1  Cooperation is the beginning

Every organisation starts with a remarkably simple idea: people can achieve more together than individually. Otherwise there would be little reason to create organisations in the first place.

Yet cooperation is something we often take for granted.

We put people into departments, give them responsibilities and objectives, connect them through processes and assume that cooperation will somehow emerge.

Sometimes it does. And sometimes the system quietly encourages exactly the opposite.

Imagine two departments that are supposed to work closely together but are measured against different objectives. Both can make perfectly reasonable decisions from their own perspective while producing a terrible result for the organisation.

The same happens between individuals.

People learn very quickly what really matters. Not what is written on the wall, but what gets rewarded, recognised, promoted or punished.

If protecting your own area makes you successful, you protect your area. If sharing information makes you less powerful, information becomes scarce. If admitting a mistake damages your reputation, mistakes disappear from conversations – although they continue to exist in reality.

This is why cooperation is more than teamwork.

It is a design question. And underneath the structures sits something much more human: relationships: people behave differently with people they trust.

They ask earlier. They share unfinished thoughts. They disagree more openly. They admit uncertainty. They offer support without immediately calculating what they will receive in return.

Perhaps this is why some of the conversations that matter most in organisations happen outside the formal meeting.

Organisations run on processes, while cooperation runs on relationships.

A good place to begin looking at your organisation might therefore be the space between people rather than the boxes around them.

 2  An organisation should never become too comfortable with itself

Success has an interesting side effect: it teaches us what works. And once we know what works, we repeat it.

We build processes around it. We hire people who understand it. We measure it. We optimise it. Eventually, an entire organisation can become beautifully adapted to a particular version of reality.

Then reality changes.

This is one of the great paradoxes of organisational development: the better an organisation becomes at doing something, the harder it can become to imagine doing something fundamentally different.

We often call the resulting problem “resistance to change.”

I think that explanation is too simple: people change constantly. They change jobs, relationships, technologies, habits and entire ways of living.

What people find difficult is change without meaning.

A restructuring presented on twenty PowerPoint slides may make perfect strategic sense to the people who spent six months developing it. To everyone else, it can simply feel like somebody has moved the ground beneath their feet.

Change becomes possible when people can connect today’s movement with tomorrow’s purpose.

• Why are we doing this?
• What has changed?
• What are we trying to become?
• What happens if we remain where we are?
• What happens if we make this change successful?

These questions are not simple communication to do after the strategy has been decided: they are an essential part of the strategy.

An organisation capable of changing is not one in which people enthusiastically accept every new initiative – it is one in which questioning, learning and adaptation are normal enough that change does not always require a crisis first.

 3  The future needs someone to defend it

There is always something more urgent than thinking about the future.

• A customer needs an answer.
• The numbers need reviewing.
• A project is late.
• A position needs filling.
• Or anything else that keeps you busy all day

And tomorrow there will be another list: because the present is extraordinarily good at occupying all available space.

The future is much quieter.

It usually appears first as an observation that doesn’t quite fit, a technology that still looks immature, a customer behaving differently, a competitor nobody takes seriously or a question for which there is no immediate business case.

The danger is not that organisations cannot see the future – the real danger is that they are too busy with the present to even look.

This is why strategy needs imagination as much as analysis. Data can tell us a great deal about what has happened. It can reveal patterns and help us understand where we are. But designing an organisation also means thinking about realities that don’t exist yet.

• What if the assumptions behind today’s success changed?
• What would our customers expect from us five years from now?
• Which capability would we wish we had started developing today?
• What would we do differently if we were building this company from scratch?
• Which topics on the back burner could become the hot topics of tomorrow?

These questions are uncomfortable because there are no reliable answers. And that is precisely why they matter.

Because the objective is not to predict the future correctly: it is to prevent the organisation from becoming trapped inside an outdated version of itself.

 4  Structure should give people freedom, not take it away

There is a reason organisations create structures. Without them, everything would need to be negotiated again and again.

• Who decides?
• Who is responsible?
• What happens next?

Structure gives us answers before we need to ask the questions. That is enormously useful. Until the answer no longer makes sense. Then structure can become bureaucracy.

A person close to a customer knows what needs to happen. Their manager agrees. Another manager needs to approve it. Perhaps Finance needs to be involved. Eventually, a small decision has travelled surprisingly far through the organisation.

Nobody designed the organisation with the intention of making people ineffective. Each individual rule probably had a sensible origin.

