Moving Beyond Program Design – The role of cultural diagnosis tools in improving the design of organizations

The Importance of Organizational Design

All social purpose and civil society organizations are committed to improving the impact of their programs. Understanding the issue or problem that is being addressed and designing impactful solutions is at the heart of most non-profits, NGOs and social enterprises. Founders, program managers, field-level implementers and monitoring and evaluation personnel spend a lot of energy, time and resources in diagnosing and understanding the problem, designing solutions, articulating their theory of change and action, and implementing these programs until the final beneficiaries are reached. This external program focus is a time consuming and resource intensive exercise.

The consequence of this is that many civil society organizations fail to focus inward into the organization and diagnose the issues, challenges, and problems that it faces internally. Not enough time and resources are spent in diagnosing and assessing whether the culture, structure, relationships, roles, communication processes and work flows of the organization are in service of its vision and purpose.

When issues emerge with programs in their design, implementation, or evaluation, the programs and their components are redesigned and/or implementors are put through technical training and capacity building. Rarely do organizations pause and ask the question, “Are our culture, structure and processes enabling us to achieve our mission and purpose.”

Why Organizational Design Gets Neglected

There are many reasons for this neglect.

First, civil society organizations are busy workspaces. Reaching beneficiaries quickly and ensuring the success of the program is time consuming. Very few organizations have the luxury of reflecting on their internal design while they are busy solving the day-today issues of program implementation.

“Rarely do organizations pause and ask the question, ‘Are our culture, structure and processes enabling us to achieve our mission and purpose.’”

Second, many organizations do not perceive their internal organizational design to be of relevance or importance for them to achieve their goals and purpose. There is often a sense that a good program will achieve the outcomes that the organization wants to achieve.

Consequently, civil society organizations spend time and resource on technical knowledge and capacity building associated with programs rather than on internal organizational building.

Third, most civil society organizations work with limited resources and prefer to spend any additional resources they have on programs – mostly in scaling these up and increasing their scope – rather than on building their internal capacity through organizational design and development.

Fourth, not many organizations have a clear understanding about organizational development and how intangible aspects of organizations such as culture, relationship, trust, clarity of purpose, team motivation etc. can be evaluated.

Finally, most funding organizations support directly for programs and rarely fund internal organizational design and developmental needs of NGOs. So untied funds, that can be spent on internal organizational development, are rarely available.

Research and data from around the world overwhelmingly conclude that the ‘internal design’ of an organization is as important as ‘external program design’. In many instances, the quality and effectiveness and impact of a program can be significantly impacted by factors such as motivation and relationship of staff, clarity of purpose, organizing and communication structures, clarity of role, clarity of work processes, autonomy and decision-making power and trust between employees.

An anchoring feature of this is the culture that an organization builds – consciously or unconsciously – and the impact of culture on all aspects of the organization.

Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI): Diagnosing to Redesign

Over the last decade, a lot of work has occurred in this domain. More and more tools are available today that can help organizations take the first steps towards better organizational design – that is diagnosing the organization and its culture. These cultural diagnosis tools provide ‘windows’ through which organizations can take the first steps towards deeper understanding of their internal workings.

While a number of such diagnostic tools exist today, a personal favourite of mine is the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) developed by Cameron and Quinn (2006) based on the Competing Values Framework (CVF).

The CVF helps organizations understand their underlying value drivers, current behaviour preferences, and where they wish to be or move towards. CVF presents a model that helps organizations understand their own ‘effectiveness criteria.’ It helps organizations understand what is it that they value between alternate choices; how these values drive organizational decision making; how they influence the structures, processes, and functions that organizations adopt, and how and why different values compete for attention, causing stress and tensions.

Using a simple 2×2 matrix, the CVF helps organizations understand the multiple competing pressures that they face, and the underlying cultural patterns being developed.

The OCAI tool uses the CVF 2×2, four quadrant matrices, as the model through which an organization can diagnose their internal culture. The OCAI itself is a simple, interactive tool consisting of a set of 20 questions that can be answered by all staff and the leadership team within an organization.

“Research and data from around the world overwhelmingly conclude that the ‘internal design’ of an organization is as important as ‘external program design.’”

The tool enables the answers to these questions to be visually represented across two scenarios – the current stress and tension of the organization and their preferred values and the future direction that the organization wants to move towards.

By enabling all members of the organization to participate in this diagnosis, deeper, underlying stresses and tensions in the organization can be revealed. This diagnosis then makes it possible for dialogues to take place between individuals, teams and organizational leaders. This can provide powerful data on how to re-design the organization more purposefully.

Thanks to tools like the OCAI, it is now easier for organizations to take stock of their ‘internal worlds’ and to begin the process of designing themselves to better suit their purpose and mission while improving the effectiveness of their programs.

Considering the enormous impact that civil society organizations have on improving our socio-cultural world and societies at large, such diagnosis is an essential first step.

It is something that all civil society organizations – small and large – can undertake with greater confidence and with minimum efforts and resource spend to improve their impact and serve their constituencies better.