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About the guest
Learn more about Amri B. Johnson and his journey from Epidemiology to DEI in Org Design on his expert page
Summary
In this episode of the Org Design Podcast, hosts Tim Brewer and Amy Springer welcome Amri B. Johnson from Inclusion Wins. Amri shares his journey into organizational design, revealing how his background as an epidemiologist shaped his understanding of leadership and management. He discusses the importance of creating organizational structures that foster emergent strategies, emphasizing that "structure creates behavior." Amri highlights the common pitfalls organizations face when trying to implement diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, noting that many fail to align their strategies with their stated goals. He argues for a shift in perspective: DEI should not be seen as a separate initiative but as integral to the organization's fabric. Listeners will gain insights into the significance of including team members in the decision-making process and the need for leaders to develop robust listening skills to build adaptive organizations. This conversation aims to equip leaders with the tools to create inclusive environments that allow all individuals to thrive, ultimately driving better organizational outcomes. Tune in to learn how to design organizations that are not only effective but also resilient and inclusive, ensuring that every voice is heard and valued.
Show Notes
Inclusion Wins - https://inclusionwins.com/
Reconstructing Inclusion (Book) - https://inclusionwins.com/book
The Path of Least Resistance (Book) - https://www.robertfritz.com/wp/product/path-kindle/
Morehouse College - https://morehouse.edu/
Transcript
[00:00:00] Tim Brewer: Welcome to the Org Design Podcast. It's great to be back. My name's Tim Brewer, one of the co-hosts of the podcast. Also, I'm lucky enough to have Amy Springer joining me.
And we have Amri from Inclusion Wins. Amri, so good to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us all the way from Switzerland. I have so many questions about how you get to live there. It's on my bucket list of places to spend a chunk of time. So, we'll have to take that conversation offline, but maybe if you start just by telling us how did you end up getting into the org design space? What was your journey to org design?
[00:00:35] Amri Johnson: Thank you. I'm delighted to be here, Tim, Amy, I'm excited for the conversation. So, how did I get into the organizational design space? I am an epidemiologist by training and I got asked to come lead epidemiology and health promotion for a local health department, outside of Atlanta, Georgia. I was 27, 28 years old when I got the job.
I had never managed anybody and I got a team of 10. And they were all pretty much older than me and way more experienced than I was. And one of them actually had a son who was born on the same day, in the same year, too. So, it was like managing my mother. She wasn't quite like my mother, but she definitely helped me as much as my mother has helped me.
She was one of the most helpful people on the team. And so, I was really bad at management. And so, I start becoming obsessed with organizational effectiveness leadership, organization design, and what that looked like. What do we need to do strategy- wise? And I had no clue. I didn't know about Galbraith and Kates. I didn't know about Mintzberg. I didn't know about all these people I came to know later. I wish I would have, but I didn't. But I did go through a redesign and the result was tragic. And so, I began to want to learn more about the process over time as a result.
[00:01:57] Amy Springer: Thanks, Amri. I think that word, tragic, tragedy you aren't the first person to mention that in the context of orgs, reorgs. You've been a leader within organizations, you've since consulted to organizations. Our aim is really to teach and equip leaders, like you were when you started, people with a bit more experience*. *What do you wish you knew when you were starting out?
[00:02:24] Amri Johnson: I wish I would have known emergence and the nature of strategy to be emergent. It's something that I knew intuitively, but I didn't know technically. The only way you let a strategy emerge is you're doing it with people. And so, one principle for us is, *people commit to what they help to create.* Getting people involved in strategy early, and then letting it blossom, even though you might have something that's fixed, knowing that it's going to shift, and, actually, looking forward to those shifts as you learn. So, I would have learned that early. I probably would have been in a better place to really listen to what my folks were saying that I was engaged with and building capacities across the organizations I've been a part of, as a result of having that construct in my head that things are going to emerge and things will change, even though it's we know it, but I don't even know it was a closeness to it, I just was unaware. And so, that blind spot kept me, oftentimes, from, I think, getting to someplace in a different way and landing at someplace in a different way, rather than, oftentimes, having to revisit all the stuff that I did before, because I didn't take that into account and listen closely enough to that emergence as it was coming to enter fruition.
