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Participative design

What is it?

Participative design is a methodology for work design developed by the Fred and Merrelyn Emery and has been successfully applied in many settings around the world.

Participative design enables organizations to redesign themselves fast and cost effectively through the involvement of the people whose work is changing. The central tool is the participative design workshop (PDW). With simple design principles tools the groups can redesign themselves in three days. An entire organization should not take longer than a few weeks.

The outcome is a highly flexible, adaptive organization, structured around multi-skilled, self-managed groups, with the capacity to continuously learn and adapt.

Why use it?

Leaders today have to make whole organisations change very rapidly to make them more flexible and adaptive, competitive and profitable in a rapidly changing world. If you are struggling with issues around time, cost and the commitment of employees, participative design has much to offer.

Most structure and work redesign strategies impose expert solutions and can take months just to do the data gathering and diagnostics. A select team of internal and external experts do all the work, extracting data, detailing every measure of input, output, and business processes.

Participative design starts from the fact that the people who are best placed to redesign the work are those who know the existing work best. These people have ideas, and in many cases strong views, as to how their work can be changed for the better. By pooling their ideas, they themselves can redesign their work for the benefit of themselves, their peers and customers. Having people participate in the design of their own work creates in every person, from the CEO to the front-line employee, the ability to be a researcher, learner, teacher and resource.

Background

Decades of social science research around the world on what motivates people in their work, has identified a number of important requirements for productive people. When work conditions and meet these requirements, productivity, quality and people's well-being always improve. Involving both tasks and the informal, social fabric of the organisation, the requirements are:

1. Adequate elbow room for decision making. People need to be able to influence their own work and they don't have to ask permission for everything. Enough elbow room to feel empowered but not so much that they do not know what to do.
2. Opportunity to learn continually on the job. People need to be able to set goals that are reasonable challenges for them and get timely feedback on results.
3. An optimum level of variety. People need to avoid boredom and fatigue and they can gain the best advantages from settling into a satisfying and effective rhythm of work.
4. Mutual support and respect. People need help and respect from their co-workers...
5. Meaningfulness. People need to feel that their own work is meaningfully contributing to something that matters to them. This often includes the need to have knowledge of the whole product or service because, in many jobs, employees see such a small part of the final product that it feels meaningless..
6. A desirable future. People need to feel that their job will lead somewhere beyond the job they are doing and the way they are doing it - even though for some personal growth and an increase in skills within the existing role will be enough.

Principles

Participative design distinguishes two design principles:

• Design principle one (DP one): redundancy of parts - For organizations to respond adequately to market demand, they need to behave flexibly and adaptively. This is only possible through a degree of redundancy - i.e. that within the design it is ensured that each part becomes replaceable so that if one part fails, another takes over.
• Design principle two (DP two): redundancy of functions - By adding extra functions to each operating part, employees broaden their roles outside of narrow job definitions. Being skilled in a wide variety of tasks is more motivating to the individual and allows the organisation to respond flexibly to its environment.

By following these principles and the six requirements for productive work, individuals are more challenged and motivated so people are to do excellent work and help the organisation to grow its business, the organisation is more coherent and focussed as well as being more flexible to the demands and opportunities from its environment...

Where can it be used?

Participative design, and their operating units, self-managed teams, can operate on a variety of levels. They can operate as a team, running a unit as a small business; as a cross-functional project team with participation of customers and suppliers, or as a collaborative venture with other companies.

Self-managed teams are typically responsible for:

• Client satisfaction, quality and productivity measures.
• The development and management of budgets.
• Scheduling of work.
• Design of work process and flow.
• Lay-out of the workplace.
• Recruitment decisions
• Peer reviews, etc.

Perhaps the most important gain that participative design brings is that the process of learning becomes as important as the final organisational solution - increasing self sufficiency and building adaptive capacity.

Let's Talk

The easiest way to understand how we can help, and whether you feel that you could work with us, is to begin with a conversation.

We don't believe in a "hard sell" and often find that people get value out of the exploratory discussion - whether or not we go on to work together.

Please Contact Us – we would love to hear from you.