The pictures show the orchestra that my son of 9 years is a member of.
As you see, some seats are empty in the first photo – why? Let me tell you the story – and explain why this is related to a key organization design principle. One that is becoming increasingly important.
My son started in the orchestra two years ago. He was then only 7 years old, while most of the other children were older and had practiced playing their instruments longer.
As a parent, I was somewhat concerned that the level was too high for the smaller kids. The conductor chose difficult pieces from well known composers, even some pieces that “real” orchestras with adults play.
I expressed my concern a couple of times, but I was told that it worked reasonably well, because the conductor would simplify the score and give the simplest, 2nd or 3rd violin section to the smallest kids.
Nonetheless, I felt it was something of a compromise, particularly when they practiced: The oldest kids easily did they part, and became bored when listening to the second and third violin section rehearsing their parts with the conductor time after time. The youngest kids, on the other hand, could have benefited from even more time practicing.
When we came back after holiday this Fall, however, I noticed that a new system had been introduced. Instead of everybody practicing together, the conductor had split the orchestra practice into three parts:
05:00 pm: The youngest kids meet and practice for 45 minutes (image 1 above).
05:45 pm: Break
06:00 pm: The older kids join, and everybody practices together (image 2 above)
06:30 pm: The younger kids leave and the older ones practice for another half hour alone
So what does this have to do with organization design? Quite a lot, I would argue.
The basic idea is that a well performing organization must be designed to address its demands (or functional requirements, if you want a more technical term).
The conductor realized that there were really two incompatible demands or functional requirements in this case: The first to provide adequate level of challenge for the older children, the second to provide adequate level of challenge for the younger children. And he gradually realized that these two functions were somewhat incompatible.
I think this is fairly similar to the situation facing many leaders in complex organizations. They may be responsible for a diverse group of people, activities, and customers.
Leaders must constantly evaluate whether the current design is the right one; whether the unit they lead really serves one key function, or whether there are actually two or more distinct functions, which would suggest a different organizational design.
It’s not easy to do two things well – to fulfill two functions or meet two demands – at the same time. And for most organizations, the best advice is probably to focus on only one thing. This has been documented in academic research. Focused companies (or organizational units) generally do better.
Typically, when an organization can’t focus, and the organization needs to do two things, leaders end up with a compromise solution that is neither fish nor fowl.
This is one reason why so many organizations achieve only mediocre performance – they are unable to optimize performance because they are addressing two or more demands, and when trying to address the first (“Develop a product for customer group 1”), it compromises their ability to meet the second (“Develop a product for customer group 2”).
Yet as this example shows, there are designs that reconcile conflicting goals and make it possible to do two things at the same time. The key is to find, or invent, the design that “dissolves” the conflict between the two goals or functions. You do it by separating some roles and activities, while integrating others.
It is not easy. Even in this simple example, it took the conductor several months to introduce the slightly altered schedule. The new system also involved an additional cost: People have to turn up earlier and the practice sessions last for 30 minutes more than they used to. But that’s a fairly small cost compared to splitting the orchestra in two, or continue with the previous system.
Conclusion: If you are a creative organizational architect, you should be able to discover or invent a design that helps you achieve top performance – even when the organization needs to do two things rather than one.
By the way, if you want a more analytical approach, there are three chapters in my book (chapters 1, 2 and 8 ) where I discuss how an approach – developed by former MIT professor Nam Suh – called axiomatic design can be used to analyze these kinds of problems.
Nicolay, I hope your son is not getting up to practice at 05.45 in the morning! The point you make about doing two different things is a good one. The analogy I like is that of the defense configuration and the attack configuration as in basket ball. On on a fishing boat there is the fishing configuration, the preparing meals configuration, the docking and unloading configuration, etc. On the fishing boat all the same people are involved in all configurations: but they take different roles. In basketball, some of the same people are in both configurations. The key that people know what to do – what role they have – in each configuration. All of these examples solve the problem with time differences. It is even harder to solve if you are trying to do two or three different things simultaneously – then you need separate organisations – for example one for fishing and one for preparing meals. Andrew
Andrew, thanks for your comment, no we’re talking 05:45 pm here (17:45 EU time, which UK should adopt…)
I thought a bit about your examples. The attack/defense analogy is one I have used myself and I am actually investigating a bit the history regarding formation of football players (may write about it later on the blog).
However, what I was mainly thinking about in this particular blog post was functions that are somewhat ambiguous to those who participate and design a system, and functional conflicts that may not be apparent when the organization is set up. This is the main challenge I observe.
So it’s a bit different from the fishing boat example because most fishermen will agree that meals will have to be prepared and that somebody must perform the docking and unloading.
I will need to consider it a bit more, but perhaps a closer analogy would be a fishing boat intending to catch two types of fish, one deep water and one more shallow water, or a situation where there is uncertainty whether the same net can be used to catch two types of fish (e.g., large and small).
In such cases it would usually be better to send two fishing boats out on the sea, but one can also imagine innovations that makes it possible to address both functions at the same time (e.g., a particular design of the fishing net).