Research: Organisation Design for Agility

Organisation design is both art and science. It is a difficult and complex subject, combining issues of strategy, capabilities, structure, relationships, processes, and people. The solution is different for every organisation and must be driven by the unique business strategy and objectives. There will always be a number of possible solutions, each involving some element of compromise. Organisation design is a field that addresses complex systems – in this case, human systems – at scale.

Today, virtually all large organisations use some form of matrix and work gets done as much through collaborating across internal, and external, organisation boundaries as it does up and down the hierarchy. These cross-boundary networks and connections don’t happen by accident and need to be purposefully designed. The opportunities presented by cloud, AI, digital, data, and analytics simultaneously increase internal organisational complexity while helping organisations manage the external complexity that continues to increase in the business world.

While there is a place for full scale operating model design (see previous CRF reports on Emerging Approaches to Organisation Design (2013) and Designing Adaptable Organisations for Tomorrow’s Challenges (2018)), the focus of this report is on elements of organisation design that specifically build agility. In practice, we are seeing that some elements of the operating model are being used more to build agility as a set of management capabilities in service of specific outcomes.

The research is authored by Amy Kates, Prateek Sinha and Gillian Pillans. And sponsored by Accenture.