Agentic Organization Design
When humans and machines share the job of reorganization
If you care about organization design, the real work starts now.
I think it worked.
The two-week trip around Sicily has helped me clear my mind.
I want to look more closely at the challenge of agentic organization design. How should we organize people and agents in the age of intelligent machines? How do we design the reorganization itself and divide that work among humans and machines?
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The plan for my vacation was to unfocus for two weeks, get away from my current projects, and give the other parts of my mind a chance to think and reflect.
In which direction should my professional life be going next?
I reflected on my Substack newsletter as I strolled through magnificent cathedrals. I mulled over my advisory board aspirations as I walked the streets of Palermo. I considered my agentic workflows laboring tirelessly while I was enjoying a cup of pistachio ice-cream.
Inevitably, my thoughts kept circling back to the questions that fascinate me most:
How do systems organize to create value and get things done? Why do so many organizations struggle and perform so badly? What are the best ways to structure work and orchestrate people?
Sicily offers countless perspectives. One moment I was looking at piles of litter on the roadside. Another, I was sitting in Palermo’s Massimo opera house listening to Aida’s heartbreaking aria. And I thought: how can the same people sometimes throw garbage onto the streets, and at other times create such timeless beauty? How does an organization (a one-person business, a team, an enterprise, or a government) redesign itself to discourage the former and encourage the latter?
I felt a strong need to get to the heart of this question.
And then, while reading a classic novel on a beach somewhere between Messina and Catania, I came across this section:
This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy. And now that I’ve found it, how can I give it up? Life and work are the most wonderful things a man can have. I am in love with what I am doing, because the answer to this problem is right here in my mind, and soon—very soon—it will burst into consciousness. Let me solve this one problem. I pray God it is the answer I want, but if not I will accept any answer at all and try to be grateful for what I had.
- Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
This paragraph made me stop reading. I felt it speaking directly to me.
Yes, I want to solve the organization design problem, which (IMHO) has never been truly tackled by anyone before. Sure, thousands of experts have written and talked about it. But just look around you at the average team, the average company, the average institution. How much of the theory has actually become practice? Not much, I dare say.
That’s where my work-life should be heading next. That’s where my attention should go.
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Let me solve that one problem.
I pray I get a satisfactory answer. But if not, I will be happy to make just a small contribution to the field.
Jurgen, Solo Chief.
P.S. What’s the first step you’d take to redesign an organization?
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My current (and preliminary) thinking on this topic: I feel that for many (especially larger) organizations, "reorganization" in the usual sense would not be nearly enough. It would be more of a re-invention (looking for the best word here). Inertia has always been a danger for incumbents, and the amount of rethinking required to restructure ways of working to integrate AI systems might be way too much for most of them. So maybe the answer might be that there is no practical way forward for many companies. The question then would be: what (type of) organizations have a real chance to adapt?
"What’s the first step you’d take to redesign an organization?" -- I would try to visualize how the organization is working right now to have a starting point and be able to involve the people in the organization. And to give context to AI ...