Posts from the ‘Coordination cost’ Category
About a year ago, I created a presentation about how leaders can simplify the structure of their organization. This presentation has been viewed more than 2,500 times so it seems like people find the topic relevant. I have now revised the presentation and recorded voice-over (audio narration) with explanation of the slides and additional examples.
The slidecast lasts for 14 minutes.
This presentation deals with the key topic of my new book that will be released next week. The book provides an analytical and data-based approach for analysing complexity and developing simpler organizations designs.
Most people consider organization design principles as rather abstract concepts. How do we bring them to life and demonstrate that they both explain – and potentially inform – decisions about how to design organizations?
One solution is to develop an experiential format, such as role plays or simulations. I have been working on simulation for a long time in order to illustrate some of the core organization design principles such as interdependency and coordination costs.
Yesterday I was able to pilot test the simulation with two groups of 36 students at the Norwegian School of Management. Associate Professor Thorvald Haerem kindly lent me his class who willingly participated. The students quickly understood the rules and impressed me in terms of their ability to make coordinated decisions.
The key idea was to have 7 tables with 5 students, each symbolizing a department, while coloured to-shirts symbolized the work process they performed. Hence the task was to reconfigure the formal structure into a more process-based organization by moving people according to set rules.
In the slide set below you can read more about the purpose and outcome of the simulation. The next step for us now is to analyze the decisions the students made more carefully, in order to evaluate the relative “goodness” of the configuration they ended up with.
