to figure out how to do it exactly this way so it was perfect. Now you want me to change? So I think the messages we send to a lot of people about how the organization is supposed to operate and what's considered normal and not normal need to, need to shift.
[00:22:45] Damian Bramanis: So in, in that that ideal of what an agile organization should look like, what do you see as the goals there? The shining light?
[00:22:53] Chris Worley: I try and talk about it in terms of four processes, routines, you can call them whatever you want. You have to have the ability to change your strategy routinely. You need to be more or less aggressive. You need to be be clear about what your differentiators are, that makes white people buy your stuff and not somebody else. So I think you gotta learn how to change those strategies. And I think that's a leadership issue, to set the stage and say, On the one hand, here's who we are, and on the other hand, we're going to be tweaking these things routinely because it positions us well in our environment. So strategizing is important. I'm just surprised how few organizations spend time in the future, future scenarios. I don't want to be surprised. I just need to reduce the number of surprises because if I'm surprised by something, that means I have to be brilliant immediately, and I never have a chance to sort of think about, well, what would I do? So I try to get teams to, especially leadership teams to spend a lot of time. What would I do if this happens? And honestly, I try and, I try and think of the most catastrophic thing, right?
[00:24:05] Tim Brewer: zombies, zombie apocalypse, zombie apocalypse. What would you do? Two years time, go. Yes, exactly.
[00:24:11] Chris Worley: Exactly. And they, a lot of times they poo poo the whole idea. Well, that's not going to happen. I said, you know, Humor me. I'm just trying to get them to play with the notion of these disruptions that are going to happen. You know they're going to happen, it's just when. So play with it. Take some time now to think about what you would do if you were surprised. So when the surprise comes, You're ready. So that's the strategizing, perceiving. Then I think organizations just need to spend more time trying things out in an experimental way. I say test and learn. That comes from Capital One. It was a really clever little part of their culture. Test and learn. Test and learn. Try it out. See what happens. And then I'm, I get in trouble with this one, but I'm worried that change management is dead. And what I mean by that is we're no longer doing one change at a time. We're having to orchestrate multiple changes at once. And most of the change management models struggle with that idea. Yeah. Right? Yeah. The struggle of how to do that. So what I tried to do, and the other thing that I'll pick on a little bit, in most change management models, there is no diagnostic step, and I get a little cynical because then I say, well, there's no diagnostic step, who decided we're going to do this change and who is it benefiting?
That's where power and politics comes back, comes back because I think some of the changes are being, are being proposed because they benefit me, as opposed to
[00:25:42] Tim Brewer: Are you choosing my want to get a promotion next year? I felt like that was a pretty good, well explained goal in this restructure to make sure we get profitable just for the next quarter.
[00:25:53] Chris Worley: Well, if you haven't learned already, right, as a professor I can talk about nothing for hours. So, we could talk about this stuff for days because it's just something that I'm fascinated by. It just really is. You know, the stuff we talked about is really important. It's absolutely crucial. Yeah. We talked about, when do you need a design? When do you need to redesign? What's the role of leadership? How do you create trust in, in uncertain circumstances? How do you orchestrate all this stuff? We talked about some really big stuff?
[00:26:23] Tim Brewer: Chris, I'll, I'll ask the question then that everyone seems to be asking in every industry right now. We all know with change happening faster and faster, right now we're in a loop of change happening with large Language Models, LLM's and AI. I just wanted to be specific that it was that part of machine learning. What are you seeing? In AI and its impact on organization structures, on org design. What are you worried about and where are you spending your time and focus watching and learning in AI?
[00:26:53] Chris Worley: I start from a place of, as digitalization broadly and AI being, you know, a specific example of it. I start from the point of view that, once you put a new technology like that inside your organization, you set the organization on a rail of change. Because that technology, we're at the beginning of it, and so if you insert it inside your organization, the technology is going to continue to evolve, and therefore your organization needs to continue to evolve, and therefore agility becomes a really powerful response to that. Because when a new disruption of whatever comes on, an agile organization says, "Oh, another change", because it's used to that. That's what it considers normal.
So, the notion of digitalizing, whether it's AI or anything else, and becoming agile, I just see those as really hooked together, and, learning to become more agile means, I can take any of these disruptions, pull them in, figure out, test and learn, see what they're going to do.
So that's what's happening right now? We're trying to figure out, let's bring AI into the thing, let's bring AI in, and, the most interesting thing that I see is the, is the interfaces they're creating between the large language models and a particular topic. Whether it's, scenario planning. Tell me about, tell me some future scenarios. If that's what you ask the AI, if that's what you ask the large language, it'll give you one. If you want a specific aspect of the future, now you go into the prompt and you want to ask. So they're creating all these front loaded programs now that you can ask the simple question to the front loaded interface then goes to the larger language model and tries to ask it.
The new job, it's coming out. Some people have heard of it and some people have it. Prompt Engineer. Prompt engineer, right? How do I interface with this thing so I get the answers I want? Because you can ask it anything and it'll give you an answer. If you ask it something very specific, you'll get a more specific answer. So we're trying to figure out, how do we think about prompt engineering? And then how does that, how does that now augment and work with my, the job I'm in?
So most of it is, is happening in what I would call, we used to call it, still do, the socio technical. Socio technical work design. How do I take the technology, how do I marry that with the people and the job, so that, we get good human outcomes and we get good economic outcomes at the same time, and so I think that's where a lot of the action is happening.
[00:29:38] Damian Bramanis: I like, really like what you said there about not focusing so much on trying to predict the future, but on trying to make sure that you're agile enough to be able to live with and thrive in the future that happens.
[00:29:48] Chris Worley: No, that's exactly right. You know back, it's back to small learning cycles. Yeah. Small learning cycles. Yeah.
[00:29:54] Damian Bramanis: Fantastic. Yeah. If someone is enjoying what you've said and wants to learn more, what's the best way to find out more from what you've talked about today?
[00:30:02] Chris Worley: I'm pretty easy to find on LinkedIn. My email at the university is cworley@pepperdine.edu. Joined at the hip with my email.
[00:30:10] Tim Brewer: Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming along to ODF. It's been great having you here with this session. It's also been a privilege having you on the podcast today. Thanks everyone for joining us. Have a great day.
[00:30:23] Chris Worley: Thanks for having me. Enjoy it. Yeah.
