Home » Book » Organizational design

Organizational design

You can hire a consulting firm to design your new organization, but we believe you can do it yourself. The people in the organization know it best and better understand what could  work. Use this knowledge and start doing! Use the following practice to design your new organizational structure. Note, this is an iterative process, and you need to do it together!

  • Organize a workshop with a group of up to nine stakeholders. More is not effective. Think of people from different levels and expertise areas in the organization. 
  • Share the organizational objectives. What is our core? What do we want to achieve? This should be reflected in your design. 
  • Use the characteristics of responsive organizations (tTreasure 14: Characteristics of responsive organizations) as a starting point for brainstorming the new organization. Which characteristics do we include and which (not yet)? Use various methods to share opinions, such as group discussions, brainstorming sessions, Post-it® Notes, whiteboards, or digital collaboration tools. 
  • Start with your organizational design. You can get inspiration from the video Spotify Engineering Culture by Kniberg, which talks about chapters and guilds organized across teams of teams. This creates a matrix organization with two axes: one for value delivery and one for professional development. 
  • One starting point for the new design is teams of teams focusing on delivering value. Follow the previously mentioned five steps to form teams of teams. 
  • Another starting point is organizing the professional development needed to keep delivering value. Determine which expertise areas need chapters or guilds. 
  • Create a visual representation of the organizational design. This can be a diagram, mind map, flowchart, sketch, or another form of visualization showing shared insights and agreed structures. 
  • Now it’s time for feedback. Gather feedback on the design and incorporate new insights. What questions arise about the design? Each iteration will bring new questions to solve. This way, the model eventually grows into a form you can experiment with. 
  • Define the steps needed to implement the design or part of it and proceed with step-by-step execution.

Spotify model (Kniberg, 2014)