Chad – Like the title of your book, [Re]Create the Organization You Really Want, I see a key benefit is making the organization you want to work in, and everyone else wants to work in.
WIIFM
John – That’s the “what’s in it really for me,” or the WIIFM part, right? It’s your opportunity to create the organization you want to work inside and be a part of. All too often, we find ourselves in organizations that somebody else designed. Entrepreneurs get to create their organization from scratch, which is often not done consciously, so the book is useful for recreating or redesigning. It’s also helpful if you’re designing it for the first time. You’ve got a viable product and sales, and you have to scale up and create a real organization. The same blueprint in this book will help you do that. It’s creating the one that you want and the one that you would like to work in.
Empathy
But it’s not just about you; it’s about you having empathy for all those stakeholders and what it’s like to be them inside your organization. It is essential for product design because we’re trying to provide solutions customers want and will pay for. So we know that empathy’s essential there. But from a business designer perspective, if you’re the owner or a senior leader, often the design for your personal 401K or your retirement or flipping it or whatever your objective is, you may not care about all those other stakeholders. Our focus is a situation where you care about creating a sustainable company, even if you’re going to sell it. You should be able to get more money for a sustainable company than one that’s doing boom-bust curves where we’re uncertain about the future. It should be more valuable to everybody, including the investors.
System
We’re starting to realize just how much risk is associated with poor social and environmental performance, including the financial implications. Also, many of our ecological challenges involve waste, which costs money. That’s good news. All too often, we look at some of these as making trade-offs. But this isn’t about a zero-sum game of making trade-offs. It’s about redesigning things so that they create value for multiple stakeholders. That’s why a systems view is so essential to good design because you have to understand that a better supply or partner performance and better workforce performance, when you combine those with better systems and processes, they produce better products and services and create happier customers who buy more from us and bring their friends with them, referral business. So you get repeat and referral businesses that grow the top line and make the investors happy.
So this is all a dynamic system, and good design requires you to view it as a system. Otherwise, you’ll make design decisions based on unnecessary trade-offs. As organizational designers, we still face trade-offs. We sometimes have to make them because our imagination is not yet good enough, or our creativity has not come up with a solution that allows us to resolve value for all stakeholders in every situation. I’m not saying trade-offs don’t happen and aren’t required. We have constraints, have to make trade-offs, and do it all the time, but the notion is we make those when we can’t figure out a better way.
The video is an excerpt from a 2017 podcast with Dr. Chad McAllister at The Everyday Innovator. For more podcasts on innovation and product development, check out the podcast on his website and iTunes.
