Designing beautiful organisations?

Written by Lars Rengersen on 27/05/2010

Recently I was triggered and inspired by a blog post of Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO asking the question “Can organisations be beautiful?” The huge amount of comments showed the importance and relevance of the question. Building on these comments one can conclude that indeed organisations can be beautiful and that there are many aspects that contribute to it. However, it also shows that beauty applies to many aspects of an organisation. Is is about people working together? Is is about a building? About the corporate visual identity? About the brand itself?

Tim Brown writes:

At IDEO we have been working on the topic of designing organizations for a while, most specifically the design of organizations to be more innovative. My struggle with this particular domain of design thinking has been one of aesthetics. Great design thinking results in  functionally and emotionally satisfying solutions where the emotional value is generated through the creation of meaning. In design, meaning largely comes from aesthetics and so I have been wondering how to think about aesthetics when considering the design of organizations.

Probably a design of an organisation is the resultant of all the aspects mentioned above. Like “Designing for emotion!” in the field of product experiences, consistency between all different aspects is probably key in creating meaningful experiences for employees and beautiful organisations.

But if the answer to the question “Can organisations be beautiful?” is YES, how do we in fact design those beautiful organisations? Where do we start and how do we align all different aspects?

To me, it is about the people of the organisation. In my view if they have a meaningful working experience, a beautiful organisation is born. People who are proud of their organisation, happy in their job, working together towards sustainable results will enable meaningful experiences for their customers.

At SusaGroup we are working on applying PrEmo (our tool to measure emotions) on organisations. Even though this approach is still under development, we feel it will have great added value in the field of organisational change and organisational design. Knowing the actual emotional experience of employees towards their daily work and their organisation will enable you to work on designing a beautiful organisation.

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There are 3 comments in this article:

  1. 27/05/2010Gijs Huisman say:

    What is only implicitly hinted at in the article is what the question posed actually means. Like you said, is it about creating beautiful products? About the corporate visual identity? The Brand? What Tim really seems to talk about is the way a company is organized can be either beautiful or not.

    In this sense I think the term beauty is slightly misleading since it hints at a visual quality. In the comments on Tim’s article some interesting and broader examples are given. For instance, one commenter states that Tim’s article can be compared to the way a football team can play beautiful football. It’s in the structure of the team and the team’s playing style that beauty lies.

    What seems to be the real question here is should organizations be build with efficiency and functionality in mind? Or should organizations really be about providing a ‘beautiful’ experience? Both for their customers as well as for their employees.

    This entails all the above mentioned concepts (products, visual identity, etc.), as well as the organization of the company, the company’s ‘playing style’ if you will. I agree that creating such a ‘beautiful playing style’ would require insight into the goals of the organization and the specific qualities of the people working there. Only through exploiting individual qualities in relation to the organizations goals can a team develop that is capable of playing a beautiful game.

  2. 27/05/2010Menno say:

    Having a beautiful organization is nice. But for me beauty are just the looks/image of your organization. Would you say an ugly woman (oke, or man) contributes less to the society as a very pretty one? Of course not. Because those things are unrelated. I think the term beauty is misleading here. A better term could be “good”. But then you would have the statement: Can organizations be good?

    That statement is not new. Maatschappelijk verantwoord ondernemen (sorry for the dutch, you could translate it with something like: Corporate social responsibility) is a well know trend. It’s focus is, next to making profit, on delivering value to your employees, environment, etc.

    Having a “good” organization should be way more important then having a beautiful one. To get back to the football, or even better ;) , a soccer team: For the fans it’s nice when they play beautiful soccer and win matches (compare: for shareholders a profit is important). However a the team that also helps the society, by teaching kids, helping to get neighbourhoods better, etc, is in my opinion a much better organization, even if they don’t win as many games.

  3. 7/09/2010Steven de Groot say:

    Since three years in Holland we did some research at aesthetic feeling in organisations. We defined 30 aspects in organisations employees mentions as beautiful or ugly. We wrote the book ‘Schoonheid in organisaties’ (Eburon, 2007) en developed a list of ‘beautiful organisations’.
    And yes, beautiful organisations are good organisations. They perform better, people are proud, work in flow, etc.

    Gr Steven de Groot
    KULTIFA | http://www.kultifa.nl

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