A design framework for purpose-built, AI-enabled organizations. Start with the customer, the context, and the strategy, then build from scratch to lower carrying costs, reduce complexity, and improve velocity.
Businesses are living through an epochal shift in environmental conditions. Traditional organizations were built for the business models of the twentieth century, and today most have too many layers, slow decision-making, endless meetings, disengaged remote employees, and complexity that overwhelms reality. Better operating discipline or more talent density can't correct structural deficiencies.
Importing pre-packaged processes and "best" practices doesn't fix underlying structure either. We can assemble them into a working operation but each comes with different assumptions about how the organization should work, causing gaps, overlaps, and glitches. The result is frankensteinian: it looks about right and does most things, but the sum lacks the integrity of a well-designed whole.
Form follows function.
Architect Louis Sullivan coined this phrase to stress that the shape, design, and structure of a building should follow from its purpose. His signature buildings show us good form goes beyond simple function and includes desirability, feasibility and viability.
Today, inventing new forms of organization is a necessity because our context demands globality, agility, and speed like nothing we've seen before. It can be overwhelming to reimagine a whole company, so start small and iterate.
Organizations are an assembly of processes and systems, built from compounded ideas, which rest on elementary principles of human behavior and economics. The science of human behavior informs organization design the way the science of chemistry informs cooking.
A winning organization is adapted to its context and informed by customer and business requirements. The functional structure holds the right people in the right place at the right time, with four integrated human elements: leadership, talent, culture, and communication.
Talent is the currency for exchanging what companies need to complete work and what people can do to complete it. It's not a simple thing that works the same in all circumstances. It's a compound of skills, attributes, experience, and interests. Talent is fluid and is best managed as a liquid not a solid.
A culture is good if it grows things. It is also a vessel that carries the company toward its goal, and a skilled practice that shapes it.
None of our most revered leaders act alone. Being in the lead is the result of collaboration and cooperation among a diverse group, aligned on a common mission.
True understanding takes skilled, dedicated resources to gather, clarify, amplify, and modify the messages that keep everyone informed and aligned.
It's a mistake to automate a layer or process that shouldn't exist. Building from scratch allows AI to carry real work in every function, because it's designed into the organization instead of bolted on top. Adding AI to bad process makes it worse because it amplifies the noise as much as it amplifies the signal.
Scratch OD is the technique and tooling for designing organizations with fresh assumptions to create context-adapted structures. The first principle of Scratch OD is always, always start with your customer. Everything else flows from there.
Where to play and how to win: the strategy questions the framework answers.
Why people work and what produces total motivation.
Companies that win with AI will be the ones that redesign their organization instead of optimizing it.
What if big organizations worked like ecosystems, with different species of organization inside them, each adapted to its own conditions?
A science-fair project, boats, recipes, and a hand-towel dispenser
Dead fish, precious metals make stable measures, and a scientific equation
A culture is not a values statement or a manifesto. It has to be defined in response to a business problem, then built and managed to spec.
