Essay by the Transition Collective: “Government organizations and their leaders are in a pinch. They are caught between pressures from politicians, citizens and increasingly complex external environments on the one hand — and from civil servants calling for new ways of working, thriving and belonging on the other hand. They have to enable meaningful, joined-up and efficient services for people, leveraging digital and physical resources, while building an attractive organizational culture. Indeed, the challenge is to build systems as human as the people they are intended to serve.
While this creates massive challenges for public sector organizations, this is also an opportunity to reimagine our institutions to meet the challenges of today and the future. To succeed, we must not only think about other models of organization — we also have to think of other ways of changing them.
Traditionally, we think of the organization as something static, a goal we arrive at or a fixed model we decide upon. If asked to describe their organization, most civil servants will point to an organigram — and more often than not it will consist of a number of boxes and lines, ordered in a hierarchy.
But in today’s world of complex challenges, accelerated frequency of change and dynamic interplay between the public sector and its surroundings, such a fixed model is less and less fit for the purposes it must fulfill. Not only does it not allow the collective intelligence and creativity of the organization’s members to be fully unleashed, it also does not allow for the speed and adaptability required by today’s turbulent environment. It does not allow for truly joined up, meaningful human services.
Unfreezing the organization
Rather than thinking mainly about models and forms, we should think of organizational design as an act or a series of actions. In other words, we should think about the organization not just as a what but also as a how: Less as a set of boxes describing a power hierarchy, and more as a set of living, organic roles and relationships. We need to thaw up our organizations from their frozen state — and keep them warmer and more fluid.
In this piece, we suggest that many efforts to reimagine public sector organizations have failed because the challenge of transforming an organization has been underestimated. We draw on concrete experiences from working with international and Danish public sector institutions, in particular in health and welfare services.
We propose a set of four approaches which, taken together, can support the work of redesigning organizations to be more ambitious, free, human, creative and self-managing — and thus better suited to meet the ever more complex challenges they are faced with…(More)”.