Organisation Development in the times of MI6: Art, Science or a Story Unfolding?

Nishanth Krishnam shares his experience of Organisation Design and Workforce Shaping - The true grey work in people practice

OPINION PIECE

Nishanth Krishnam,

6/27/20263 min read

David Maister published his legendary book, “Managing the Professional Service Firm” 33 years ago describing the range of client needs that require advisors to vary from grunt (routine, commoditized) to grey work (complex, expert-led). In people consulting, a space I’ve made home for over 15 years now, only organization design comes close to the grey. It is informed by strategy, numbers, benchmarks and scenarios, and yet never formularized by them. It feels right for a particular stage of a company’s journey, and yet completely wrong for another. It stays in papers gathering dust unless, somehow magically, the boxes on the chart come alive with real humans (with their skills, loyalties and equity intact) matching a version of what they were when drawn.

I’ve held 37 such projects together, before losing most of them to politics, lack of will or change in leadership direction. The ones I held on to, to the end (mostly in the latter, greyer part of my 15 years) were the ones where the design was fluid enough to fit any version of the company’s story that the different stakeholders believed was true, while staying true to principles that these same stakeholders had sincerely agreed to, unbeknownst to who was coming.

When there’s no right or wrong but only consequences

Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP), the just one step downstream (still fashionably grey) cousin of org design, has often been misinterpreted by many as a hard-coded number-play linking composition of roles in a company to its strategic direction. What actually makes it grey is the counterintuitive genius of arriving at what’s a truly critical role/skill and what’s flexible to the point of automating and outsourcing. When leaders finally agree to an organization design (the same one that they had to move on from 5 years ago but are back to, to make sense to their growth story now) and are then served up a scenario that tells them only 10% of this new design is what they should have hired had they restarted their company from scratch, it makes them question the value of the entire exercise.

I’ve been there too with them, often enough, to know that the success of an SWP is only a seed, planted in the most resilient of leadership brains. When and if it becomes a tree, what the fruits will look like is anybody’s guess. In a world where leaders have started moving a lot more between entities, where “how long is long term” isn’t being answered in numbers that need more fingers than in one hand to count, there is neither artistry nor scientific temper saving the day for implementers of effective ways of working in organizations. Saving the day is a third, highly underrated skill: storytelling. For the same structure and workforce shape, what tale gets narrated to the board, the C-Suite, the managers, the employees, and the customers, is what makes or breaks how seriously it gets implemented.

Now, with the agent in the mix…

I will be 40 years old next year, at what is traditionally (and for unorthodox careers too) a middle point. In a knowledge coma for the last 5 years, I wake up to find that the designs I’ve been impressing companies with will all come to nought in this new world where AI agents rule the roost. I first thought these agents are not human and so shouldn’t be coming with human limitations of scope, energy or expertise. However, they have the exact same problems but with different names: context, tokens and cutoff. So we are back to designing organizations, now with agents bossing (they like it being called orchestrating) over other agents and then some humans in and on the loop - doing a strategic agent force plan so I don’t overspend on my AI subscription. I genuinely hope for models that do away with these limiters making my retirement from this grey world more urgent but I think capitalism has other ideas (as it always has had). OD in the times of MI6 will continue being about a great set of stories being told to an intelligent, yet unassuming audience

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