Form Seeking Organizations

Saul Kaplan
October 28, 2009

I have been thinking about the notion of form seeking structures since being wowed by MIT researcher Neri Oxman during the BIF-5 Collaborative Innovation Summit. Neri’s exciting work has big implications for organization design as we move from self-limiting industrial era structures to self-organizing networked structures.

Neri is an innovative architect who plumbs the natural world for ingenious ways to create objects or structures that meld harmoniously with their surroundings. Her vision of design is not rooted in the philosophy of the Industrial Revolution, when the machine became the ultimate model of functionality-many parts working together as an integral whole, a kit of parts. Instead, Neri’s model of design is the biological world, where there are no assemblies or individual components, but mostly tissues made of single materials (like a leaf) redistributed perfectly to achieve balance and functionality.

Neri’s interdisciplinary research initiative, MATERIALECOLOGY, takes a contemplative approach to design. She asks atypical questions. Not, what type of building do we want to design? But, what behavior do we want to achieve with this space? What human and environmental values will be important and how do we design a structure to accommodate those values?

“We’re accustomed to thinking in terms of types and typologies,” Oxman says. “We begin with specific a-priori high level rules and work toward some desired product.  A typical architectural approach is to assume the separation of materials by their functions-steel and cement for support, glass for insulation and visual connection to the environment. Natural objects, however, are perfectly designed from single materials. Oxman’s designs, several of which are now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, strive to imitate that perfection in manmade materials.

Neri’s approach is directly relevant to organization and social system design.  How can we apply her fresh thinking to creating new form seeking structures and models designed around the end user?

After twenty years of deploying consulting teams I guess I take for granted the value of quickly forming flexible interdisciplinary teams to work on specific challenges and opportunities.  It seems intuitive and obvious that project teams should be organized around the customer comprised of the diverse talent needed for the work at hand regardless of what silo or organization function individuals come from.  No organization boundaries should ever be allowed to come between the customer and delivering value.  Customer-facing team effectiveness is all that matters.   Compensation and promotion opportunities must be aligned with customer value delivery.

Over many years as a road warrior consultant, client executives would observe with envy the way consulting teams were easily formed and reformed across silos.  Executives would often express a desire that their organizations could work as effectively across functional boundaries.  While they wished for a more flexible organization most were stuck in an industrial era paradigm and unable to change.

Most large organizations including both product and service companies are stuck in top down functional organizations with entrenched silos.  The silos are impermeable and efforts to implement horizontal processes cutting across the organization are always burdened by loyalties and incentives that reinforce vertical affiliations.  Interdisciplinary project teams are too slow to come together and often dysfunctional as team members struggle to figure out roles, expectations, and implications of being too far removed from functional homes and bosses.

Industrial era organization structures are getting in the way of innovation.  They are too rigid and unable to seek the networked forms necessary to deliver value to customers in the 21st century.  The customer is waiting. We need new organization structures and approaches that are form seeking in order to better meet customer needs.  We can learn a lot from Neri Oxman about form seeking structures.