Uncategorised Archives | Metalogue | Organisation Design Consultants

Ready for re-design in 2023?

It’s the time of year when we look back and make sense of the work we’ve been doing with the benefit of a bit more perspective. Much of our focus this year has been on helping organisations more purposefully organise so they can better achieve their goals. It’s likely that the need for restructuring and re-designing will only increase in 2023. If you think this might be in your in-tray in the new year, you might like to add our practitioner research into organisation design to your Christmas reading list.

Can you NOT communicate?

I recently re-read Paul Watzlawick’s classic book Pragmatics of Human Communication. For those of you who don’t know his work, many of his ideas have influenced paradoxical theories of change and family systems theory. In the book he outlines a number of principles of human communication. We can argue that much of what happens in organisations is communication. Underneath the labels such of ‘leadership’, ‘strategy’, ‘change’, ‘structure’, ‘culture’ are in fact patterns of communication.

Designing with users – are you flushed with success or going down the pan?

It started with Bella. Bella cleans the toilets and public areas in a hotel that is undergoing prolonged refurbishment and where I was fortunate to stay recently.

Do you do resilience and well-being work?

I was asked this twice last week by two of the least fluffy senior male execs I know. I imagine the question arose because many people close them are struggling. Knowing them as I do, they want to care for and support individuals. They also will be noticing that this isn’t just one or two individuals and that something is happening that is more systemic.

Embracing Ambivalence

We were witnessing a scenario where an executive team had decided on a change of strategic direction that would affect every division. For many it meant a change of priorities and a need to reset budgets. What needed to happen, and the key communication messages were summarised before the meeting closed.

Are you about to step into an organisation design bear-trap?

Many of us have experienced organisation re-design processes that have destroyed trust and value in the organisations in which we work (some of us have even been responsible for them). When things go wrong, it’s often down to misguided assumptions about what’s needed.

Changing the Bed Sheets

It’s early May and I’m just back from working in Devon. For each of the last 7 years I've been running an annual workshop on ecological thinking and organisational change at Schumacher College, a few miles outside the town of Totnes.

There’s no sexism here right?

So started the day. “We saw a pretty girl.” It’s been a long time coming. A company going through a radical transformation – a real one – where the way they work together, talk to each other, share information and make decisions is actually visibly changing.

Form Follows Function

When a senior leader realises that their organisation is not performing well, or well enough, they often commission a redesign, and task a small design group to start thinking about how they could be better organised. The temptation for the design team is to start tinkering with org charts, add in new roles to bridge perceived gaps, and identify savings and synergies.

“We’re having an organization design, and you’re invited!”

Our house parties are always difficult to plan for. I'm not that keen on parties but my partner is. When backed into a corner I sometimes foolishly agree to a party... but then there are the tricky questions of how many people do we want to come and who should be on the list.

Stirring up our strategic thinking together – am I half-baked or did you pre-cook it?

The famously eccentric inventor and philosopher R. Buckminster-Fuller (inventor of the geodesic dome and author of Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth) is once supposed to have said “Never show unfinished work”.

Starting an organisation re-structure? 10 ways to get it right.

It is still by no means business as usual. While the impact of the pandemic has varied from individual to individual, we are all living with less certainty, often more anxiety and questioning some of the taken for granted in our lives.

How do we find new ways to make sense of Organisational Culture?

Finding new possibilities for how to enable cultural change and transformation. In our last blog, we talked about applying “a liberal dose of science and an equal measure of art” when exploring organisational culture and change. As practitioners, one frame we find helpful comes from John Heron and Peter Reason (2008), who talk about there being 4 “ways of knowing”:

From organisation design to designing

Throughout 2020, we conducted an action research project with our clients into the practice of designing organisations. One observation we made is that most organisations are in a constant process of redesigning themselves as they adapt to ever-increasing levels of uncertainty and complexity. Because of this, organisations are becoming more fluid and structures more transitory.

Isn’t it better to rip off the org design plaster (or Band-Aid) than take time and engage widely?

This was the question posed to us recently by a sceptical senior leader about to embark on an organisation design process for their organisation. On further questioning she intimated that in previous organisations she had always been told what her structure was going to be after a quick decision by the CEO, based on advice from the HR Director and external consultants.

Virtual working – lessons from real life

Like all organisations we are looking how to deal with the effects of the Coronavirus outbreak. Our clients are thinking about how to keep making progress on planned work which involved bringing groups of people together, sometimes from around the globe, to tackle issues like strategy and organisation design.

Is Cultural Change really that controllable?

We have been working in and around organisations long enough to have noticed a cyclical obsession with changing culture as a panacea for transformation and renewal. But is it helpful to describe this kind of change as if it is something we can master by applying some kind of cause and effect approach?

Organisational Transformation: are you a leader walking backwards into the future?

The “T” word is everywhere – it’s hard to find an organisation that isn’t undergoing some kind of transformation. At an event last week to launch our Metalogue research on the subject, one group worked on the question “How do we help leaders hold their nerve during transformation.”

“Ripeness is all” – leadership lessons from myth and legend

Many these days would see leadership development as a specialist field. However, if we look back at what myth and legend have to say, we realise that it is only comparatively recently that we have outsourced the development of leaders to ‘specialists’. For thousands of years before this, the development of ‘leaders’ has been something handled at the heart of communities.

Consulting beyond the Froth

During a recent meeting with a prospective client (let’s call him Paul), I was struck by how much he didn’t want us to sell what we did. He seemed to be much more fascinated in how we felt able to "just be ourselves"(his words). At one stage his challenge was “yeah, yeah I know when you are consulting you can do all that. I’m sure you will be good at partnering with us or anyone.

Calling all excretors! Why words matter in times of change

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me”. Did you grow up with this saying as a supposed consolation when someone said something unkind at school? Words may not actually be able to break bones, but they do have effects on our physiology, and how we interact with the world.

Older Posts »

Putting our insights to good use, our bite-sized blogs give leaders our latest thinking on strategy, organisation design, executive team development and culture change as well as other musings.