Most real organizations have many design problems. This is most explicit in engineering type organizations, but such issues are nearly as common in all organizations. Any organization must make many choices regarding the design and marketing of their product or service, in how it will be financed, sourced, produced, tested, stored, transferred, priced, evaluated, etc.
So problems of product or service design are the consequences of organizational design. I would therefore be interested in the following:
What organizational design minimizes the factors that detract from good product or service design?
Can these traits be developed within an existing organization, and if so how?
I infer this is a much more significant challenge: though most organizations have ideal design criteria for products and services they produce, I have not heard of any that have ideal design criteria for the organization itself. At least, none that are not automatically assumed to be met.
It seems kinda weird to focus on the mismatch between design competency and other attributes (like power, etc..). To a first approximation we can probably assume that almost everyone in almost all organizations are primarily concerned with advancing themselves and only distantly with the overall organization objectives (maybe not consciously)
Wouldn't it be more useful to think about this in terms of why there are other goods than design competency to be traded, e.g., why it would even be desirable to join coalitions or to trade favors. Isn't the fact that credit is gameable the heart of the phenomena that is going on hear.
The reason that people form coalitions to fight over resources can presumably be traced to the fact that people on "successful" projects get an unduly large amount of credit...enough to make up for extra resource consumption. This is also why favor trading presumably happens since you are better off if your department succeeds once and fails dramatically once than if it comes close to success twice.
Only the issue of pitching things so someone else thinks it's their idea seems to be a genuine issue of psychological bias rather than poor assignment of credit. Even there one has to consider the extra credit handed out to the person who came up with the idea.
You lump in a bunch of a very different design decisions in such a way that its hard to be wrong. What problems or decisions does a company face that are outside of what you call 'design decisions'? Personally I would at least differentiate between what I would call design decisions and internal resource allocation decisions.
For what I would call design decisions I only see this dynamic play across one level of the hierarchy at a time. A low level employee may have design disagreements with their boss, but rarely or never with their bosses boss. The problem sets just change too drastically as you move up the hierarchy. We also just don't care about each others problem sets, so it would be hard to communicate on an agreed set of design decisions to present a united front.
Coalition forming seems to be based around what design decisions you or your group are in charge of, so its really just coalition forming around resource allocation decisions. Developers generally won't form coalitions against each other, but they will all form a coalition to represent their interests to the company at large.
Performance reviews seem mostly to be about re-establishing hierarchy, not helping talent to rise to the top, which is threatening to supervisors as per the Peter principle.
Perhaps worse still, the direction of information in a performance review may in reality mostly be employee --> supervisor instead of supervisor --> employee. That way the supervisor knows how to more effectively take credit for the work internally, and at the same time gets to display and enhance dominance.
Hmm. I'm not completely disagreeing with you here, but I do think this is one of your more cynical posts. In particular, I'd sure like to believe that my company is not experiencing the kind of destructive politics you described.
So problems of product or service design are the consequences of organizational design. I would therefore be interested in the following:
What organizational design minimizes the factors that detract from good product or service design?
Can these traits be developed within an existing organization, and if so how?
I infer this is a much more significant challenge: though most organizations have ideal design criteria for products and services they produce, I have not heard of any that have ideal design criteria for the organization itself. At least, none that are not automatically assumed to be met.
It's common for a boss who relies on a particular underling's design ideas to describe that underling as being accomplished at articulating ideas
It seems kinda weird to focus on the mismatch between design competency and other attributes (like power, etc..). To a first approximation we can probably assume that almost everyone in almost all organizations are primarily concerned with advancing themselves and only distantly with the overall organization objectives (maybe not consciously)
Wouldn't it be more useful to think about this in terms of why there are other goods than design competency to be traded, e.g., why it would even be desirable to join coalitions or to trade favors. Isn't the fact that credit is gameable the heart of the phenomena that is going on hear.
The reason that people form coalitions to fight over resources can presumably be traced to the fact that people on "successful" projects get an unduly large amount of credit...enough to make up for extra resource consumption. This is also why favor trading presumably happens since you are better off if your department succeeds once and fails dramatically once than if it comes close to success twice.
Only the issue of pitching things so someone else thinks it's their idea seems to be a genuine issue of psychological bias rather than poor assignment of credit. Even there one has to consider the extra credit handed out to the person who came up with the idea.
As I've defined them, resource allocation decisions are design decisions.
http://jeffreypfeffer.com/b...
Is there a good management text that expounds on these ideas?
You lump in a bunch of a very different design decisions in such a way that its hard to be wrong. What problems or decisions does a company face that are outside of what you call 'design decisions'? Personally I would at least differentiate between what I would call design decisions and internal resource allocation decisions.
For what I would call design decisions I only see this dynamic play across one level of the hierarchy at a time. A low level employee may have design disagreements with their boss, but rarely or never with their bosses boss. The problem sets just change too drastically as you move up the hierarchy. We also just don't care about each others problem sets, so it would be hard to communicate on an agreed set of design decisions to present a united front.
Coalition forming seems to be based around what design decisions you or your group are in charge of, so its really just coalition forming around resource allocation decisions. Developers generally won't form coalitions against each other, but they will all form a coalition to represent their interests to the company at large.
Yes, performance evaluations are very political: http://www.overcomingbias.c...
Performance reviews seem mostly to be about re-establishing hierarchy, not helping talent to rise to the top, which is threatening to supervisors as per the Peter principle.
Perhaps worse still, the direction of information in a performance review may in reality mostly be employee --> supervisor instead of supervisor --> employee. That way the supervisor knows how to more effectively take credit for the work internally, and at the same time gets to display and enhance dominance.
How informative is what you'd like to believe about what is true?
Hmm. I'm not completely disagreeing with you here, but I do think this is one of your more cynical posts. In particular, I'd sure like to believe that my company is not experiencing the kind of destructive politics you described.
* Good design can be intellectual property in and of itself, so there might be reasons to restrict knowledge of what constitutes good design.
* Telling employees what you think constitutes good design might discourage them from coming up with better designs.
* There might be diversification benefits (think in ecological terms) to having a variety of designs.