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by Jeanne Bell and Dan Tucker, Co-Founders
Photo by pierre matile, Monochrome Landscape with Industrial Silos
Blog No. 10 - December 2024
Let’s start with our conclusion: departments are undermining strategy activation in justice-focused organizations. As facilitators of organizational design, we see leaders holding onto the knownness of departments even as they struggle mightily to build strategic momentum in spite of them. Here we lay out a set of serious downsides associated with organizational departments and offer some alternative design thinking for leaders to consider.
Departments Downside #1: Insulated
As the definition above conveys, departments are very often like territories inside an organization. Typically defined by a function–like communications or advocacy–they become fenced off, with their own cultures, norms, and critical to our thesis: their own interpretation or avoidance of evolving organizational strategy. Leaders face the impossible challenge of trying to align six, or ten, or twenty insulated territories around an evolving set of justice strategies.
Departments Downside #2: Autonomous
When departments are the primary structure in an organization, department leads traditionally seek maximum autonomy. They hire their own staff, they submit and manage their own budgets, they track their own metrics. Organizational systems and incentives are designed around their departmental performance more so than their dynamic contribution to organizational strategy activation.
Departments Downside #3: Inevitable
Once departments are created and titles and hierarchies and compensation models are built into each of them, they become inert, inevitable, unquestioned even as organizational strategies change profoundly. On the face of it, this makes no sense, but leaders get locked in. Staff become attached. And soon, strategies that would obviously benefit from configuring people differently struggle to gain real traction.
Insulated, autonomous, and inevitable–not words any of us would associate with strategic agility. As we head into a second Trump administration, knowing that our agility is a matter of survival, let alone thriving, something has to give.
This is where we can think very differently about the design of our organizations. Let's be bold, even courageous: what could we replace our entrenched notion of departments with?
Think about the key bodies of work in your organization and the impact you need each of them to have. That impact is nearly always dependent on the engagement of people and systems beyond a single department. For instance, thinking about financial sustainability rather than finance immediately invites a different charter and a different group of people to the table. Why not have a structure that invites the key raisers/earners and the key spenders of money to look together at what’s happening financially and why? To make informed, holistic decisions and commitments together throughout the year. Imagine the misunderstanding and conflict having such a table could prevent.
While it's often logical to have small functional or project teams in a justice-committed organization, what's missing are routine, well-managed spaces to connect the dots and tie everything to active organizational strategies. A place for clear, strategic decision-making with the key players at the table.
We use the simple image above with leaders ready to re-orient organizational structure to strategy activation. Here are some initial steps you can consider to get the conversation started at your justice-focused nonprofit or philanthropy:
- Have a conversation about the connotations of the language you currently use to group people and work in your organization.
- Putting aside your current departmental nomenclature, have a generative conversation about the bodies of work you need strategically and the concrete impacts you need them to have. Hint: In today's climate, some of these may be short-term, exploratory, or experimental.
- Practice putting a table together around one of those key impacts. See the financial sustainability example earlier in this blog. And, here’s a JustOrg Design worksheet to guide you.
We need staff at all levels to be far less attached to departments and far more compelled by the strategic opportunities and challenges their organization faces–none of which a single department can, in fact, address on its own.
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