So, I have finally published a reasonable first daft of my next book, titled Agile Organizational Design.
This is still very much a rough first cut. The chapters in the mindset section are in decent shape, although hey need an example / use case to tie them together, along with the usual caveat around editing / word smithing, etc etc.
The second section on practices is largely not started, with the exception of what in my opinion are the the two most important sections of the book, org mapping and collaboration patterns. These are also in pretty good shape, but also need some good examples to tie things together.
Even in this state there is a lot to read, digest, and hopefully try out.
Given our current state of the world, along with incompleteness of the book, I'll be offering the book for free for the time being. I sincerely hope others out there find the content as useful as I have.
Have a look at the outline below and download a copy if you find the topic interesting.
The traditional approach to organizational design has got it wrong, completely wrong, it's based on concepts that are over 100 years old, and was built to meet the needs of the industrial age, an age that is long past.
Traditional approaches to organizational design will lead you down a path where you define functional departments, add in layers of management with explicit spans of control, and define individual account-abilities.
This approach stifles the innovation, creativity, and collaboration required for enterprises to be successful in today's era of complexity and uncertainty. We need organizing structures that increases people ability to swarm on wicked problems and rapidly learn from market feedback.
Organizational Designers needs a new approach, one that emphasizes co-creation, iteration, and self organization.
This book provides a set of thinking tools to help leaders, change agents, coaches and interested knowledge workers grow organizing structures that foster self-organization rather that strangle it.
Agile Organizational Design reflects over 15 years of organizational change experience from the Agile By Design team. It integrates and extends material from many different sources into a cohesive set of principles and practices that will help the reader facilitate a new mode of organizing structures, one based on teams that can self-organize to meet market outcomes.
Agile Organizational Design provides tactical tools and techniques to design Organizing structures based on the following principles:
- Organize For Cross Functionality, not Functional Specialization
- Use Market Pull to Guide Organizational Design
- Try To Keep Teams Stable, But Continuously Evolve Structure To Eliminate The Need For Hand Offs
- Define Organizational Structure around Social and Domain Boundaries
