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This Spring, I had the priviledge of teaching the organization design elective at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management.
The class consisted of 50 students, half of them from the MBA program and the other half from the EMBA (part time) program. All of the students had work experience prior to entering their program.
During the last session, I posed a set of questions about the future of organization design. I asked them to consider seven scenarios and the likelihood that they will happen 10 years from now:
- Are executives going to be using computer algorithms to find the best organizational model?
- Will even large firms have removed most of the managers and rely on self-managing teams instead?
- Will the most succcessful firms only have a handful of employees, and rely on external partners to develop and deliver products or services?
- Are computers with artificial intelligence going to be held accountable for decision errors that they make?
- Will the work that is still done by humans (rather than by computers or robots) be done by teams, projects and networks, rather than by individuals working separately?
- Will there be arrangements for holding teams and networks accountable, instead of restricting accountability to the individual level?
- Will most firms in Europe and Asia have adopted the American model and be very similar to U.S. firms in terms of how they are led and organized?
The students were divided into 9 groups. I asked them to first discuss the questions in the groups, and then agree on a rating from 1 to 10 (where 1 was “highly unlikely” and 10 “highly likely”).
I have included the results in the presentation below, with brief comments from me at the bottom of each page.
What are your views on this? You can participate in the survey yourself here (you can also add a comment below this post).