System Seeing Adventure – Day 2: Draw your Org (incl. my take on orgs)

The task on day 2 is not only to draw your org, but draw it in three different ways. The org to draw I choose was my company in its current state.

Next step: Draw your org – 3 different ways

That was harder than imagined.

Next step: Jot down what you learned about your org.

• Rather team-centric view
• For some non-tech related functions I have no idea how they are organized
• One view was trying to emulate what was recently presented, but with team focus

Next step: What first occurred to you to draw?

I mostly started with my team. I chose a rather egocentric perspective. In one attempt I started top-down approach, but then lost count of “departments” and moved on to the next one.

Learning for me: The view of the org that I have in mind is hard for me to draw. In my mind there is this web of relations and dependencies, with people and their tasks, and whom do I need to approach for what. Putting that into 2D is really hard for me, especially with a time constraint. I will think more about that.

Update from day 2 + 1:

It seems I missed yesterday’s morning walk more than I expected. On today’s walk I gained a lot of insights on the org structure and why it didn’t work to draw it.

I put myself into a box and tried to draw the org as we usually draw orgs. You know these organigrams and hierarchies. But these are only boxes that HR draws and packs. But reality looks different. Companies are complex adaptive systems, if you want or not. No matter how much command and control you apply, people will adapt. So what does that mean for my org.

Despite having a bunch of boxes where people are put in, this does not even closely reflect how we are working. Besides these hierarchical teams and structures you have guilds, working groups, virtual teams, meetings, and many more elements. e.g the Quality Engineers are put individually into teams, but we also form a loose guild and exchange. When we have to work on special topics like addressing non-conformities (remember: regulated environment) we form working groups from members across several functions. There are the security champions, our InfoSec team’s virtual extension into the module teams. There are regular meetings across functions for many topics, one e.g. change control board.

Some of these additional elements of the organization form based on plan and command, because they need to happen. Others form more organically, because people are willing to support. Organizations are not static.
You might know that the addition or removal of one person creates a new system. Depending on the change this can be adjusted more or less quickly. Changing more than one element will add more time and friction to that. But the system will adapt to the changes and find a way. Happiness of people has been left out of all this on purpose.

No matter how structured your org might look on paper, there are many more layers that happen inside. These are more or less formal, more or less under command and control, but they happen all the time despite the form of the organization. And I would even go that far and say that these structures are more important to the success of an organization than the “official hierarchy”. But as always, these are too messy to put “on paper”. And some of these cannot be forced to happen, at least not when they are supposed to be “successful”.