Advanced Organisation Design

Special Practitioner Workshop:
Two days on organisation design

Who is the workshop for?

You are a manager with organisation design experience. You have been involved in three or more organisation design projects where structural changes were being considered. You are ambitious to become more skilled. You may want to be an internal expert that others turn to. Your organisation will be facing some tough design challenges that you would like to share with the group. You may be an HR professional, an OD specialist, a manager within the strategy function, a line manager or a consultant.

Workshop Overview

Organisation design is a skill. It increases with accumulated experience. This two-day workshop is for managers, competent in organisation design, who want to accelerate their learning. We will focus on case studies and on your examples. We will address some typically tough issues like designing for growth or for globalisation, designing when strategy is unclear, making matrix structures work and designing centralised functions.

This is a unique opportunity. Amy Kates of Kates Kesler in New York is joining Andrew Campbell to bring you insights from “over here and over there”.

Amy Kates, is a prolific author and collaborator with Jay Galbraith. Kates Kesler is the leading consultancy using Galbraith’s Star Model and has developed practical tools around Galbraith’s ideas. With her partner, Greg Kesler, Amy has been running Advanced Practitioner Workshops in New York for a number of years.

Andrew Campbell wrote the classic text “Designing Effective Organisations”. He lead’s Ashridge’s course Advanced Organisation Design. He developed the “nine tests” of good organisation design and a way of drawing organisation charts as organisation models.

The workshop will therefore bring Amy’s US-oriented experience and Andrew’s European-oriented experience together with your experiences to accelerate and broaden your learning. If you feel that you understand the basics and now want to raise your confidence, this intensive exchange of experience and ideas is ideal for you.

Content

The emphasis will be on case studies and on your experiences and challenges. Before the workshop, we will circulate those attending to identify the topics you most want to discuss. Topics that have been at the heart of the Advanced Practitioner Workshop, run each year by Kates Kesler in New York, include:

• Designing for new growth strategies
• Designing organisations when the business model is changing
• Designing an organisation with less infrastructure and more focus on value
• Designing organisations to achieve more customer focus
• Designing organisations when future strategy is unclear
• Organising to support a move into new geographies
• How to make centralised functions work in an organisation with business divisions
• How to make front/back organisations work
• How to design and support complex matrix structures

Faculty

Join Ashridge's Organisation Design Interest Group

Let us have your email address and we will send you a quarterly summary of significant articles on organisation design - and information about Ashridge events on organisation design. Click here to view example quarterly summaries.