A New Role for Design and Design Managers in the ‘Organizational Design’ of High Social Value-Creative Business Models

Abstract

Sustainability at the global and local level constantly requires a contextual understanding of the premise of organizational behavior. We unravel that in fact that currently there is no veritable role for design, designers, or design methodology associated with ‘organizational design’. Rather, already practiced organizational designs are analyzed retrospectively through trial and error, for possible change, adaptation, optimization, mutation - in short ‘evolution’ - while the original creation of the system blueprint or architecture is not questioned. The application of such a system to produce sustainability requires reexamination. The design of an organization is a byproduct of tactics and management bureaucracy in postindustrial organizational entities. The role of design is subordinate and residual at best. In this admittedly abstractive albeit critical and empirically supported paper we want to demonstrate that (a) an entrepreneurial perspective on design in the premise of sustainable change is challenged by the paradigmatic and transformational effects of information and information technology in their most recent incarnations (especially with the advent of complex information technology-intensive firms); and (b) that the apparent problematic absence of a design theory and the existence of the firm can be reconciled via the involvement of design managers with their presumed design-methodological grounding. We advocate a tripartite system for designing, producing, and the adaptation of sustainable change: design managers design the firm, managers operate it, and strategists lead and govern it. Thus, in the pursuit of a sustainable world – but contrary to our energy dependent convictions for it - we propose to substitute the anachronistic evolutionary speciation of organizational design with a perspective based on ‘intelligent design’.