The Organizational Architecture of Failure
The culture, structure, and workings of an organization often pose greater challenges for User Experience practitioners than any technical or design questions at hand. If you’d like to know more about the factors behind these situations, be sure to check out We Tried To Warn You: The Organizational Architecture of Failure, by Peter Jones, just published by Boxes and Arrows.
Peter is an independent consultant with deep expertise in research, product design, and strategy. His talk for the panel on failure at the 2007 IA Summit was insightful and in-depth, and this two-part series offers quite a bit more very useful material on the roots and warning signs of organizational failure (by comparison, consider the very brief post I put up on the same subject a few years ago.)
Peter’s is the second written feature to come out of the failure panel (my missive on the parallels between entrepreneurial and societal failure was the first). I’m looking forward to part two of We Tried To Warn You, as well as additional features from the remaining two panelists, Christian Crumlish and Lorelei Brown!
Here’s a snippet, to whet your appetite:
How do we even know when an organization fails? What are the differences between a major product failure (involving function or adoption) and a business failure that threatens the organization? An organizational-level failure is a recognizable event, one which typically follows a series of antecedent events or decisions that led to the large-scale breakdown. My working definition: When significant initiatives critical to business strategy fail to meet their highest-priority stated goals.”
