with Dr Susan Albers Mohrman, Prof Christopher G. Worley and Prof John Boudreau
Research and Insights Archive
Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations
Available Content
How to Do Relevant Research – Part 1
with Dr. Philip Mirvis (Babson), Dr. Susan Mohrman (USC), and Professor Christoper Worley (Pepperdine)
Four Key Processes for Developing Advanced Change Capabilities in Agile Organizations
Adapting to digitalization and to the COVID-19 pandemic has stoked interest in the design and operation of agile organizations. But what gets lost in the search for the right structure or the best work methods is how agile organizations change. Agile organizations are...
6 Barriers to Becoming Agile and How to Overcome Them
Research conducted by CEO’s Dr. Chris Worley at USC’s Marshall School of Business, in partnership with goetzpartners – a German advisory firm – and the NEOMA Business School in France, offers insights into the movement of companies’ agility levels. (A full version of...
Assessing Organization Agility: Creating Diagnostic Profiles to Guide Transformation
Welcome to the companion website to Assessing Organization Agility: Creating Diagnostic Profiles to Guide Transformation by Christopher G. Worley, Thomas Williams, and Edward E. Lawler, III. Here you will find the resources mentioned in the book. For the online...
Socio-Technical Action Research Lab Design Lab Description and Process
The STARLab acronym “Socio-technical Action Research Lab” points to a specific type of lab which is designed to create socio-technical action research. This paper outlines the distinctive features of the socio-technical action research lab. First, it outlines the ideas that provide a foundation for STARLab, along with the essential concepts of tacit knowledge and design thinking. Next, it provides a brief background of the origin of the design lab methodology. Last is a description of how the lab works – planning, environment, and process.
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Designing from the Future: Building Prototypes for Digitalized Organizations
The STARLab (Socio-Technical Action Research Laboratory) addresses the gap between the rapid advances in digital technology and the slower evolution of the social systems that are being impacted. Technology advances carry the potential to fundamentally change the nature of work, of the employment relationship, of organizations, and of societies. STARLab’s goal is to accelerate the generation of knowledge about how to design socio-technically integrated organizations to simultaneously address economic and human needs.
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Designing a Digitally Enabled Prototype— a Customer-Centric Design
In the past, growth in the population, markets, customer segments, and customer preferences as well as relatively linear technological advancement meant that a product-centric organization could be successful. Digital technologies allow us to quickly generate insights into customer/consumer behavior, expectations, and valued outcomes, and to build the customer facing part of the organization quite differently than we have in the past.
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Digital Organization Design Challenges: Prototype Solutions and Integration
This document summarizes eight specific organization design challenges facing companies attempting a digital transformation, and describes prototype solutions and responses to seven3 of these challenges. It also presents an integrated reflection on these solutions and an induced design scenario.
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Fast Scaling— A Practitioner’s Guide
The STARLab “Scaling” Community of Practice met virtually (Zoom video conferencing) on three separate occasions during the first quarter of 2018. During these discussions, company examples and research findings were shared. A documented case was presented representing a successful “fast scale” approach to enterprise-wide adoption of a new business model and organization design. Community of Practice members found the case interesting and relevant but requested the journal article be leveraged into a fast scale methodology guide for the practitioner. This paper first discusses key points made in the scale community of practice, and then follows with a practitioner-based methodology for fast scale based on the case study. The appendix describes the initial STARLab research finding from members companies identifying scale as a key organizational challenge in driving digital transformation. A brief perspective is provided to the challenge.
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Efficiency-Innovation Tools
This challenge has to do with using digital technology to enhance organizational ambidexterity
Companies reported that designing and balancing efficiency and digital innovation is hard and fraught with tensions and conflicts. The two types of work produce radically different structures, designs and cultures, which are often contradictory in purpose and management.
These tools are intended to help raise awareness of the challenge and to provide useful guides to actions
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Scaling Tools
This challenge has to do with spreading worthwhile digital innovations across the enterprise
Organizations are struggling to conduct four types of scaling activity: (1) rolling out optimized processes to the larger organization; (2) growing a start-up business to a full standalone P&L; (3) scaling agile units; and, (4) pushing a capability out to the value chain
These tools are intended to help raise awareness of the challenge and to provide useful guides to actions you can take to scale innovations
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