Seminario di Luca Giustiniano

ore 12.30 Sala Seminari – I° piano, Palazzo Levi Cases, Via del Santo 33

09.02.2017

Emerging completion of incomplete organization design: The Case of XYZ, Inc

Seminario di Luca Giustiniano, Luiss

XYZ, Inc (XYZ, fantasy name) is a worldwide organization intentionally “designed for incompleteness”  because the organization is composed of a “crowd” of hundreds of volunteers from the public, periodically working together to design a futuristic infrastructure, develop a market, find investors and customers, and meet with government entities in countries across the globe to change regulations to accommodate the technology. An ethnographic analysis of XYZ identifies several features of designing for incompleteness that aid the organization to continue redesigning itself in the wake of continuous changes in the market, customers, technology, and the crowd itself.  These features include: 1) Centering the organizational design on visibly conveying the sets of interdependent tasks needing to be accomplished, which are allowed to be tailored by crowd members to their unique interests and skills, and then collaboratively worked on with temporary coordination mechanisms; 2) Tasks needing to be accomplished are based on current opportunities available to the organization  - opportunities provided in part by the crowd itself; 3) Dynamic and transparent surfacing and balancing of inherent dilemmas in the organization form the core processes in the organization; and 4) Collaboration tools are used not simply to support collaboration but to encourage fluidity in the organization design.  These features expand our understanding of designing for incompleteness, and especially for managing innovative virtual organizations of crowds which are likely to remain incomplete by the nature of their work and workers.