Organizational Design

How do you ensure your processes, systems and culture are designed to empower and activate your people to be more adaptive and continuously improve?

Traditional ways of working can slow you down as you manage legacy plans and processes instead of empowering teams to act and learn rapidly.  Similarly, the complexities that come from growing too fast can also hold you back from performing with agility.  Both of these experiences can produce common pain points:

  • Siloed functions and teams
  • Misalignment around key goals & objectives
  • Challenges attracting and retaining top talent
  • Too many priorities and not enough focus
  • Confusion around ownership and accountability
  • Culture that’s not aligned with your strategy

iF’s OD practice is designed for a world where constant change, complexity, and uncertainty are the new normal. We work with our partners to improve your way of operating to unlock greater teamwork and engagement by designing simple operating systems that put people first and enable adaptability.

Linked gears showing the process of organizational design, labeled from left to right: organizational assessment, strategy activation and execution, system and structure optimization, process design and improvement, and culture change.

Creating agility in your culture

The challenge you are facing

Every growing business becomes more complex over time. Interlinked processes, increasing risks, silos and growing demand are some of the factors reinforcing complexity. This complexity slows you down and makes you difficult to perform with consistency.

What is the risk to your business if you are not able to quickly pivot to respond to new customer needs?

Recognize the risks 

  • Your decision-making has become too slow, making you miss opportunities.
  • Your people are fearful or making the wrong decisions and protecting themselves by hiding behind a complexity of processes.
  • Your customers are turning to your competitors who are able to respond to their changing needs with greater speed.

How we can help you turn this challenge into an opportunity

  • We conduct an assessment of your systems and culture, deep-diving into potential blockers of agility. We help you identify the levers you can pull to unblock complexity and support agility.
  • We create an Agile Culture Development Plan and engage your workforce in agile solutions.
  • We redesign your management systems to drive an operating rhythm that enables effective and efficient collaboration across teams and reinforces continuous learning.

Managing growth

The challenge you are facing

As your organization grows, new sites and teams can form almost overnight.  New leadership positions are created and teams are busy tending to increased demand.  Your business cannot outperform your culture, and the bigger you grow the bigger the role process and structure play to enable or disable your culture.  

How do you identify and preserve the aspects of your culture that forged your company’s success while at the same time scale the culture to keep pace with rapid growth?

‍Recognize the risks

  • Your organization is a great place to work, but you are not able to say precisely what makes it great. What are the values and beliefs alive in your business?  What processes, practices and rituals reinforce the desired culture?
  • Can your people clearly see the link between the culture and your business imperatives?
  • Everyone is busy managing the what (growth) but has not time to worry about the how (culture).

How we can help you turn this challenge into an opportunity

  • We give you an in-depth understanding of your culture: not only how people do things, but also why they behave the way they do.
  • We help you to build Rhythm Systems to make sure you are always on top of how your business and culture evolves.
  • We identify the cultural levers for change and sustainability in your business.
  • We train your people on how to manage culture, day-in, day-out.

Aligning culture with strategy

The challenge you’re facing

Your strategy is shifting, so you want to make sure that your organization can fully support your new strategic pillars. You need people to do things differently and you are worried that telling them to do so is not enough. You’re right!

How do you make sure your culture reinforces beliefs and behaviors that will enable your strategy execution successfully?

Recognize the risks

  • Your new strategy needs people to do things differently, but they already have set patterns around ways of working.
  • You are not completely clear on the mindsets and behaviors you need to see in your people to achieve your business imperative.
  • Your current processes and systems actually drive people to behave differently from what you need for your new strategy.

How we can help you turn this challenge into an opportunity

  • We help you engage with your people to create awareness and desire for change.
  • We give you an in-depth understanding of your current culture and of the gaps you need to address.
  • We help you redesign processes and systems to align with the cultural attributes you need for your new strategy.
  • We support your leaders to model the change and lead effectively. 

Boosting your performance

The challenge you are facing

Your performance has been lagging for a while. Whatever you do does not seem to have a long-lasting and significant impact. You’ve run a variety of initiatives and while people have understood the urgency of improving performance, little actually changes.

How do you get your people to change the way they think, feel and act in order to drive superior performance across the organization?

Recognize the risks

  • Employees keep doing the same things expecting performance to lift, but it’s not improving.
  • Accountability is low. People don’t always deliver what they said they would.
  • Your people find justifications and excuses as to why results have not been met. 

How we can help you turn this challenge into an opportunity

  • We help you identify and address the blockers of performance in your culture.
  • We help make your process and systems visible to enable daily team-based problem solving and experimentation.
  • We design and coach leaders to adopt practices and rituals that foster greater accountability and servant leadership.

Moving the needle with strategy execution

The challenge you’re facing

You have ambitious strategic priorities but are falling behind as people struggle with the urgencies of the day-to-day.  Everyone seems to be rowing in different directions,  accountabilities are unclear, and performance is inconsistent across the organization.

How do you execute on strategy in the midst of the daily urgencies?

Recognize the risks

  • Your teams are in silos and lack clear communication and cross-team collaboration.
  • Your employees don’t know what your top goals are nor how they contribute towards them.
  • There always seems too many fires to put out and not enough time to dedicate towards critical initiatives.

How we can help you turn this challenge into an opportunity

  • We give you an in-depth understanding of your current strategy execution system and of the gaps you need to address.
  • We help you redesign processes and systems to be fit your limited capacity and the complexity of your goals.
  • We help you identify and track the right activities that have the greatest leverage to move your goals. 

Aligning the leadership team

The challenge you are facing

Your leadership team is not ‘walking the talk’ and this creates cynicism. You have clearly defined cultural aspirations but the lack of alignment at the top makes it difficult to engage the rest of the organization.

How do you achieve alignment in a group that may have their own agendas, drivers, beliefs and unique personalities? How do you get them to be role models of the culture you desire?

Recognize the risks

  • The culture effort is seen by leaders as purely engagement or communication work to be driven by HR (or insert the relevant function).
  • Individuals believe the problem lies elsewhere in the business.
  • The senior team are failing to walk the talk.

How we can help you turn this challenge into an opportunity

  • We build the leadership capabilities needed within your leadership team.
  • We design leadership standard work to embed practices & rituals into their daily routines that amplify the behaviors needed to model the way.
  • We build an environment for your leadership team to become more cohesive and accountable with each other.

Throughout all our engagements our aim is the same: build organizations with the capacity to sense and adapt to change.  We help you:

  • Make the invisible visible, helping leaders see the hidden culture problems that are hindering performance.
  • Turn strategies into systems, ensuring your structures and processes empower your teams to innovate and support your future growth.
  • Evolve companies into communities, using the power of shared purpose and culture to inspire your people to reach their highest potential.

Let’s talk about how we can help make your organization more effective. To learn more contact christiana@intentionalfutures.com

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