The problem is accumulation. Over time, organisations can add layer after layer of control without removing the controls that are no longer necessary.

And there is a deeper question underneath this.

How much do we trust people to think?

Empowerment is often discussed as if it simply meant giving people more freedom. But freedom without clarity can be just as frustrating as excessive control.

People need to understand the direction, the boundaries and what they are responsible for. Inside that space, however, something important can happen: they can use their judgement.

Perhaps the best structures are not those that control every possible situation. Perhaps they are those that make themselves almost invisible when people know what they are trying to achieve.

 5  The environment becomes part of the organisation

There is an old temptation to think about organisational design through an organisational chart: boxes. Lines. Reporting relationships.

But nobody actually experiences an organisation that way.

People experience a room. A conversation. A manager. A meeting. A laptop full of notifications. A colleague who has time to listen – or doesn’t. A workplace where they can concentrate – or one where concentration is almost impossible.

The environment in which work happens is not decoration around the organisation. It shapes the organisation itself.

Physical space can encourage encounters or prevent them. It can create energy or drain it. It can provide privacy, calm, movement, light and contact with nature – or remove all of them.

Digital environments do the same.

We have created extraordinary tools for communication and then sometimes built working cultures in which everyone can interrupt everyone else at any moment.

That should make us think.

Perhaps productivity is not always about asking people to become better at managing their attention. Perhaps organisations should become better at protecting it.

And perhaps the question of where people should work – office, home or somewhere else – is less interesting than another question: What environment does this particular work need?

A difficult conversation needs something different from writing a strategy. Creativity needs something different from administration. Collaboration needs something different from concentration.

Once we start looking at the environment this way, workplace design becomes part of organisational design.

 6  Difference is valuable when we allow it to remain different

Most organisations today understand the value of diversity. But there is a subtle contradiction in the way we sometimes approach it. We bring different people into the organisation – and then teach them how things are done here.

Of course, every organisation needs a culture.

But if everyone eventually learns to think, communicate and decide in the same way, we may preserve visible diversity while losing much of the difference that made it valuable.

Different backgrounds create different perspectives. So do different professions, personalities, generations, cultures and life experiences.

That can make collaboration more difficult.

It can also make thinking considerably better. Because someone asks the question nobody else thought to ask. Someone sees a risk everybody overlooked. Someone interprets a customer differently. Someone challenges an assumption that has become so familiar nobody notices it anymore.

The value does not come from difference alone. It comes from what happens when difference enters the conversation.

This requires a particular kind of environment. People need to be able to disagree without becoming outsiders. They need to be able to question seniority without attacking it. They need to be able to say “I don’t understand” without appearing weak.

In international organisations, this becomes even more fascinating. What looks like hesitation may be respect. What one culture considers refreshingly direct may feel unnecessarily aggressive to another. Silence can mean agreement, disagreement, reflection or simply politeness.

The interesting question is not always: Why is this person behaving differently?

Sometimes it is: What can I see because this person is different from me?

That leads to a very different conversation.

 7  Organisations grow when people grow

Eventually, every organisational strategy arrives at people. You can design a new structure. Create a compelling vision. Introduce better technology. Develop sophisticated processes.

Somebody still has to make it work.

This makes personal growth one of the most important – and perhaps most underestimated – dimensions of organisational development.

But development should mean more than filling gaps in a competency matrix. People are not empty containers waiting to be filled with the skills an organisation currently needs. They arrive with abilities, interests, ambitions, experiences and ways of seeing the world.

• Some work gives them energy.
• Some drains it.
• Some challenges them in exactly the right way.

And occasionally someone who appeared average in one role becomes extraordinary in another.

That should tell us something.

Development is partly about learning new capabilities. But it is also about discovering where people can make their strongest contribution. And then giving them enough responsibility to make it. This is where development and empowerment meet.

There is little point in teaching people to think independently if every meaningful decision still travels upwards.

Equally, simply handing someone responsibility without preparing them for it is not empowerment. It is abandonment.

Growth happens somewhere between challenge and support.

A person takes on something slightly larger than before. They make decisions. Some work. Some don’t. They reflect, receive feedback, adjust and try again.

Gradually, the organisation needs less control because the people inside it have developed more judgement.

Perhaps this is one of the most interesting measures of leadership: Not how many decisions a leader makes, but how many good decisions can happen without them.