It is fairly common to claim that all global firms now are “matrix organizations”.

When you examine a particular firm more carefully, however, you usually don’t find that people report to more than one boss (formally), although they of course may work for multiple managers in a variety of different roles. Yet this was the defining feature of the matrix organization when it was first conceived of.

Most large organizations today are multidimensional – but that does not necessarily mean that employees have two or more bosses.

I participated in a discussion on a Linkedin forum recently where I argued that we should reserve the term “matrix” for the situation where people report to more than one boss.

Here’s my reasoning:

• It is fully consistent with the original meaning of the term. Look up in the books from the 1970’s and 1980’s and you will see that this is the way it was defined.
• It makes it easier to communicate about organizational design with each other. If we don’t make the distinction, we will have to specify whether we mean a “one boss” matrix or a “two boss” matrix every time we speak about it. In addition, it makes it very hard to distinguish a formal matrix structure from any kind of collaborative effort.
• Third, and most importantly: Working in a matrix with two bosses and working in a multidimensional organization with one boss is very different! I have tried it myself – I have worked for the same manager, once when he was my boss in a matrix and then as an internal supplier to him. Try it and you will feel the difference.

So what I am trying to say is: We need different terms to be able to distinguish between different multidimensional organizations.

The truth is that P&G, ABB, Shell, Philips, and many other large companies disbanded the matrix in favor of other multidimensional designs during the 1990’s. This was, in my opinion, a huge change even if the official organization chart may not look very different.

The slide below is an attempt at summarizing on one page the differences between alternative multidimensional forms. See my book for an in-depth discussion and practical examples.

The organization of the future will be (…) like a Calder mobile, with a thin wire of control, and with modules hanging down of various shapes and colors, each of which is capable of twisting in the wind as the wind changes. And each of which is also capable of being decoupled and disposed of and replaced by some other unit.

                                                                                                           – Alvin Toffler

Most organizations have to deal with an uncertain business environment. Some industries are cyclical and go through relatively predictable economic upturns and downturns. Other industries stay stable for a time and then suddenly enter a phase with rapid change.

The overall trend is toward greater volatility: Economists have found that recessions occur more frequently now than they did three of four decades ago.

For this reason, a key challenge for leaders is to design robust, flexible, and scalable organizations. At the most basic level, one needs an organization that can easily adapt the internal capacity and volume of output to the external demand for its products and services.

When evaluating your current organizational model, there are two simple questions you can ask:

• Can we easily scale it up? Can we – at a fairly low cost and relatively quickly – add (or increase the size of) projects, technology units, or market units?
• Can we easily scale it down? Can we – at a fairly low cost and relatively quickly – terminate (or reduce the size of) projects, technology units, or market units?

For the majority of corporations, the answer is no. There are a lot of rigidities – from governmental regulations, labor union agreements, to our own culture, systems and structure – that limit our flexibility and agility.

Of course, every firm can hire and fire people, and that is certainly an important element of scalability. But if your only method for achieving scalability is to downsize when a downturn begins, chances are your firm is in for trouble.

Downsizing is sometimes necessary, but it may also be ineffective in some industries, erode trust among those who remain in the organization, and even fail to reduce costs in some cases (if you want a balanced analysis of this issue, see this article published in an academic journal).

Instead, consider how your organizational model affects scalability.

If your model relies on only a core set of permanent employees and allows business units to easily contract external resources, the fixed cost base can be reduced and more of the cost can be variable. You rent people instead of owning them.

If there’s internal mobility, people can transfer from business areas with less activity to business areas with more activity.

Better still, if a significant part of your people belong to a resource pool and are used to working in temporary projects for several internal units, you already have some built-in flexibility that can be exploited when uncertainty increases.

But scalability is not only an issue in economic downturns. When the economic environment is more favorable, one needs to think about what happens when business units actually do succeed. Once a business unit or subsidiary reaches a certain size, it sometimes forces firms to do a complete reorganization to allow further growth.

To use the metaphor of the Calder mobile – in these cases there are too many wires crossing each other (and too many unique and non-compatible modules), making it difficult to change the configuration without redoing the whole structure.

One reason why many organizations lack scalability is simply that the issue is not even thought about when a new unit (e.g., a subsidiary) is established.

This is particularly a risk if the organization chart is gradually adapted to specific people or circumstances. New matrix reporting lines or hybrid structures are often created on top of the existing structure without considering what will happen if the unit succeeds and is able to grow (or the opposite, if the business must be closed down).

In my experience,  the more you “design by compromise” the more difficulty you will have in finding a scalable structure.

To create a scalable model you need to think about the overall organizational architecture from a strategic point of view, and consider how it can support both the current business and adapt to possible future changes.

The model that I call the “modular organization” (developed by the late US professor Russell Ackoff), is by far the most flexible (see this blog article).

The key idea is to have relatively small and independent units with standard interfaces, meaning that each unit can transact with any other unit. Ackoff claimed that there would be no need to reorganize anymore once this structure is adopted. Instead of reorganization, you can shift the resource allocation among the units to adapt to external changes.

The next time you discuss possible changes to the organizational model, don’t ask whether you have the right model given your current challenges. Ask whether you have the right model for the future.

What you see above is an incubator made from car parts. The concept was developed by Design the Matters, a non-profit organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The key purpose is to help reduce the number of pre-term babies that die during the first month in the developing world. Ordinary incubators are too expensive for rural clinics in poor countries. Sometimes incubators are donated to these clinics, but research shows that up to 98% break down within five year. In many cases medical equipment is not being repaired, as the components are not available locally and the technical staff lack the required training to carry out these repairs.

So a group of engineers at Design that Matters came together and asked themselves how to address this problem. They started with field research in developing countries, interviewing medical staff, maintenance staff, as well as parents of newborn babies.

They saw many examples of discarded medical equipment, but also asked: What does get reliably repaired in rural communities? The answer was that cars do get fixed, and cars may contain up to 40,000 components that are delivered reliably to even the most remote community. So why not build an incubator of car parts?

You may be familiar with this story already, and you might ask: What does it have to do with organization design? Quite a lot, I would argue.

The story is basically about matching the complexity of your design with the capability of the organization. This is as important in organization design as it is in product design.

Particularly when organization re-designs are triggered by strategy processes, there is often a risk that new models are selected that presupposed capabilities that the organization simply do not possess.

When I did a series of interviews with leaders of large firms in 2010, I was told of three cases where an organization had restructured, only to find out later that the design simply did not work, and then had to reverse to the old structure again. In each case the key cause seemed to be a failure to understand the capabilities (both technical and human) required to make the new design work.

I am not saying that you shouldn’t be bold sometimes – we should always think about new and better organizational models for our organization. Nor can we can eliminate risk altogheter. But with a little bit of preparation we can minimize these kinds of risks.

If you are an executive, a consultant, or internal project manager working on a new design for the organization, do what the engineers in Boston did: Go out in the field.

Don’t sit in the board room with only a few select managers drawing boxes and reporting lines.  Ask people on the frontline about what works and what does not work. Ensure that you understand the effect of the organizational structure on operations and IT. Consider the required behavioral changes that are necesssary for a new model to work.

As I argue in my recent book, the goal should be to find the simplest design. Develop alternative models. Evaluate the alternatives against each other and – other things being equal – select the model that is the easiest to implement given your current organizational capabilities.

Related post:

How many pages to you need to explain your organizational model?