My friend Dee has made it on to the property ladder and is excited about replacing a functional but worn out 20 year old kitchen. Starting out thinking on her own, she was pondering colours and whether a breakfast bar would be helpful. But then, an architect friend challenged the wider design of the flat and suggested possibilities of knocking walls out and making much better use of space; the original conversion of the flats into buildings being judged as constrained by budget and that architects imagination.
More friends have visited and given their opinions. One, with a strong passion and skill for interior design suggested Dee ditch the neutral colour pallets she’d put on her mood board and go for a bold yellow, because the old rusty coloured bricks needed a strong contrast, one of the foundation principles of graphic design and a wise suggestion indeed.
Although I was not short of offering my own likes and dislikes, at some point over a cup of tea I stopped and asked “do you like yellow?” As we left I told her to do what brings her joy. I had remembered it was not my flat. The next time I visited, we started to develop some design criteria that she could test her shortlisted options against. The kitchen design must:
Design criteria create helpful constraint when thought about wisely and in consultation with all stakeholders. There are trade-offs that will narrow down options. The final design options can only work if all the criteria are met. The design criteria can be adjusted if that overall gut feeling us that there’s too much compromise. For example, if Dee’s preferred design option at the end of a selection process strongly meets the functionality and wow factor criteria, she will need to adjust her budget.
I’ve told the story above to highlight the usefulness of multiple perspectives and expertise, highlight how we all have our own opinions and share a little on how design criteria can be somewhat of a helpful tool to be objective, if we want some help ensuring our final chosen design is the right one.
The main messages I want to deliver in this piece are that we — and others — can never be free of our own biases, opinions and preferences. And that’s okay. But ignoring how we operate as humans individually, collectively in an organisation and in broader society means we cannot even strive for objectivity.
You don’t have to have transparent objectivity in organisation design. An entrepreneur with a strong business vision is free to work on instinct, experiment, succeed or fail. We’d be worse off in the world of work if no one broke the rules and came up with radical new thinking and helped give examples that might help us see things differently. It would be terrible if Zappos had never tried operating a fully decentralised system to encourage entrepreneurial spirit, and to give corporates inspiration on how it could make work more engaging for people, even if they’ve toned down ‘holacracy’ since, recognising organisations and people are complex. Where I live in North London, I love a small shop filled with whatever the owner likes, from strange antique trinkets to modern iPad stands. It’s a complete juxtaposition to the jewellery shop next door, with a carefully curated zones for different price points which suit the dominant customer demographic of the area, lighting that makes jewels gleam and staff that know their products. The later, has a stable and profitable business model that pays careful attention to all the rules. The former, seems to give the owner a lot of joy and contentment and I hope it stays afloat, even though I have not yet found anything I want to buy, that seems to have a well thought out price tag.
However, a company in a regulated industry, government organisation or other large corporate with a board and shareholders, that is not manager owned, may need more objectivity and logic. The leaders of these organisations, which are likely complex, will have their own hypotheses (opinions) on how things should be run. Like Dee, they will receive both solicited and unsolicited opinion from others in the organisation or consultants on the ‘right’ design.
In a restructure, you might hear phrases like “turkeys don’t vote for Christmas”, albeit, in some organisations with enticing redundancy terms, may be they would. There’s no escaping power and politics in organisational life. When I studied organisation design and development, a foundation of my practice was knowledge mapping to include what might be going on underground in organisations. Neuroscience, builds on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs thinking and tells us that we have strong reactions to change that might impact our status, ability to work autonomously and relationships with other. The satire W1A about the BBC, has a marvellous episode (Series 2, Episode 3) where the ‘senior team’ have been tasked with generating a new structure.
Each character is pretending to be selfless and objective as they generate different design options. The main protagonist Ian Fletcher, Head of Values captures the polite ways we might disagree in a boardroom to reject the second option shown in the image above by stating “The thing is, if you turn this on its side, it’s almost the same as when it was top down.” Recognising the challenge of gaining consensus in a power hungry, unhealthy ego driven system of leaders was insurmountable, he created the “creative network model” shown on the bottom of the image. He went to the Director General “offline” to gain his approval and endorsement first before catching everyone off-guard with the proposal (he was not tasked to “hold the pen” on). Its radial presentation and dialogic arrows on the face of it give equity and independence, meeting the fundamental human needs and little the others in the room could disagree with, as they come to a realisation that this might be a good compromise for them. However, I love the cheekiness of Ian placing values at the top of the circle, distanced from his key adversaries, the Head of Better and Head of Output. And his understanding the Director General’s ego would be stroked by their position in the centre. Notice also how Alan Yentob (a long-serving and impactful leader of the BBC) is named versus the de-humanisation of the other roles.
I’ve used this humorous exaggeration of how corporate organisations can operate because humour makes it safe for us to surface the silly ways our system one (fight or flight) brain can make us operate. All of us at work will have had similar experiences to the meeting depicted in the episode. Many of us will have been equally as guilty of using corporate jargon and playing power games, driven by our own desires, bias and opinions.
No. Well maybe if we took enough time and scientific practice, however, by then I fear the need for change would have passed and our businesses would have not adapted to markets and gone bust. Or shareholders, politicians or another entity of power will have made different decisions about the organisation for us.
However, if we do have a strong need for objectivity or want to be more sure that we’re serving an organisation with a reasonable amount of altruism and care for its overall purpose and performance, then there are practices that can help us and labelling some traps can help us to avoid them.