Design is politics
Organizations shape the world.
Society, culture, economy and if we want even the environmental context itself in the time of anthropocentric globalization, are the result of the mixture between physical and digital environments. These in turn are composed of interfaces (rules, buildings, hardware, software, commercial contexts, leisure contexts, etc.) that are administered to us and that limit our actions based on the coherence that we can or want to maintain with them.
All these environments and their interfaces are not the casual result of an emergency, but are designed to ensure that people follow a pre-established path within them, and this path often leads to the creation of a specific output and by-products (economic resources, well-being, discomfort, relationality, time, etc.).
Individuals or collectivities within organizations influential enough (political parties, big tech, activist organizations, constituencies, voluntary bodies, etc.), design and make accessible to other people (or inflict on other agents) these environments with their respective interfaces.
These can be defined design organizations, and they are the entities that have always contributed to the maintenance or change of the status quo, but in the current historical period where through technology, Scale-invariant networks have replaced bell curves, are even more influential.
Inside Ecosystemic in this period we have adopted this framework to observe reality, obviously, like any cognitive lens, it is only one among the infinite possible ones. We do not pretend that it is exhaustive, nor better than the others.
Our aim is to take it on to explore in a peculiar way the context that surrounds us, placing organizations and their organizational design models at the center as an integral part of the design process, the cultural process of individuals and therefore also the political process in a broad sense.
Why, How, What
After years of work, study, activism, belonging to every type of social network possible, from the family, to the condominium, up to social networks, we have begun to observe that there are some pattern rather stable in organizations (obviously since our field cannot be worked with exclusively quantitative methodologies, we treat this statement with the lightness that it deserves).
Organizations designing for life respond in different ways to three areas:
Why we exist
This is the area of the scope or more precisely of the reason for being.
Here are the purpose, the mission and the vision.
The why is a vital question for an organization, but what is made explicit does not always equate to reality (this is not only true for the why, the discussion between implicit, explicit and deviation between explicit and actually practiced would deserve a separate article) quoting Donella Meadows in “Thinking for Systems”:
A system is a complex of elements (nodes) interconnected (connections) with each other, coherently organised to pursue something (purpose).
Often the least obvious part of a system, its function or purpose, is the major determinant of a system's behavior.
The function of a system is not necessarily expressed in words.
Goals are inferred from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated purposes.
How we organize ourselves
This is the area of organizational design that generates feedback loops that can shape and renew shared culture in a vision autopoietic (if you mean the organization as agent) And sympoietic (if one observes it as an entity composed of all its units, human or otherwise).
Here they are structure, information flows, relational processes, decision-making methods, creation And resource management.
It is always important to observe the How we organize ourselves with a view to the individual and collective dimensions within the organization, but this area also includes reflection on How we put into practice by collaborating externally.
The How is the place of practices, of the individual incorporation of organizational culture (the younger and decentralized sister of theepisteme or of the paradigm), is the place where the real identity of the organization shines through and spreads into the areas of why and what. The posture of an organization and its units is the tangible evidence of its purpose and what it offers to the outside world.
To use another schematization by Donella Meadows, in her article on leverage points to intervene in a system, we are talking mainly about points 7 to 12, the ones she considers most impactful (even if in the How almost all points are touched upon):
- Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, norms);
- The size of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows;
- The structure of capital and material flows (such as transport networks, age groups of the population);
- Delays in the speed of system change;
- The Power of Negative Feedback Loops Versus the Effects They Try to Counteract
- The gain of positive feedback loops;
- The structure of information flows (who has and who does not have access to any type of information);
- The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints);
- The power to add to, change, evolve, or self-organize the structure of the system;
- The objectives of the system;
- The mental attitude or ideal pattern – its goals, structure, rules, delays, patterns – with which the system presents itself;
- The power to go beyond models.
What we do
This is the area of the creating value outside the organization. Here are the products hey services that the organization generates and delivers to the outside. This area, like the previous ones, is fundamental; an organization cannot exist without one of the three.
In this case it is important to disambiguate with respect to the model of Golden Circle proposed by Simon Sinek: if in fact he also analyses the same areas – What, How and Why – he refers, especially in the “How”, more specifically to the “How of the What”. Obviously there are many How to create your own products or services, but the How that we would like to analyse refers more directly to the As an organizational, that is, the structures, processes and patterns that culturally inform, and therefore at the level of shared practices, the outputs that organizations produce.
An organizational design protocol
Our work as Ecosystemic consists in helping organizations to have a better and greater impact on their sphere of action, be it environmental, social or cultural, through targeted accompaniments for work on the How. For now, let's forget about the other two areas, which remain fundamental, but which we will leave to be explored in depth by other organizations, certainly more competent than us.
We have been experimenting with this framework for several months and we have had the opportunity, through dialogic and analytical contexts, to formalize some questions that can help us and other organizations to delve deeper into the How. We would like these questions to be part of an organizational self-assessment model from which to bring out intentions and practices of renewal and evolution, aimed at generating organizations regenerative of the context described in the first paragraph. The aim is to stimulate a conscious work And centered on organizational cultures so that they can be adopted methods, practices and rituals that generate internal well-being and spread it outwards.
The six macro questions that you will find below have subcategories that are not explained in this article due to the length of the text; furthermore, they maintain a multiple interpretative possibility: it is therefore possible that more questions lead to the same answers and more answers can be found in different questions.It is it is impossible to adopt a linear ontology to work on complex systems such as organizations.
