You said what? Astronomy in organisational design?

Sometimes, many times, I just can't predict where things will end up from a hum-drum starting point. You'd think I would know better by now.

There are times when what clients really want to talk about is "structure". Or think they do. I have always found it a little dull, compared to other elements. I had spent some previous hours discussing "structure" with one of my favourite clients, and I guess it was essentially about that: how to frame your organisation to respond most effectively to the strategic and operational challenges facing it.

Structure must also respond, sometimes, to people. This client still sits in the post-start-up, pre-explosive-growth stage, with 2 inspiring co-founders running different streams. Happy and willing to share the power and the accountability of leadership. Neither wanting or needing the glory of sole control.

In corporate style show-and-tell during the previous session, I had sketched on the whiteboard a wiring diagram with boxes and arrows, depicting the "program" and "operations" sides of the organisation, and "joint CEOs" at the top of each stream. Not an unknown paradigm.

Now we were running a workshop to flesh out that paradigm with the full team. I started again on the whiteboard, with the two joint CEO boxes at the top. Then I said: "We need a box for Eric."

Eric said "Do I have to be a box?" which was a question I had never been asked before, but a fair enough one, I suppose.

"No," I said, "what would you like to be?" We eventually settled on putting Eric inside a fluffy cloud.

"When you put me up there, can I be a love-heart?" said Gabby, who is about to get married. So in one stream of the structure diagram we had a cloud, and in the other a love-heart.

At that point I suspended judgement, and said "Okay Anna, what do you want to be?" Anna went up on the board as a 5-pointed star.

Of course I then had to back-track to the joint CEO boxes: Mary-Ruth went up as a crescent moon, and Kim as the sun. There were no longer any lines or arrows in the diagram, just clusters like two constellations. We spent the rest of the session in discussion around what would be happening on the "moon side", and what would be needed on the "sun side".

It was liberating and effective. So there's a new kind of organisational design structure: the astral plane version. It's wonderful to walk out of a job feeling like I have learned at least as much as I have contributed.