MICROMANAGED? Don’t fight your bureaucracy, insure against it!
Organizational design fiction, part 3
Do you feel like you can’t make decisions without getting everyone in your organization to agree? For simple things do you need to ask for permission rather than being autonomous in your decision making? In this design fiction, I’m considering who might help you get the right types of approvals in the style of an ad for a lawyer.
Ideation with the cards
For ideation, as before, I’m using a combination of The Work Kit of Design Fiction cards from the Near Future Laboratories with the Tensions and Practices cards from The Ready.
This time I got the following:
- Tension: “People have to ask for permission to take action”
- Action: “diagnose”
- Object: “payment”
- Archetype: “advertisement”
- Tone: “failure”
- Attribute: “forbidden”
As before, I thought about all of the reasons that someone might need to ask for permission to take action. This help me explore all of the different root problems we might try to solve with the design fiction. Here is what I came up with for this prompt:
- Micromanagement
- Their decisions are undone by someone else usually
- All mistakes are punished
- Bureaucracy
- Part of the process to get approvals
- Fear of someone not being included
When I drew this set of cards, I wasn’t very excited and didn’t really get far with my ideation. I thought of investigators and consultants that might advertise their help. It wasn’t until I came back a week later that I finally was inspired by the idea of a lawyer ad for a permission consultant.
What types of intake would this practice do? How would they be effective? How would other people feel if you brought in someone else to wrangle them? What leverage would they have in an organization? How would this change relationships with stakeholders?
Pushing on organizational practice
What was more interesting were the different types or organizational dynamics we might consider if we were to solve this problem outside of the design fiction:
- People have pay out of some organizational bank to have someone’s approval — less approvals take less out of this bank.
- More people involved in a decision the less people get paid for that decision — if some decision set would equal their paycheck.
- Paying for insurance out of your paycheck to avoid people getting mad at a decision being made without them.
- Larger decision making groups come directly out of a group/team budget — so smaller decisions are cheaper.
- Internal consultant service that looks for the right people to be involved in every case so you better make sure it is an important decision.
- People can sue in the court of the org if they aren’t included in a decision when they should have been — who would preside over this?
I’m still not sure what to do with these organizational provocations or how they would fit into a design fiction (or other discursive design practice). Maybe fiction? Still need to work through it a bit more…
Here are all of the organizational design fiction posts so far:
- #1 — Rotten Tomatoes Meeting Reviews Google Chrome Extension
- #2 — RiteFeeling behavior modification program to reduce meetings
- #3 — MICROMANAGED? Don’t fight your bureaucracy, insure against it!
And I’ve also talked about how product managers write fiction, starting with the PRFAQ.
