My father was an architect, and while I obviously never took up my Dad’s profession, his sensitivity to the visual did help me to start thinking about the concept of design early on. Today, “design thinking” is all the rage (as it should be), but it has also been a topic for many years in the field of management consulting and organization development. In the organizational context, design has a bit of a mechanical flavor–we design our organizations into neat, tidy silos, and each department works as a different cog in the machine. We design (or, better yet, engineer) processes to be very efficient and replicable. If we are lucky to get down into human “resources” (or the new term, human “capital”), then design tends to show up in a series of boxes connected by lines that we call organizational charts.

Not really the design my Dad was teaching me about. The design I learned about felt more whole, and it connected to me in ways that weren’t obvious or efficient. It was part of an experience. In those ways, it was more human (where organizational design is more suitable for machines). It wasn’t devoid of the mechanical or the efficient–design needs that too–but there was more to it than that. So I wonder, do we need more “design” inserted into our organizational design?

Enter social media. Last week Maddie pointed to a very powerful presentation by Paul Adams, who is a user experience expert at Google. He provides a great analysis of how our social media relationships tend to be lumped together into huge groups called “friends” or “followers,” but in reality they are always made up of smaller subgroups, many of which don’t overlap, with different levels of connection, from strong to weak. Social media experiences, therefore, aren’t designed with the complexity of our relationships in mind. They fit the programmer’s needs, but not the human’s needs. Adams’ presentation is really mind blowing, and he has all the text of his presentation below the slides, so you get the whole thing. You really should check it out.

But back to organizations. What if we applied Adams’ ideas to organizational design? In terms of social media, the problem is that complex relationships get “lumped” into one bucket of “friends.” For organizations, it might be the opposite. We are cast into specific departments and work teams that make it more difficult for us to connect in ways that will help us get our work done. As a human I will develop relationships outside of these lines, and often that helps me get my job done. I get to know Angela, for instance, who works with a different client, but I realize she’s really good at exhibitor sales, so I pick her brain about it and it helps me with my client.

In terms of organizational design, though, I just got lucky. If I were in a bigger organization, I may never have stumbled upon the fact that Angela was good at exhibitor sales. What if we could design our organizations to actually facilitate connections outside our lines and boxes? What if we treated our organizations like a community, where we would expect there to be strong ties and weak ties and parts where we don’t overlap and parts where we do? What if we designed an “organizational experience” (as opposed to “user experience”) that embraced that complexity, and actually allowed for more work meetings with people with strong ties (even if they weren’t in the same department)?

What I love about social media is that it facilitates learning–something we desperately need more of in our organizations. The structures we have in our organizations are designed for efficient information flow (and control, quite frankly), but they aren’t very good at the inherently messy (and human) process of learning. Let’s see if we can shake that up a bit an actually expect our employees to be more human as they do their work.