Socio-Technical Organization Design in the Digital Era: A Collaborative Exploration

Organizations and society are experiencing ongoing disruption as digitalization evolves and the capabilities of digital technology become increasingly entrenched in our institutions, work, and lives. Exponential disruption stems in large part from the technology's inherent generativity and the ease with which it creates boundary transcending connections. Digital technologies promise and provide broad benefits, including customization, agility, transparency, efficiency, and empowerment. At the same time, they present organizations with a complex adaptive challenge: if the emerging social system is not guided by a future vision where technical rationality and human purpose are considered together, traditional assumptions of hierarchical control and technological determinism will overwhelm human agency. We describe and discuss the learnings from a ten-company design lab convened to increase understanding of the practical impacts and implications of digitalization on the design of their organizations and generate actionable knowledge to address the challenges inherent in this transition. Participants came to recognize the need to design digitally enabled organizations based on a new set of assumptions consistent with both technological possibilities and human aspirations. Their work generated preliminary design specifications and implications for the process of redesign and change.