Leverage Design Thinking to Strategic Alignment and Organizational Structural Tuning

The premium organizational design should be fluid enough to streamline information flow and flexible enough to enable business autonomy.

Compared to the mechanical nature of the industrial organization, digital organizations are like the living systems that can self-adapt and self-renew in thriving as the high-performance business. Traditional organizations are process-driven, but digital organizations are people-centric; they are complex enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to changes promptly. Design Thinking needs to be a discipline for enforcing strategic alignment and tuning organizational structure in order to improve organizational maturity from functioning to delight.

Design Thinking is a human-centered, iterative process for setting goals and putting strategies into place to achieve genuine innovation: The emerging digital era upon us is about the exponential growth of information and rapid speed of changes. The goal of the organizational design is to enable the business responding to changes promptly, self-adapting to the dynamic business environment with flexibility. Organizational design and business strategy mutually enforce each other. Therefore, the business strategists need to have a solid understanding of the organizational architecture and design; while the technical organizational design knowledge plays a support role. The organizational structure carries inherent business capabilities as to what can be achieved within its frame to enable a well-defined business strategy. Ideally, in contemporary organizations, the two structures - hierarchy and relationship structure wrap around each other to ensure high responsiveness and accountability. With emerging digital platforms and efficient collaboration tools, an organization with fine-tuned lightweight business processes allows information and idea flow, get nurtured and turn into business value, harness cross-functional communication, and mass collaboration, to create business synergy, catalyze strategy management and achieve genuine innovation.

Organizational design is the ultimate expression of the organization’s strategy because it reflects the resource allocation and configuration of the value-creating business processes: Mapping the business flow of information and process starting with customers and going all the way across the company usually trigger the organizational design as a logical step in strategy management. Organizational design is an ultimate expression of the business strategy, and strategic alignment occurs on multiple levels, from process configuration to resource allocation. It presupposes the ability of each link to articulate their strategic intent. If the strategic intent can be understood cross the organizational scope, the strategic alignment process becomes a harmonized process in which the actual configuration of the organizational strategy is a consequence of organizational design and business strategy implementation. There is an emergence-vs-design-paradox thereon across the business complexities around the multi-sided business competencies issues, including the full spectrum of organizational maturity-levels. The premium organizational design should be fluid enough to streamline information flow and flexible enough to achieve business autonomy and democracy, and keep optimizing the business processes to fit the purpose of the business.

High mature digital organizations integrate Organizational Design (OD) into the process design and organizational re-engineering: Digital organizations are organic integrated systems which keep evolving. It’s important to look at all critical business elements, including the human element. Individual and group work cannot be done as a segregated from but within a framework of an entire business ecosystem including business systems, policies, processes, cultures, and customers, etc. The organizational design issue is really about how to build the best mixture of organizational elements that enable the organizational interdependence and harness adaptability through less hierarchy, frictionless processes, designed to a hyperconnected business dynamic. Enforcing mutual respects between organizational design and business process management can lead to effective business transformation. Structure and behavior are two elements co-working in every nature organism and in every system designed by human nature. Thus, the goal for the optimized organizational design is to foster communication, collaboration, and accountability so the large group of people can interact, form and amplify collective capabilities to deal with common business challenges and achieve common goals.

As organizations strive to improve the business maturity level from functioning to firm to delight, forward-thinking leaders need to understand how things such as design thinking can fundamentally change organizations and their societal impact by making a seamless strategic alignment, striking the delicate balance of solid and flow, control and autonomy, and improving organizational responsibility and maturity.

Posted in: Innovation,Organizational structure tuning