Bulldozer00's Blog

In Russell Ackoff‘s “Idealized Design” method, he suggests that designers assume that the system they’re trying to improve/re-design exploded last night and it no longer exists. D’oh! He does this in order to put a jackhammer to the layers of unquestioned, un-noticed, outdated, and hard-wired assumptions that reside in every designer’s mind.

So, if you were part of an emergency task force charged with re-designing your no-longer-existing org, what candidate list of ideas would you concoct? To help jumpstart your underused, but innately powerful creative talents, here’s an outrageous example list that I stole from a raging lunatic:

1. Provide two computer monitors for every employee and religiously refresh workstations every three years.
2. Provide two projectors and multiple whiteboards in each conference room. Ensure a plentiful supply of working markers. No exclusive executive conference rooms – all rooms equally accessible to all, with negotiated overrides.
3. Physically co-locate all product and project teams for the duration. Disallow a rotating door where projectees can come and go as they please or management pleases – with rare exceptions of course.
4. Put round tables in every conference room.
5. Distribute executive and middle manager offices throughout the org. No bunching in a cloistered, elitist corner, space, or glistening building with HR/Marketing/PR/finance/contracts or other overhead functions.
6. Require every manager in the org with direct reports to periodically ask each direct report: “How can I help you do your job better?” at frequent one-on-one meetings. If a manager has too many direct reports – then fix it somehow.
7. Require every manager who has managers reporting to him/her to ask each of his/her subordinate managers: “Can you give me an example of how you helped one or more of your direct reports to grow and develop this year?“.
8. Require periodic, skip-level manager-subordinate meetings where the manager triggers the conversation and then just listens.
9. If “schedule is king” all the time, then write it into your prioritized core values list – just above “engineering excellence and elegant products“. If your core values list contains conflicting values, then prioritize it.
10. Carefully and continuously monitor group (not individual) interaction protocols and behaviors. Diligently prevent protocol bloat and convert tightly coupled, synchronous client-server relationships into loosely couple, asynchronous, peer-to-peer exchanges.
11. Explicitly budget X days of user-chosen training to every person in the org and enforce the policy’s  execution.
12. To reinforce why the org exists and de-emphasize who is “more important” than who, publish a product and/or service-centric org chart with products/services across the top and groups, including all managers, down the side. Preferably, the managers should be on the bottom propping up the org. (See figure below).
13. Abandon the “employee-in-a-box” classification and reward system. Pay each person enough so that pay isn’t an issue, and publicly publish all salaries as a self-regulating mechanism.
14. Create policy making and problem solving councils up and down the org. Members must consist of three levels of titles and include both affectees in addition to effectors.
15. Give leadees a say regarding who their leaders are. Publicly publish all reviews of leaders by leadees.
16. Require periodic job rotations to reduce the org’s truck number.
17. Frequently survey the entire org for ideas and problem hot spots. Visibly act on at least concern within a relatively short amount of time after each survey.
18. Provide every employee with an org credit card and budget a fixed amount of money where no approvals are required for purchases. Fix the purchasing system to make it ridiculously easy for expenses to be submitted.