6 March 2017
An MSc Entrepreneurship and Innovation attendee shares their experience of attending the workshop, organised by the European Organisational Design Forum and supported by funding from the Business School's Santander initiative.
The workshop on Seeing and Thinking Design organised by the European Organisational Design Forum was a great experience. I got to know many new people working in and around Edinburgh – all working in fields related to process improvement, innovation, change or organizational design. The one day long workshop was very valuable because it gave an in-depth insight into practitioners’ challenges to introducing change to their organisations.
It also fit my master’s programme in Entrepreneurship & Innovation. Here, I’m currently taking two courses (among others), Change Management and Design Thinking. The workshop connected the two by moving the topic of organisation design in the broader movement of design thinking. We explored the history of organisational design form the early 19th century (moving from the early stages of organisational design towards concepts of design thinking by Nigel Cross and Tim Brown), discussed differences between design and design thinking and worked on a case study that was about restructuring an organisation. The challenge lie in designing a holistic solution to a complex problem by identifying different stakeholders’ interests and motivations. While doing so, we could test and develop our own frameworks and models for the organisation’s redesign before presenting the results to the group.
We also discussed the enablers and inhibitors to successful organisation design. Larger corporations slowly adapt to change, especially when the organisation is not driven or ready to change. For this to happen, change agents play a crucial role. We also discussed the concept of polarity, and how to use find a good compromise among different extremes. Organisation design is very much about designing a living output, something that sustains, an embedded system of learning to an organisation.
Having experienced companies going through times of change triggered by digitalisation or mergers of entities myself, the theories and framework presented and discussed in the workshop perfectly blended in with my programme in MSc Entrepreneurship & Innovation. Thanks to the workshop I feel affirmed of my plans to work in Innovation management and organisational change. Due to all the change happening in the world, there is a growing demand for change makers or intrapreneurs in the context of larger organisations.
When applying design thinking methodology, there are five core principles to follow. First of all, the development has to envision a human centred approach, second of all, framing and the creation of models is important. Thirdly, prototyping allows for an iterative solution development with lots of testing involved. Additionally, the notion of co-creation (participative design) is very important to the design process as well. Last but not least, there has to be a tolerance for failure, or rather, a mind-set of “failing quickly and cheaply” when following these guiding principles. These are just some examples of what we learned during the workshop. I am very glad to have been giving the chance to attend the workshop.
Find more information about Santander funding under Opportunities.