Intro to Organizational Design and Management – Part 1

My first week in the course called “Organization Design and Management (ODM) in Human Centered Design (HCD)” with Professor Guy Boy was beyond thrilling. This was my very first time interacting with Dr. Boy and it was off to a great start. After being inspired by his voice over the telephone, and his unparalleled digital footprint in HCD, I was able to grasp the professor, a real Human Systems Integration Architect.

The ODM course began with the organization being established as a fundamental pillar of HCD – “no HCD will be really possible without an appropriate organization.” This pillar was reinforced by the basic, conceptual TOP Model, which is a triangle for “Technology, Organization and People” that circumscribes HCD. Further, a quote from H. W. Hendrick on macro-ergonomics connected the vertices into one purposeful sentence i.e. macro-ergonomics is “the optimization of organizational and work systems through consideration of relevant personnel, technological and environmental variables and their interactions.”

Dr. Boy highlighted the fact that modern technology has created significant influences on the way how people interact within organizations. One such noticeable change has been the replacement of top-down, hierarchical communication with transversal communication. An example of this is evident in an email from Elon Musk to his employees at Tesla entitled “Communication Within Tesla”. In this email, Elon Musk, highlights that “Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else [without managerial permission] according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company.” The point here was not random chit-chat, but rather ensuring that Tesla executes ultra-fast, and with intelligence and agility.

Another noticeable change has been the movement of people from rural areas towards the cities and the replacement of “village communication” with social media. However, along with this evolution of people within their organizations and operational environments, several layers of artifacts have been added, which need to be understood. For example, in the case with the intra-organizational communication, new layers of Internet, smart phones, mobile apps and instant messaging have lead to large volumes of data and multimedia that may be scattered incoherently and insecurely across multiple devices which represents the very antithesis of organization or intelligence. Or does this phenomenon invite a design opportunity for automation that aggregates and makes useful sense of the untethered digital organizational memory?

This growing digital organizational memory would be beneficial since organizations will have active databases into which user requirements and new design recommendations can be creatively combined in order to generate simulate-able user interface (UI) prototypes. Simply because these prototypes incorporate such knowledge, it would follow that these prototypes would facilitate the early testing, require less user training and corrective ergonomics i.e. economical HCD.

My hypothetical Big Data application for generative HCD will certainly eliminate gaps in organizational memory that accrue over time when specialists retire, and cut across space to mitigate cultural differences; however, it may be susceptible to groupthink, which is “a mode of thinking that people [or automata] engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action … a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgment that results from in-group pressures” (Janis, 1972, p. 9). To manage groupthink from design-time, alternatives can be generated through abductive reasoning, which thrives on intuition, pragmatism, experience and competence. The narrowed range of design alternatives can then be tested by users in human-in-the-loop simulations (HITLS) of organizational activities while under evaluation with usability inspection methods. It is also noteworthy that my hypothetical Big Data application can have an input parameter for the level of Standardization vs. the level of Innovation that is required in the generated designs.

Another concept that came to the fore was the tangibility of the UI prototypes, which is a necessary element of human interaction, especially in light of techno-virtualization. According to Dr. Boy, tangibility is about physical and figurative cognitive situation awareness. I assert that, in both cases, tangibility appears to be related to the salience, frequency and intensity of physical feedback and the cognitive linkages to a user-based conceptual model. I have taken a note that even though tangibility sounds abstract it is measurable. Both subjective and objective metrics can be operationalized to determine levels of tangibility.

What I quickly realized is that among the string of stories that Dr. Boy vividly recalls from his vast experience, there are some elegantly crafted conceptual models, which have been mapped onto shapes – some hybrid of Cartesian Geometry and Platonic Solids. Therefore, in between a captivating story of his seminal work on the A380 and the organizational complexity at Airbus, and an equally fascinating story about his fond childhood memories with the shepherds in the Southern France and their educated common sense, Dr. Boy weaved his HCD framework, step-by-step, from a triangle into the upper half of a 3D octahedron (or square-based pyramid) in order to depict what he called “The AUTOS Pyramid”. Each of the five (5) vertices represented a tangible object: Artifact, User, Task, Organization and Situation. The eight (8) edges along with the two (2) diagonals of the square base represented the relations between criteria and methods of the specific objects in the corresponding vertices.

What was amazing about the AUTOS Pyramid as a foundational HCD framework was not only the simplicity and applicability of the conceptual model, but rather the ordering of the layers of relationships upon which the 2D model evolves into a 3D model that encapsulates the essential entities and functions within HCD.

The next outstanding moment was when Dr. Boy posed the question, “What would the next generation of aircraft look like?” I responded that “these aircraft will be personal and without the cylindrical fuselage”, because as was mentioned from the outset, technology has caused several shifts in organization. One of those shifts has been more personalization of devices, which are connected via a suite of network protocols. Dr. Boy hinted that “stability would be the design challenge”. I modified my response to a “personal quadcopter”. I admired this type of creative-thinking question! Dr. Boy’s questions led me to discover the compact, closed-cockpit, semi-autonomous E-Hang 184, and the Kitty Hawk Flyer, a lightweight, open-seated flying car. Both flight vehicles feature eight (8) electric engines, which are arranged in two different configurations.

At the end of Week 1, there were several key take-aways which I’ve summarized below:

• In HCD it is imperative to go purpose to means opposed to means to purpose
• It is better to integrate people; the UI will emerge naturally
• Testing as early as possible is the essence of HCD
• The crucial issue of HCD is INTEGRATION
• “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” (Alan Kay)
• Don’t only think abductively; do abductively; be abductively!

With these concepts embedded within my ODM conceptual model, I happily prepared for Week 2 by ordering the following three books:

• Orchestrating Human Centered Design
• Tangible Interactive Systems
• The Handbook of Human Machine Interaction

I also downloaded the book “Management of Uncertainty” and browsed Dr. Boy’s impressive website at http://my.fit.edu/~gboy/GAB/Welcome.html. As was expected, I was totally floored by the capability of the Giant who stood before me in Week 1. Thank God, the ODM class of Week 2 was only approximately 10,000 minutes away.