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There are many methods of organizational planning in use today. Most have been around for decades. While each of these methods differs in detail almost all of them have one very important thing in common: they are focused on how to get the organization from where it is now to where it wants to be. There are a couple of problems with this.

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• When you start with your current situation and look towards where you would like to be you must consider every possible alternative in choosing the best path to get there. This makes even short term planning complex and makes long term planning virtually impossible at a detailed level.

• You can't accurately predict the future. Even the best forecasting methods have a terrible success rate in the long term because they try to predict the future based on what has happened in the past. Since you don't know what events will occur over the period you are planning for, you can't prepare your organization to deal with them. Because you have to allow for a geometrically increasing number of possibilities as you plan farther into the future, it is difficult to clearly define a plan to reach your ultimate long term goal .

 

Back in 1951 the vice president of Bell Telephone Laboratories created a new method of planning to circumvent these problems. The premise of this planning method is that you first design your ideal organization and only once that design is done do you worry about how to implement it. This method of planning is therefore called idealized design. The difference between idealized design and most other forms of planning seems trivial at first glance but in practice greatly increases the productivity of the planning process because:

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• You first clearly define your ultimate goal without worrying about the problems you will face in getting there.

• Since your goal is an ideal, you plan backwards to where you are now, so you have fewer possibilities to consider because you are looking at potential paths between two fixed states rather than between a fixed state and a variable one (the unpredictable future).

 

Another key benefit of idealized design is that it helps you focus on the development of your organization rather than its growth. Growth is the process of gaining control over an ever increasing number of resources whereas development is maximizing your ability to make the best use of the resources you have. Therefore growth is limited by available resources whereas development is only limited by creativity and imagination.

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The idealized design process is conceptually simple. We imagine that the organization does not exist and we must redesign and rebuild it from scratch. The owners, shareholders, directors, or other stakeholders who are primarily responsible for creating or directing the organization must clearly define its purpose, as described in the The Empowerment Paradigm section of this site. Members of the organization are then divided into groups of six to eight each, usually along the lines of the organization's management hierarchy, and each group begins the process, which consists of the following four steps.

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• Brainstorming: Members of the all of the lowest level of organizational units meet and throw out ideas without any attempt to evaluate them. Creativity is encouraged and no idea is too outlandish to be recorded. This process is continued until the members start having trouble coming up with new ideas.

• Evaluation: Ideas are refined and evaluated. No idea is discarded just because it is impractical to implement. In fact, the more unusual ideas are often useful because, with refinement, they can provide the basis for the most creative and effective designs. The only constraints on the ideas are that they are technologically feasible and that, if they were to be implemented, the resulting organization could survive in the current environment. One technique that is very helpful during this process is to rank the general characteristics of the ideas generated by brainstorming in order of their expected importance relative to the organization's defined purpose. This can also be helpful on a much smaller scale with individual projects, processes, smaller units of the organization, or just about any system that is being designed.

  • Functionality - What does the system need to do?

  • Time - When does the construction or implementation of the system need to be completed?

  • Cost - How much can the organization or unit afford to spend on the system?

  • Integrity - How resistant must the system, its parts, and its data be to corruption?

  • Ease of Use - How easy must it be for customers and other stakeholders to interact with the system?

  • Security - How sensitive is the information used by the system and the functionality it provides, and how much damage would result if information were compromised or lost?

  • Reliability - How often can the system be unavailable or impaired without seriously harming the organization?

  • Performance - How quickly do various system functions need to respond when under a typical work load? a heavy work load?

  • Maintainability - How easy should it be to modify the system when significant changes are required?

  • Manageability - How easy must it be to administer the system?

  Some additional characteristics that typically apply only to hardware and software systems include:

  • Flexibility - How easy must it be to add / change functionality without significant technical changes, like mechanical, program, or database changes?

  • Scalability - How easy must it be to expand the system to accommodate a greater work load?

  • Availability - What percentage of the time must the system be on line?

  • Recoverability - How quickly must the system be restored to full operation in the event of a failure?

  • Concurrency - How many simultaneous users must the system support?

• Design: Ideas are integrated into a single design. We’re not worried about implementation right now, only that all the ideas we use in the design interact well with each other. At this point interaction of the ideas becomes more important than the ideas themselves because we are designing a system, not a collection.

• Integration: Members of each small unit select a representative to meet with representatives of other units, again in groups of six to eight, to continue the process. Steps two and three are repeated using the designs of each lower unit rather than newly brainstormed ideas, although it is entirely acceptable for the higher level groups to integrate their own ideas into the mix. Each parent unit thereby integrates the designs of its child units with each other and with its own design. This process continues with progressively higher level units until we reach the executive level and have an organizational design.

 

Now that we have an organizational design we create an implementation plan by planning backward to the current state of the organization. We simply modify the idealized design so that it is somewhat more similar to the current organization. However, it is still close enough to the original idealized design so that it will be straightforward to implement from the modified design. We then produce a third design that is yet closer to the current state of the organization and from which the second design can be implemented with relative ease. This process is continued until we reach a design that is an image of the current organization. Finally, we organize the implementation steps between all the different designs into a plan to morph the current organization into the idealized organization. We plan backward from the idealized design to the design of the current organization, but we implement forward from the current organization to the ideal one.

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The concept of idealized design is like the conceptual light bulb going off over your head - once you have thought about it enough it will just click. If you need some help lighting the bulb, please try reading the section on idealized design in Empowerment Book I: Fundamentals or Empowerment Book II: Foundation. You can purchase a hard copy or download them free here. You can also learn about idealized design in detail from the book Idealized Design: How to Dissolve Tomorrow’s Crisis…Today by Russell Ackoff, Jason Magidson, and Herbert Addison. Also, please feel free to contact us with any questions.