Organization Design

Design the organization around the decisions that run the business.

Organization design is the discipline of designing the connections that make an organization intelligent: who decides what, how decisions travel, what is measured, and the rhythms in which the organization reviews itself, so that the right decisions get made by the right people and keep getting made as the organization changes.

When teams come to Fugue

The situations organization design answers.

Answered with an investment case and a judgment boundary

Artificial intelligence and automation investments without a clear economic case.

Pilots are approved on a demonstration and an estimate of hours saved, and the review hours the system generates are charged to nobody.

Answered with decision rights and an operating rhythm

Operating models that slow decisions and blur accountability.

Approvals queue, work crosses four teams before anything ships, and no one can say who owns the outcome.

Answered with Outcome-Owned Architecture

Organizations that cannot show who is accountable when a system decides.

A model or an agent commits the business to something, and the only account of why is a log that no person answers for.

Answered with a charter, decision rights and flow

A new team or lab to stand up and make part of the organization.

An innovation lab or a product portfolio team is funded, and its charter, its decision rights and its place in the operating rhythm are still to be designed.

How the situation is assessed: Can we deliver outcomes predictably? Where is risk hidden?

Delivery Maturity Diagnostic

How the organization defines, plans, prioritizes, executes, measures, communicates and improves, scored against observable practice. For a team or portfolio; run on ForesightOps.

Portfolio and Program Risk (PRISM)

Nine dimensions across a delivery lens and a security, compliance and governance lens, where one dimension at seventy is a critical finding whatever the aggregate says.

How the work runs

Your team maps the decisions that run the business, gives each an owner, and sets the rhythm in which they are made and revisited.

Map the decisions

The team lists the consequential decisions the organization makes, who makes each today, who answers for it, and how long each waits. Service design and value stream mapping show the same organization as the customer meets it.

Design the ownership

Each outcome gets a named owner with the authority to commit and the duty to answer. Where a system or an AI agent decides, the team writes what it will not decide and when it hands up to a person. This is Outcome-Owned Architecture, developed with Jamie Bernard.

Set the rhythm

Roles, rituals and reviews are designed so the organization keeps its coherence as each decision changes it. A new innovation lab or product team is given its charter, its decision rights and its place in that rhythm.

The methods behind the work, with their sources and steps, on ForesightOps

Organization Design workshop and talks

A half-day workshop on what stays human when software decides, and two keynotes on how organizations change.

Workshop, half day, or executive briefing, 90 minutes

Outcome-Owned Architecture

Decide which decisions stay with people, who owns each one, and what the result is worth.

Keynote, 45 minutes

A New Physics of Work

How to decide what software should own, what people should keep, who answers for each decision, and what each choice is worth.