This guide is part of a progression set comprised of Core, Advanced, and Emerging Organizational Design practices.

What it is

Emerging organizational design practices focus less on traditional hierarchical structures and more on creating systems that foster innovation and adaptability. These systems emphasize informal networks, team-based structures, and collaboration within and across organizational boundaries. Central to these approaches is identifying networks that exist outside formal functional, departmental, geographic, and business-unit-centric structures. In such networks, members of different teams come together to share insights, ideas, and data that help them complete a task, design an innovation, or co-create new work methods. These networks form when relationships are established outside or adjacent to formal workflows, such as through social, joint project, or mentorship-based relationships. Leveraging these networks to improve innovation or value creation requires outside-the-box thinking, the creation of formal cross-fertilization opportunities, and network analysis. 

Organizational design practices based on such systems require precise identification techniques to capture these naturally occurring, informal structures. They call for a cultural commitment to openness and to integrating people, projects, and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), that enable collaboration and allow the organization to focus on high-value activities.

These practices bring together internal and external resources to create short-term and more permanent structures with purpose and a focus on specific business needs. Business agility is the primary rationale for these fluid organizational structures supported by associated talent programs and processes. They pair external resources with internal staff, and work methodologies are determined according to formal criteria. Leveraging external talent for needed expertise or idea generation is a critical aspect of these practices. Formalized assessments of what is required and how resources will be used are necessary for such structuring. Introducing new technologies brings the ability to resolve long-standing challenges and issues to the forefront. While many are emerging and new, technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotization offer the promise of increased efficiency and pattern recognition that traditional human-centered thinking alone struggles to generate (thus their use in medical, pharmaceutical, and technology industries).

Why use it

Organizations face an increasingly unpredictable and complex environment. With multi-factor challenges occurring simultaneously related to global financial market volatilities, rapidly evolving and disruptive technology adoptions, shrinking labor pools, and geopolitical policy shifts impacting supply chains, the need for adaptable, agile, and rapid responsiveness is becoming an essential business capability. Implementing emerging organizational design practices that emphasize openness, innovation, the adoption and integration of new technologies, and flexible team-based structures can help organizations thrive in today’s business environment. 

The opportunities are endless, with a commitment to cross-functional work teams brought together based on a mix of skills and experience needed to generate solutions to high-profile and strategic issues and challenges. Creating such teams brings together a wide range of skills, knowledge bases, areas of expertise, and application and use-case experiences. By assembling work teams based upon non-traditional (e.g., multi-functional) skill and capability mixes at scale, a culture of sharing atypical work methodologies and processes drives cross-fertilization of skills and substantial innovation.

Outcomes

Freeing critical talent from the traditional boundaries of functional or employer relationships and workflows promises more flexible, agile, and innovative work processes and outcomes while creating a more stimulating, invigorating, and innovative work life for workers. The promise of greater organizational agility and resourcing amid rapidly changing markets and business conditions is seen as a critical and strategic competitive differentiator across industries. Formally adopting cross-functional work structures and processes can drive enhanced sharing of previously function-centric knowledge and capabilities. 

For example, bringing together a manufacturing engineering-based team with a financial modeling expert, a human-centered design professional, and a learning & development facilitator who can leverage unique insights into human behavior, capabilities, and financial impacts to inform process and equipment redesign. The potential for improved outcomes is enormous. In a similar light, leveraging new technologies to identify opportunities for job redesign through automation and enhanced worker processing is becoming an ongoing initiative as new capabilities are developed and released. Such capabilities expand opportunities for greater effectiveness and efficiency, which can directly impact how work is accomplished (and ultimately staffed).

Practices at this level

Facilitating networks inside the organization to foster informal collaboration.

Analyze informal informational and influence networks and leverage them to enable flexibility and responsiveness to a changing environment.

Implementing agile teams to respond to dynamic market environments.

Structuring and implementing agile, team-based structures that are self-organizing and quickly receive and respond to bottom-up feedback.

Identifying partnership opportunities with external stakeholders to enable collaboration across organizational boundaries.

Developing external collaboration relationships with partner organizations and individuals to augment, fill or replace business-critical skill sets and capabilities.

Assessing how emerging technologies can shift the organization towards the forefront of innovation.

Evaluating the ability of artificial intelligence and related technologies to impact major work processes and resulting organization redesign decision-making.