The ORGDESINE® raison d’être and research product portfolio

In the previous edition of ORGDESINE OUTLOOK, we discussed the need for concordance within structural aspects of organisations and the impairing effects on performance of the three types of discordant situations often witnessed in business. Moreover, we examined how structural concordance can lead organisations to “align”, “empower” and “resonate” (https://nirsanconnect.com/09/05/2019/orgdesine-outlook/leverage-structural-aspects-of-organisations/). In this edition, we bring structural research to life through ORGDESINE® – our research category focused on transforming structural performance of business organisations. We profile the five research products within the category, and explore the synergistic impact of the ORGDESINE® platform that drives benefit which is over and beyond the benefit accrued from individual products.

The ORGDESINE® platform has products that help organisations conduct research and unearth insights about the most seminal structural aspects of their organisations – structure, management and operating processes, decision making architecture, governance models and performance management. FORMIUM® conducts research on organisation structures; EMQUIP® explores opportunities and approaches to strengthen the decision making architecture; SECOPAR® studies the appropriateness of prevailing governance models; OPEREFT® examines the robustness of the budgeting process; UTODEL® analyses the strengths and gaps of people performance management systems.

The structure of the business organisation is the frame that holds it together, and allows it to express through purpose, action and performance. FORMIUM® provides an in-depth assessment of the organisation structure; identifies avoidable design complexities; assesses fit with strategy and environment; and highlights inherent design flaws. FORMIUM® underpins this assessment by an emphasis on simplicity. FORMIUM® believes that organisation structures are most prolific when founded on simple yet profound concepts. FORMIUM® profiles your organisation’s structure along five dimensions of simplicity: axial or conceptual, dimensional, compositional, functional, and connective.

Quality of decisions underpin excellence in operations and performance. EMQUIP® focuses on such substantive ingredients as decision goal setting, research and problem solving, collaborating, aligning, and communicating and contextualising. It provides an in-depth evaluation of the quality of decision making in your organisation, for different decision categories. EMQUIP® is antithetical to the gross simplification that has marred the thinking on what constitutes high quality decisions. EMQUIP® rejects prevalent approaches which have turned decision making into a caricature of linear mechanically described tasks as ‘recommending’, ‘approving’, ‘supporting’, ‘consulting’ and ‘informing’.

Governance provides the foundation for the superstructure of organisational processes. It underpins high performance, smooth operations, effective problem solving, and strategic decision making. SECOPAR® believes in a rich multifaceted conception of governance – as an organisational construct with manifold degrees of freedom, despite linkages with other constructs. SECOPAR® evaluates your organisation’s governance structure based on a framework that tracks seminal factors such as the nature of decisions, cultural context, identity of decision makers, and nature of the environment. SECOPAR® rejects the unidimensional conception that relegates governance to a mere fallout of the organisation’s structure.

Budgeting is a backbone process which materially influences a wide range of other processes such as operations planning, performance management and marketing execution. OPEREFT® provides an incisive and multifaceted assessment of your budgeting process, and identifies aspects that need strengthening. OPEREFT® believes that the budgeting process reflects choices that leaders of organisations make while running the enterprise to create value. When these choices are not made explicit, it results in poor comprehension, low intensity and subpar outputs. OPEREFT® makes explicit these choices along six dimensions: orientation, emphasis, dynamics, refinement, aggregation and interactivity.

UTODEL® rids people performance management from “behaviourism”. Since the 1920s, behaviourism’s central precept has been that: employee behaviour is either reflex as a response to stimulus, or a consequence of the individual’s history of reinforcement and punishment. Such a methodological attitude to people management is hopelessly anachronous. UTODEL® provides a perceptive analysis of performance management, causal relations, and methodological opportunities to adopt humanistic approaches. In stark contrast to behaviourism, UTODEL® is underpinned by humanistic psychology, and embraces the constructs of free will, creativity, positive human potential and self-actualisation.

Hence, each of the five products within ORGDESINE® researches for insights while being underpinned by a unique belief or affirmation that serves as its pedagogic backbone. While FORMIUM® embraces and leverages the power of “simplicity” in structure, EMQUIP® shuns the gross simplification of the construct of decision making and focuses on its substantive ingredients. SECOPAR® emphasises a rich multifaceted conception of governance, as OPEREFT® emphasises the need to make choices in the budgeting process. Meanwhile, UTODEL® negates “behaviourism” in people performance management, and embraces the constructs inherent in “humanistic psychology”.

This brings us naturally to the synergistic value addition of the ORGDESINE® platform, which serves as a greater good over and above the insight and impact brought about by individual products. This value addition is best understood in two parts. The first part of the value addition can be defined in functional terms, when the platform drives concordance across various structural aspects of the organisation and across the research outcomes of the five products. The effort of the platform is to prevent the structural dissonances enumerated in the previous edition of the blog, namely the dissonances caused by situations of “unequal bases”, “poor follow-through” and “inadequate detailed-design”.

The second part of the platform’s value addition is more fundamental than functional, and draws on its own inherent strengths. ORGDESINE® believes that good structural design will lead to organisational “alignment”, “empowering” and “resonance”. All research conducted on the platform have embedded elements of inquiry that are geared towards assessing the prevalent situation along these three organisation characteristics.

In the next edition of ORGDESINE OUTLOOK, we begin our journey to explore individual research products on the platform. We start by delving into the realm of organisation structure, examining the power of “simplicity” along various dimensions of design, and understanding how FORMIUM® leverages such constructs to generate deep research-based insights.