[00:03:42] Tim Brewer: A question for, like, every day, you know, I'm listening to the podcast and I'm leading my organization of 50 or a hundred people. How do I know I don't know those things. What are the symptoms that you see in your work or that you've seen over your life of leadership, that you didn't see then that are now obvious to you. Like, "Oh, we have an org design problem or it's, like, really obvious. You guys are ignoring this thing that's becoming a reality in your organization." What are the kind of practical tips you can give to a leader that's not got to have those experiences that's facing some of those challenges.
[00:04:17] Amri Johnson: I would say, Tim, the one big thing I learned from Bob Fritz, Robert Fritz, he wrote a book called _The Path of Least Resistance,_ if you're familiar, it's that, structure creates behavior. And I'm not talking about just the, kind of, structural design in your organization, because that's emergent too. But, I'm talking about the fact that, there's certain ways of being in your culture that drive what your culture is going to do and the actions that it takes.
I remember reading a blog from Henry Mintzberg and he had this picture of an organization and then he had a second picture and it was exactly the same as the first and he called that picture a reorganization.
And so, if you are creating this, kind of, organizational structure, and then you reorg and it's the same thing, it's not necessarily even the same shape. You might make it a matrix or all these other things that we call organizations, but if your behaviors, basically, stay the same, you haven't fundamentally shifted your organization and moved closer to what you want to see. So, if the way we do things around here, our culture is not shifting, even though you've done a reorg, you probably need to go back and figure out what you missed.
So, my first reorg, and I didn't see it as that at the time, but I came into a health department. And I was responsible for epidemiology and health promotion. This, probably, had 60 to 80 employees across the administrative part. And then there were probably another 150 to 200 that did clinical stuff and stuff in the field. So, it was a relatively large geographical area outside of Atlanta. And, I came in to reorg infectious diseases and health promotion. There was a really competent person who happened to be quite good at infectious diseases and outbreaks of infectious diseases, sexually transmitted infections, and then there was a whole group that was expert at HIV and tuberculosis, which was a big, big problem with a large immigrant population in the area that we were in.
So, naturally to me, it was just easy to make that organizational split. And so, I took one manager, made him a manager, and the manager that was his manager became just responsible for one area. And the manager just was upset. And I never really got clear about where we were going and how we could do it together. I just told them. Some of them were perfectly okay with it, but enough of them weren't, that it disrupted our ability to get things done.
That person eventually left. She was really good. I hated to see her leave. And at the time, I was young, I was like, "Whatever, she doesn't know anything." I was silly to say that, and I saw her subsequently and said, "You know what, I could have done that differently and we probably would have had a great working relationship and done some great things if I had." And she acknowledged her faults as well, but I wish I would have done that differently.
So, the best thing is to know that there's emergence to know that structure creates behavior. And to know that you need to have your people come along with you intentionally and constantly and consistently, or you're going to have to go back to the drawing board and all of that internal tension and the complexity behind it, isn't worked out? If we don't make sense together and it just slows you down from being able to do your best work with each other.
[00:07:39] Tim Brewer: That's really cool. Thank you. I'm super interested, actually I know that you've done a ton of work around diversity, equity, inclusion. And I'm really fascinated at what you've learned across that discipline or area, and how you see that impacting and I think you've touched on it around including people in conversations, but can you talk to me about, what are the surprise learnings for you in areas you've talked to people, as it relates to organization design, or organization structure?
[00:08:11] Amri Johnson: I think one of the biggest things that I've discovered to date is that, a lot of people don't consider that most of their challenges lie inside of the way their organization is designed. Because, you guys have probably heard this a thousand times, most people think about org design as the org chart. So, they don't even think about org design in any more robust manner.
And so, they don't think about whether their strategy is aligned with what they say they want people to be. So, I don't know any organization that doesn't want an inclusive organization with inclusive leaders that create a sense of belonging for everybody. Their strategy doesn't align with that. Their reward systems don't align with that. The way that they do everything from a candidate attraction, or talent attraction, all the way through somebody leaving the organization, is not aligned with that mindset.
