What Is Organization Design?

Organization design is a relatively young field with close relations to its neighboring fields of professional endeavor and academic inquiry, such as organization development. One of the aspects that set organization design apart is its focus on formalizable elements such as structures, processes, and roles and a claim that we can design or redesign those elements to achieve intended outcomes. Organization design is about much more than just the structure of the organization. Jay Galbraith’s Star model is a framework that shows the other elements that need to be taken into consideration, such as tasks and decision processes. It also shows that these elements interact and need to be aligned. The four fundamental problems of organizing introduced by Puranam et al. provide another framework for analyzing organizations and their design. It identifies two interlinked problems of organizing: the division of labor and the integration of effort. Both Galbraith’s and Puranam’s frameworks offer useful vocabulary for organization designers with regard to the elements that can be designed or the questions that need to be answered.