Adaptability through modular organisation design?

Apr 9

“Do you love to play with Lego?”

I do, even though I am not very good at it… :(.

What we can learn from Lego, is flexibility through modular design.

“Wait, does this mean, that if we want to achieve more flexible organisations, where we can react to new business opportunities…hmm, that we can also use modular design?”

Yes, that’s exactly my point. And thankfully, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

From social network science, we can learn that there are some rules of thumb numbers that describe how we humans like to connect.

The rule of 5, 15, 50,150, 500 and 1500.

Each number represents an effective group size for organising our relationships for a core purpose, which is grounded in science.

Robin Dunbar - The director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University and the author of How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (Faber) found that there is a core number about our relationships.

“150. This is the number of people you can have a relationship with involving trust and obligation – there’s some personal history, not just names and faces. It turns out the average village size in the 18th century was about 150 people, before many of us moved into cities.”

— Robin Dunbar

Some more numbers from human networks:

5:
The most effective team size for collaboration and problem-solving.
15:
This number represents the size of a close-knit group of "good friends", a most trusted circle.
50:
This number represents the size of a wider circle of "friends".
500:
This is the approximate number of "acquaintances" , loose connections that a person can maintain.
1500:
This number represents the maximum number of individuals a person can recognise.

”So, can we now come back to modular design for our organisations?”

Depending on the business challenge we want to solve - to launch a new product or service, to develop a business strategy, or to drive usage of a new technology across our organisation - we can think in “modules” of the above sizes.

Jurgen Appelo, management speaker, author and expert developed a set of organisational patterns called UnFIX, based on global organisations who master the adaptivity game.
For example, we can learn to think in groups of:

5 - Crew types - this is a pattern set helping us think about teams not only within but across our hierarchical structure. Crews are defined here as a small team (of 5-max 9 people) on a mission to accomplish a shared goal.
Besides project teams or functional teams, these patterns help us think about if it is meaningful to set up a Governance crew - responsible to make decisions regularly around a business outcome/risk portfolio. Or a Capability crew - a team focused on offering and on building a (new) capability in all parts and corners of our organisation. See the Crew types here.
150 - Base types - these are organisational patterns we might establish for a sense of safety, belonging and stability - at least for a while. Depending on your business need, you may choose to set up a strongly aligned (strategically focused) organisation base or quite the opposite, a loosely aligned, experimental innovation space. You can see the Base types here.
50 - 150 - 500 -1500 - Value streams - these structures facilitate focus and collaboration. Depending on your organisation’s size and complexity, the complexity of your products or services will drive the number of people who need to closely collaborate to deliver value in these value streams for specific customers. You may set up longer term collaboration structures for already proven, stable products and services - or think shorter term for events or for projects. You can see the Value stream types here.
15 - 150 - Forums - you may want some overlay collaboration structures from across the organisation to drive focus on cyclical recurring topics such as market growth strategies, or recurring decision-making forums such as technology forums, strategic investment reviews. Forums can be a versatile way to connect the right experts or key influencers in your network both on a competence and on an interest basis. Find the various Forum types here.

Hopefully, this already gives you a sense of how thinking about your organisation similar to adaptable, purpose-driven designs of modular collaborating units can be achieved. This also opens up many layers of organisation design - such as role design, purpose-driven collaboration, decision-making patterns and so on.

To sum it up, thinking about your organisational design as a flexible, modular design, with UnFIX patterns you can

map out your current organisation and gain a “helicopter view” on how real work happens today in your business
explore organizational patterns that support innovation and continuous improvements
move incrementally to launch and test your designs, measuring the impact of changes on collaboration, engagement and business outcomes

I leave you with a visual summary of the UnFIX organisation design patterns - you can download the full set of relevant cards for free from the UnFIX website. We do offer UnFIX courses for in-house teams, who want to understand their current organisational structure and intentionally adjust it, make it more adaptable to the business challenges they face in the coming years. Contact us if you would be interested in organising a 1-day introductory session or 2-day workshop.