Org design

Organisational design, or org design, is the discipline of deciding which seats a business needs to execute its plan, what each seat is accountable for, how seats group into functions and reporting lines, and only then who sits in each one. The output is usually an accountability chart rather than a traditional org chart: every seat has an owner, three to five responsibilities and one number.

In owner managed companies across British Columbia the chart is usually a drawing of who was hired in what order, with the owner holding several seats at once. Org design makes those hidden seats visible, which is the first step to getting the owner out of them. It also exposes spans of control that are too wide and responsibilities that nobody owns.

In practice org design runs as a short engagement: interviews with the owner and managers, a map of how work actually flows, a design of the seats the next twelve months require, a sequence of hires and promotions with costs, and a plan for introducing the structure to the team. Role descriptions written for the seat double as hiring scorecards. Ali Sedighi's team runs this as a Workshop engagement of two to four weeks and stays through the hires on a retainer when wanted. Employment contract terms are left to the company's employment lawyer.