Your Organisation Viewed as a Collection of Services

March 27, 2021

(This post is second in a series. Part one, “Is Your Organisation Broken?” sets the scene for this post’s proposal of a new way to look at organisations.)

I’ve wondered for a long time if there’s value in looking at all organisations through a lens which treats employees as consumers of services the organisation provides, and then asks “how does the way you organise provide these services?”

This might seem a bit meta, so here’s two examples. The multinational conglomerate Acme Corp follows a “traditional” model of organisations in that it is hierarchical, and bureaucratic. This model offers services such as “work allocation” and “decision making” and in both cases (at least officially) these services are provided via a “performed by a named individual at the appropriate level of management who follows a documented process” approach.

Meanwhile the small startup Mom & Pop Soda Shop Inc follows a “trust” model in that anyone is expected to spot things which need to be done, and are permitted to do them. This model offers the same services (“work allocation” and “decision making”) but here both are provided via a “all employees are empowered to do the right thing ad hoc and whenever required” mechanism.

How different organisations provides these “internal” services will clearly vary greatly, but I think (bear with me) that there is a finite set of services that all organisations provide purely by dint of their being an organisation. Sometimes an organisation will provide one or more of these services explicitly, and other times it will provide some of them implicitly (or even by accident). Furthermore, some services will be provided officially, and others unofficially. Sometimes both types will be at play at once, one most likely working more efficiently than another.

Finally, please note that this breakdown says nothing about the quality or fit of any of the service implementations in a given organisation. The services as delivered might be terrible, or they might be excellent. They might conflict with or contradict one another.

With this in mind we can get to the services themselves. I am no org-design expert (I’ve just read a lot, and consulted in a lot of places, and like to nerd-out and find how other folks organisations work) but I hope that the items on this list are both collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive. Finally I’ve tried to put them in order of importance. It is likely that in all organisations the first two services are explicit. Only in larger organisations might later / all other services be so.

I’ve tried to use a service-design style way of representing this which names the service, gives the need it meets, the outcome it provides, and the value it delivers.

That’s it for now. In my following posts I want to look at various organisations and organisational styles and see how these services might map onto them.