As we become more experienced in the professional practice of our organizational function, we build a repertoire of “recipes for success” — mental models that indicate what methods to use for solving various types of problem, and criteria for evaluating how well we have succeeded in achieving specific outcomes.

Boundaries Matter: How Aspects of Organizations Interact

Assemble a group of people from different functions – for example the typical project group or management taskforce that is used for problem-situations that span organizational boundaries – and you discover that its members’ perspectives diverge, and often conflict with each other.

“Consensus planning” is the worst strategy for wicked problems. Instead, you need problem-exploration techniques that represent different perspectives of the situation to stakeholders, allowing them to generate useful frames that surface and expose conflicting change-objectives. You need to make tradeoffs explicit, to prioritize actions for change.

Appreciative design makes sense of the tangle of complexities, using an improvisational approach to incorporate the multiple, mutually inconsistent aims of stakeholders into a coherent plan for action.

An effective strategy for boundary-spanning design and change-management explores the problem-situation iteratively, incorporating the implicit knowledge that surfaces during investigation, acknowledging multiple ways of framing the situation, and managing evolving strategies, contingencies, and values to produce a coherent set of priorities for change.

It involves three, very different types of thinking:

Typically, we define a single goal that conflates the multiple, often conflicting, objectives of the work-systems we are trying to improve. This complicates, rather than simplifies the design of work-systems, as we inevitably have to revisit these goals, reworking the analysis to incorporate the multiple other purposes that people value. Many times, objectives conflict, but we don’t realize this because we only have a vague idea of what these are.

Systemic thinking takes a “big picture” approach to problem investigation, followed by a “divide-and-conquer” approach to making improvements. Read more on Wicked Problems and Systemic Solutions

In a complex, interconnected world modern organizations need to focus on effectiveness – doing the right thing – rather than the efficiency focus of most design approaches. We still use late 19th century thinking in design, trying to use “scientific management” rather than centering the process on how people need to do their work in order to produce products and services that are responsive to customer needs.

Human-centered design starts with the work that people need to do, involving them in the redesign. Unless we understand what needs to be done, we can’t design systems to support work.
Read more on Human-Centered Design

Boundary-spanning design is improvisational. We very rarely understand all the requirements for change, even when we start to implement changes to business processes and IT systems. The key skill is an ability to adapt to contingencies, integrating group knowledge across work domains.

Adaptive planning takes an iterative approach to goal-setting, integrating knowledge about what needs to be done with an evolving appreciation of how the organization works. We center this around an effective business strategy for our company, while prioritizing the work processes that those involved identify. Read more on the Co-design of Business & IT Systems