Boundary-Spanning Design

We talk about organizational design and change problems as if they were given — as if there is only one problem that could be defined for any situation and only one best way to design a solution. This is far from true. Design is like completing a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box. We find a bit of sky and then realize it is, in fact, part of a swimming pool.

Organizational change, design, and problem-solving depend on pattern recognition. When organizations assemble a team of managers or designers to represent different business groups, each person brings the assumptions of their group culture and “best practices” with them. They are expected to collaborate as if they totally understand every single part of every business practice involved. But there are multiple, interrelated problems involved in any situation and different stakeholders will perceive different problems depending on their background and experience. The key skill is to recognize those problems and tease them apart, dealing with each one separately.

Organizational problems – whether operational or strategic – typically span organizational boundaries, so the design of business processes and enterprise systems is complicated. Boundary-spanning systems of work need systemic methods and solutions. The point is to understand how collaboration works when people lack a shared context or understanding — and to use design approaches that support collaborative problem investigation, to increase the degree of shared understanding as the basis for consensus and action in organizational change. To enable collaborative visions, people need some point of intersection. In typical collaborations – for example a design group working on change requirements – the “shared vision” looks something like Figure 1.

Figure 1. Differences Between Individual, Shared, and Distributed Understanding In Boundary-Spanning Groups

The only really shared part of the group vision is the shaded area in the center. The rest is a mixture of partly-understood agreements and consensus that mean different things to different people, depending on their work background, their life experience, education, and the language they have learned to use. For example, accountants use the word “process” totally different to engineers. Psychologists use it to define a different concept from either group. When group members perceive that others are not buying in to the “obvious” consequences of a shared agreement, they think this is political behavior — when in fact, it most likely results from differences in how the situation and group agreements are interpreted.

Boundary-spanning collaboration is about maximizing the intersections of understanding using techniques such as developing shared representations and prototypes, to test and explore what group members mean by the requirements they suggested. It involves developing group relationships to allow group members to delegate areas of the design to someone they deem knowledgeable and trustworthy. It uses methods to “surface” assumptions and to expose differences in framing, in non-confrontational ways. But most of all, it involves processes to explore group definitions of the change problem, in tandem with emerging solutions. We have understood this for a long time: Enid Mumford, writing in the 1970s and 80s, discussed the importance of design approaches that involved those who worked in the situation, and the need to balance job design and satisfaction with the “bottom line interests” of IT system design (Mumford and Weir 1979; Mumford 2003) – also see Porra & Hirchheim (2007). This theme has been echoed by a succession of design process researchers: Horst Rittell (Rittel 1972; Rittel and Webber 1973), Peter Checkland (1999), and Stanford’s Design Thinking initiative (although “design thinking” tends to be co-opted to focus on “creativity” in interface design, rather than the integrative design approach that may have been envisioned).

The problem is that most collaboration methods for design of organizational and IT-related change, whether focused on enterprise systems design, business process redesign, cross-functional problem-solving, or IT support for business innovation, employ a decompositional approach. Decomposition fails dramatically because of distributed sensemaking. Group members cannot just share what they know about the problem, because each of them is sensitized by their background and experience to see a different problem (or at least, different aspects of the problem), based on where they are in the organization. Goals for change evolve, as stakeholders piece together what they collectively know about the problem-situation — a process akin to assembling a jigsaw-puzzle. (Productive) conflict and explicit boundary negotiation are avoided because group-members lack a common language for collaboration so misunderstandings are ascribed to political game-playing. We need design and problem-solving approaches that support the distributed knowledge processes underpinning creativity and innovation — approaches that recognize and embrace problem emergence, boundary-negotiation, and the development of shared understanding. This is the core of my work on improvising design.

References

Balcaitis, Ramunas 2019. What is Design Thinking? Empathize@IT https://empathizeit.com/what-is-design-thinking/. Accessed 8-15-2023.

Checkland, P. 1999. Systems Thinking Systems Practice: Includes a 30 Year Retrospective, (2nd. Edition ed.). Chichester UK: John Wiley & Sons.
[Original edition of this book published in 1981].

Mumford, E. 2003. Redesigning Human Systems. Hershey, PA: Idea Group.
Mumford, E. and Weir, M. 1979. Computer Systems in Work Design: The Ethics Method. New York NY: John Wiley.

Porra, J., & Hirschheim, R. 2007. A lifetime of theory and action on the ethical use of computers: A dialogue with Enid Mumford. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 8(9), 3.

Roumani, Nadia 2022. Integrative Design: A Practice to Tackle Complex Challenges, Stanford d.school on Medium, Accessed 8-15-2023.

Rittel, H.W.J. 1972. “Second Generation Design Methods,” DMG Occasional Paper 1. Reprinted in N. Cross (Ed.) 1984. Developments in Design Methodology, J. Wiley & Sons, Chichester: 317-327.

Rittel, H.W.J. and Webber, M.M. 1973. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences (4), pp. 155-169.