Below are the questions from V0.1 of the protocol we are developing:
How do we structure ourselves?
This question – for the current version – is the first in chronological terms to be asked of an organization. The organizational structure is always present, even if not formalized, indeed, the less it is made explicit the easier it is to run into informal structures of domination and control, a sort of tyranny of structurelessness. This question is useful to reflect on your organizational structure, whether it is pyramidal, flat, nested circles, etc. There is no right or wrong: structures can also change over time, but they must be an expression of the intention of the governance and not left to chance.
The structure influences information flows, decisional and operational freedom, informal relationships, and it is therefore correct to design it with awareness and intentionality.
There Structure and organizational culture go hand in hand and they need to be calibrated, to keep a group cohesive it is important that as one decreases the formalization of the other intensifies.
How do we participate?
This question contains a large number of themes, it arises from the synthesis of three questions from the previous version:
- How do you participate?
- How do we deal with interpersonal conflicts?
- How do we stimulate relationships?
This question can therefore be useful to gain awareness of the entry and exit processes of people, the relational modalities between individuals, individual and collective well-being, up to the correct balance between formal and informal contexts in the organization so that those who experience the organization can do so in the most appropriate way by mediating between their own needs and those of the organization. To answer these questions, methodologies can come to our aid, such as nonviolent communication, but also the buddy systems to support new arrivals or even more tangible tools such as handbook.
How do we decide?
Who decides who decides? and how do you decide, how do you decide? Often these questions block participatory flows in more informal contexts, while in more formalized organizations these questions are always answered in one way: whoever holds the highest rank decides! The little attention that is given to the explanation of decision-making models, whether they are assent, consensus, delegation, by majority or in a centralized manner (just to give a few examples, you can find more here), often creates frustration with poorly effective processes.
We believe it is essential to take the time to formalize and make explicit which decision-making methods to adopt before starting to work together, remembering that every policy or agreement can subsequently be modified, through the right pre-established ways and times.
How do we exchange information?
This is the area where we allow each participant or stakeholder of our organization to access the information they are looking for. Every organization is a system, within every system there are diversified flows of matter, energy and information that change over time and space. If people in our organization are not aware of where to find something, or how to generate something individually or collectively, then misalignment, fatigue and frustration can arise.
This is the space of physical and digital archiving systems, of information ontologies, but also of the design of the right touchpoints that can direct participants to directly find what they are looking for.
How do we manage resources?
Resources are poetic flows of systems in general and therefore of organizations. Here we find economic resources, time, well-being, knowledge, know-how. Even if many of these resources are explored under other questions, it is important to keep this multiple lens within this area so as not to forget anything. Obviously, economic resources and transparency or not regarding the latter is an important issue if we want to adopt decentralized and self-organizing approaches in organizations.
In this regard, reflecting on this question, one could implement redistribution methods, or take the point of view of all the agents in the organization to align intentions and needs.
How do we learn and evolve?
There cybernetics, especially that of second order has made a great contribution to the theories on the evolution of organisms and systems. In the field of design, information from the past to the present (feedback) and from the future to the present (feedforward) are essential to intentionally design something that can evolve. For this reason it is essential to give great importance to this question. It is necessary to inform the individual and collective present, lowering the noise, designing the right amount of redundancy, to allow the system to evolve towards new cycles. Obviously, with all the due structural differences of the case, organizations are no exception.
This is the area of feedback understood in terms of retrospectives (on the organization in general, on a single project or on a specific period of time) performance review (which within Ecosistemica we have started to call experience review).
The generative process
What is reported in the text is the synthesis of a process that began with a zero version (V0) that emerged last August and was collectively explored through a world cafe inside the RENA Summer School held in September 2024. In this document you can see the summaries of what emerged from the dialogue tables created directly by the people who facilitated the tables and whom we can never thank enough. The information reported in this collective summary gave us the opportunity to modify the questions (which initially were 10) and to be able to evolve the version. We have just prototyped a V0.1 within the RENA General Assembly, in which we brought a presentation with several case studies for each of the questions. The idea is to inspire the formation of the new board also through the As organizational structures desired by the social base.
We are now trying to prototype new interactive moments in other jobs, consultancies and trainings around Italy and soon we will release the more stable V1, from which practices and tools will emerge (including canvas and questionnaires).
It is important to mention as a source of inspiration and further reflection the work done together with Guglielmo Apolloni on Governance Rituals and the one always carried out with him, Francesca Maciocia and the team of group C of Trento Capital of Volunteering 2024 and CSV Trentino for the event In the Air with the workshop Revolution of Organizational Processes.
Next steps
We are continuing to develop the organizational design model and would like to do so through practice and theory. A great desire of ours would be to build an open context in which to treat this protocol and what will emerge from it as if it were open source code, managed by licenses. Creative Commons CC BY-SA, with their respective versions, credits for those who contributed, forks, a system of systemic partnerships based on friendly confederated organizations that can provide consultancy and training on the questions and sub-questions on which we are less knowledgeable, etc.
This is a long work, which will take a long time to reach its maximum formalization, but we hope that this work can be useful to many organizations and people who want to have a significant impact in their context. We hope to make this journey with many new allies to build a processual common good, if you want to contact us, you can find us here.
