Project Overview

Our organizational design and redesign work stretches back to our founding in 2004. During 2004-2014, we developed an extensive meta-model for organizational design. This framework saw extensive field use, mostly with large firms. We acquired a good understanding of the relationship between different dimensions of organizational design (vision, strategy, culture, leadership, structure, workflow, knowledge management, technology architectures).

Our focus in this project is to leverage our past work and  develop new organizational designs for an increasingly decentralized world. We refer to this as The Post-Industrial Enterprise.  With 40% of Americans working from home, and with startup ecosystems blossoming around the world, we are already seeing many aspects of decentralization in firms.

We are investigating how to:

• Use software to make organizations reconfigurable on the fly
• Help enterprises renew by building high-impact ventures
• Use AI to automate management tasks and accelerate innovation
• Attract and fully engage innovators through Meaningful Missions
• Develop an attractive Decentralized Work eXperience (DWX)
• Develop cultures that embrace and encourage exploration
• Develop leaders who thrive in a decentralized work landscape

Approach:

We are currently doing a literature survey as part of an effort to write a book about our findings. It is important to connect new ideas to past work to place them in context. We are also interviewing leaders on the front lines of decentralized innovation.

Articles and White Papers:

• Extending Lean for Knowledge Work: A Retrospective
• Digital Myopia and the Coming of Post-Industrial Civilization
• Lean Leadership in a Disruptive World
• The Post-Industrial Enterprise
• What comes after Digital Transformation