Structure
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A central tenet of JustOrg Design is that structure is a lever, a powerful opportunity to organize and reorganize people to activate justice strategies together. Structure is not only about who reports to whom. Or, how much someone is compensated. Or how long a person's tenure is. It's as much, or more, about what they can bring now to the most pressing strategic challenges the organization is actively embracing.
The vast majority of justice-committed leaders have replicated or inherited the organizational structure below.
A central problem for justice-committed organizations with this traditional, vertical design is that most justice strategies are inherently interdisciplinary and experimental, or what in organizational design is called, “horizontal.” Such strategies require collaboration across roles, program areas, power levels, lived expertise, etc.
An additional problem is that people working in justice-committed organizations typically want to practice internally the kinds of changes they seek for the world externally. There is a desire for the conscious holding of power, for transparency, for meaningful engagement of people internally and externally who are closest to the issues and most impacted by organizational choices.
The bottom line is that an organizational structure that consists only of functional hierarchies will not yield ongoing strategic innovation, alignment, and momentum in a justice-focused context.
Rather than thinking of and representing organizational structure in purely positional authority terms, we lead–in the graphic above–with organizational purpose and organizational strategies. Structure, in a JustOrg Design, is how we will configure ourselves to activate our strategies in service of our purpose.
A critical element of structure is the Cross-functional Table. Tables are configurations of people from across functional areas to advance a body of work. Tables give us a way to convene people other than within supervisorial or departmental lines. They are essential to collaboration. They are not one-off task forces; rather, Tables are an ever-present structural component in the intentional organizational design.
Leadership teams create Tables to address several types of critical organizational work.
This is a body of work that cannot be managed well by one department or functional team. The strategy or strategies involved are interdisciplinary and require ongoing dialogue, shared learning and adaptation, and collective decision-making across teams and positional power levels.
This is a body of work that is time-bound, inherently cross-functional, and results in a strategic deliverable such as a conference or a new hire or an important document like a theory of change or strategic plan.
This is a body of work such as people and culture development where a rotating and fairly representational group will always be necessary. People will rotate on and off to keep the group energized but the work will likely be ongoing.
The Org Administrator, at the direction of the leadership, creates a new Table.
Creating a new Table includes articulating:
Table Name
Table Purpose
Table Participants (staff, board, and/or community members)
Table Conveners and Sponsor (see Key Roles section of this guide)
Organizational Strategy(s) that the Table will focus upon
Table Scope (clear guidance on what the Table is expected to decide, deliver, and/or recommend through the course of its work)
Once a Table is active, the Table’s Conveners manage its work in the Table Planner. Here they are able to capture and manage:
Table Meeting Agendas & Notes
Table Actions / Active List of What the Table is Working On
Table Decisions
Table Linked Documents (for easy reference to documents related to the Table’s ongoing work)
When a Table’s work is complete or its usefulness has been exhausted, the Org Administrator, at the direction of leadership, will archive it. All of its work is preserved and accessible in the cloud, but it will no longer show up as active in the organizational design.
