The Next Organization
Evolving Vision and Technology-Driven Organizational DNA: Motion Over Growth.
1. The Importance of Vision: a Picture of How We Want to Be
In 1993, while working at Studio De Lucchi, we came together with the design team from Philips for a workshop at Vitra to envision the “office of the future”. The objective was not to develop a marketable methodology, but to discover possibilities none of us could have envisioned alone. An encounter as a means of exploring alternative futures while technology entered our offices in the first wave of digitalization, the development of the digital medium and production.
In March 2000, BusinessWeek asked IDEO to imagine tools and situations in a wireless world. We explored how individuals might communicate, access information, protect their privacy, or entertain themselves, and designed products that made these possibilities tangible.
The achievement was not a prediction of the future. Rather, it made possible futures tangible enough for people to understand, question, and begin building them. This period marked the second wave of digitalization: the networked economy.
I wonder how we would come together today to imagine how we want to live and work with this current third wave of digitalization.
How will we satisfy human needs under changing environmental, demographic and economic conditions? How can we use the technological potential to get … where?
2. Organizational System Design as a Result
Shared vision gives us direction. But to move towards it, organizations need to connect their existing capabilities, integrate new ones and create the conditions for them to evolve together.
A relevant example of industrial transformation is the transition of a hardware-producing industry towards an integrated product-software ecosystem through strategic acquisitions of software and AI groups and companies.
The cyclical, reliable world of hardware development is now encountering the agile, fast-moving world of software development. These differences cannot be reconciled with “cultural” fixes.
To address this, the focus of the organization has to shift from “How do we build this?” to “Who are we doing this for, and what value does it create?”
Without this common alignment, capabilities develop independently, decision-making structures lag behind, and initiatives accumulate without being integrated.
We need a balance between a clear, company-wide framework and leeway for experimental evolution. An organization should be able to develop as a living system, with its capabilities connected by shared principles rather than constrained by uniform processes. There is no universal process that can be imposed on every organization and all of its units. Each has its own history, competencies, relationships and circumstances.
3. Technology to Connect and Create Space
During the first wave of digitalization, CAD systems brought previously separate disciplines, such as design and engineering, into closer contact. The integration was not always smooth, but the challenges of adopting new technologies created new connection points and forms of collaboration.
During the second wave, digital networks accelerated development processes and connected disciplines, organizations and markets in ways that would previously have been difficult to imagine. They also created fragmented responsibilities and new dependencies.
Today, in this third wave of digital augmentation, we might have an opportunity to free ourselves to focus on the essence of our work (again). An idealistic but possible perspective.
An important step in this direction is already happening. Companies offering SaaS platforms for automated analysis and reporting are thriving. As a result, organizations can free up substantial capacity previously consumed by tedious bureaucratic tasks.
But this is only part of the potential. We learned in consumer-facing design how inadequate fixed personas and storyboards can become in increasingly diverse societies. AI offers possibilities for more responsive, multi-touchpoint systems that can accommodate individual differences while maintaining a coherent framework. It allows us to move beyond fixed personas toward a more nuanced understanding of individuals.
Standardized ESG reporting and compliance frameworks risk obscuring characteristics, capabilities and circumstances of organizations in much the same way. They establish common standards, but work against an organization’s ability to recognize changing conditions, and to use different perspectives to develop unique solutions.
With integrated data practices and consistent company-wide principles, we could move beyond mere analysis and use AI to become a connecting element for organizations that have grown increasingly fragmented.
It can reveal patterns, inconsistencies, and relationships that remain invisible outside of established silos. The difference is not simply that more information becomes available. What is changing is our ability to translate knowledge across different formats, disciplines, and therefore across organizational boundaries. This could allow organizations to recognize possibilities that no individual department can see on its own.
4. Governance: Cultivating the Opposite of Alignment
Once we have a vision, have integrated and made good use of technology, we need to review our governance structures.
Many organizations already possess extraordinary knowledge and expertise, each operating within established responsibilities, budgets and incentives. Management is expected to make these systems work efficiently.
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Leadership has the additional responsibility of ensuring that they remain capable of evolving. Yet leadership has become increasingly associated with control, compliance and protecting established arrangements.
To innovate from the bottom up, we need to create space beyond technology and automation, allowing every part of the organization to evolve without fear. This evolution must be driven by a shared vision, company-wide principles, and a dedicated, defined space to safely test innovative suggestions.
That requires leadership to accommodate two different conditions. Established operations need reliability, accountability and optimization. Emerging opportunities need room to question assumptions, cross boundaries, experiment, and occasionally fail. Both are necessary, and they are not always comfortable companions.
5. Evolutionary Architecture: The Strategic Design Plug-In
Let’s assume that we have a vision, understand how our organizational structures need to evolve, and recognize the need to adapt governance across the organization. How do we begin to create motion?
Rather than attempting to transform the entire organization at once, Strategic Design Plug-Ins introduce small, focused interventions into existing operations, allowing us to observe what changes, learn from the results and build on what works.
To start, we need an understanding of the system as a whole, its relationships, dependencies and decision-making structures. We need to see how an intervention affects other areas, how knowledge travels and where an initiative encounters resistance.
As discussed earlier, effective technology-enabled communication across the organization and its hierarchies is crucial, in this case to examine projects from multiple perspectives and to potentially develop them further also in related areas.
The insights are not an end in themselves. They can help identify where a targeted intervention might make a difference, bring together the people and capabilities needed to act, and observe what changes as a result. What is learned feeds back into the shared knowledge of the organization, informing the next, adapted intervention.
This approach and information could also help us to see and visualize communication pathways, the distribution of information and decision-making processes across the organization. Making these relationships visible can be a painful but extremely useful exercise.
6. The End of Consulting
All of this has to be designed. Who takes the lead, and assumes ownership?
The problems I have encountered in my more recent odyssey do not necessarily lie within the organizations that need to evolve. Traditional consulting models (analysis followed by recommendation) are too far detached from actual implementation.
Large consulting firms commission sub-agencies, work is distributed through increasingly complex structures to the lowest bidders. Everyone delivers something, but it is not always clear what actually changes.
A different approach would be to integrate experienced expertise directly into the leadership of the organization, with a clear mandate for a defined period of time: to connect people, question assumptions, initiate projects and follow their development. Observe what happens, how initiatives are absorbed or resisted. Build on what works.
This requires involvement and ownership rather than another presentation of recommendations.
Perhaps the future of consulting lies in becoming part of the change it proposes.
7. The Next Economy? The Next Organization
The economic opportunities ahead are not necessarily visible. They need to be imagined, explored and made tangible. They may emerge between established industries, across disciplines and outside existing business models.
To realize them, organizations must become capable of connecting what they already know with what they have not yet imagined. The next organization is not defined by an entirely new structure, but by its ability to continuously connect what it knows, recognize what is becoming possible, act through small interventions and learn from the consequences.
The objective is not growth for its own sake, but the capacity to remain in motion, capable of adapting, connecting capabilities and developing opportunities.
Understanding where future profits will come from deserves considerably more attention than finding ways to extract another percentage point from what already exists or relying on cost reductions once it’s too late.
To avoid that, someone needs to open a window, let fresh air into the organization and create a draft that moves through all the rooms.
Key contents:
Your organization has distributed knowledge that your leadership cannot fully see.
Integrated data practices and information frameworks make previously invisible relationships, inconsistencies and opportunities more accessible.
Small, embedded interventions could use that knowledge to initiate changes that the organization can absorb and develop.
Without vision, a balance of framework and leeway, capabilities develop independently of one another, decision-making structures lag behind, and initiatives accumulate without being integrated.