The DEI, as a practice, is not accessible to everyone. So, it seems like it's for the, so called, marginalized. Which is a really heavy term when you say marginalized, because oftentimes we attribute it to group identity. I think about my own experience am I marginalized because I happen to be darker skinned or African American or Black, whatever people call me, it's just not true. I've been wildly privileged and I live in Switzerland, right? Just to put that in there, Tim. So, the idea that DEI is for them, is what I think gets people caught up.
You start structuring any kind of shifts in structure or shifts in policy or actions, become targeted towards particular groups. And that doesn't align with everybody. And so, you end up out of alignment, almost by nature. And some people think this is for a group and not for me.
And so for me, when you're designing your organization and you're thinking about inclusion, you're asking the right questions around your design policies from the outset, you end up just making it more naturally built into your organization. And so, I have a client that I'm going to be working with I've been working with them. We've been doing a lot of work with them around strategy. I've had conversations with hundreds of people in the organization. Now, some broad group conversations with appreciative inquiry. Some have been one to one with top leadership. Some have been small groups that are working on certain projects.
So, I've talked to a lot of people and synthesize that data. And the reality is, everybody's saying the same thing about the way the organization is structured, but they don't have a framework for what structure looks like. And so, the next steps that we're taking are looking at the various areas of their organization design, to put their culture and DEI strategy together, so that it's aligned and people know that it's about everybody, that it's unambiguously prioritized, because we want things to be different, so we can achieve the mission. That is quite grand and everybody is aligned with that.
And then of course, that it's sustainable. That we align it with organizational purpose, so it can be sustained, because everybody gets it. So, people miss building this in to pieces of their organization. And whether they call it organizational design or not, they need to build it into how power is used, but they need to spill it into their strategy first. They need to build it into how teams work and information shared. They need to build it into the rewards and recognition structure and, of course, into the candidate employee experience. So, that's the space where a lot of clients a lot of mostly external don't get that.
When I was internal, interestingly, even the HR function didn't get that, and I didn't realize it to the extent that I do now. In retrospect, it's a lot clearer. We never even talked about org design, except for talking about org charts. A lot of people* *understood matrix organizations and all those iterations of it, but they didn't understand what needed to follow behind that.
And, oftentimes, the nature of inclusion was lost in a bevy of activities, but not in something that actually could be sustained, because it was a part of the expectations of people every day.
[00:12:20] Amy Springer: You mentioned, when you were starting out, Amri, that even HR weren't thinking about it so much. Have you been seeing a shift in the companies you've been working with, with the people you've been having conversations with, through your own consulting firm? Is there more of a general knowledge coming through organizations? Is it ramping up?
[00:12:41] Amri Johnson: If I was to be honest with you, which I will be right now, Amy, No.
I think the larger organizations are outsourcing it to really qualified companies that do this work well. So, those organizations are aware of it within the HR.
I don't know if it's translated into the leadership, where the leadership understands that, "Hey, if I can just design my organization for what I say I want, and include as many people as I can, and if I don't include them directly, I'm including them some way indirectly, and that they understand where they sit in the strategy, at any point in time, they know this is how I make my best contribution. And this is what I need to thrive in making that contribution." You go a lot further, but I don't think a lot of HR departments put that forward as a set of capabilities for their people.
I think if we built those skills and capabilities, which is really a big part of what we do, is building the skills and capabilities for people to create what I call, antifragile organizations. Organizations that can get through any challenge and be stronger as a result. It's the weightlifting for the organizational mind in a way. I don't think we're building those capabilities, those skills, that understanding. They don't have to be expert at it, but they have to understand that every single thing they do, when it comes to the work that I'm into diversity, tension, and complexity of difference and similarity, inclusion, creating the capabilities or creating the conditions for people to thrive and the organization to create extraordinary value. And equity is identifying things that might be getting in the way of people doing their best work from thriving and making sure we adjust and change things in the organizational systems, policies, and structures to prevent it.
So, I'm an epidemiologist. I'm into prevention more than treatment. So, a lot of times people are really focused on in DEI focused on fixing the problem. And I've found, and the problem with problem focus is if you look for something, you'll find it. So, if that's where your attention is if your attention's on racism, if your attention's on sexism, if your attention's on whatever-ism, it's there, withou
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