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by Closi
1718 days ago
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> Here's a simple question that should be answerable in any approach to org design. What's the optimal span of control for management at each level in the organizational hierarchy? If you can't answer this question, you can't "design" an organization. Of course you can design an organization without knowing the optimal span of control at each level, just as you can design a logo without math and scientific models. The answer anyway will just be 'it depends, and span of control varies not only between different businesses but also different roles and even different individuals'. Lots of design is done via intuition and experience rather than concrete engineering anyway, and OD is clearly an area where it is more about understanding the goals of an organisation and building a people strategy around it rather than perfect mathematical optimality. |
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Org design suffers from the same problem as economics and psychology: you're designing based on a fundamental discrete unit (a person) that's incredibly variable.
Except unlike the other two, you're typically not dealing in large enough numbers that you can handwave away differences and substitute averages.
Furthmore, any hierarchical org (which is to say, all, either formally or informally) exacerbates the problem in that you have some (variable!) individuals with even greater ability to influence the sum.
Which isn't to say it's hopeless, but is to say (to your point) that any approach needs flexibility and intuition.
Or as the author puts it: "As a result, you cannot predict how the humans in your organisation will react to your changes — not with perfect accuracy, at least. So the nature of org design demands that you iterate — that you introduce some set of changes, watch how those changes ripple out in organisational behaviour, and then either roll-back the change, or tweak in response to those observations."