This week I started reading Aurora, a sci-fi novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. I hadn't read anything he'd written before but I got intrigued when I read an interview with him in which he was talking about positive futures. His view is that 'the stories we tell have the power to shape our future'.
That struck me as relevant as we (more or less) confidently tell ourselves the story that if we (re)design the organization then we will get positive outcomes – otherwise why design or redesign?
In between reading Aurora, I am writing a chapter on evaluating organisation designs for my forthcoming book. So, I'm asking myself how do we know what our design work is bringing, has brought, or will bring, in terms of positive futures such as efficiency gains, quality improvements, problems solved, or opportunities seized. Can we actually ascribe changes in any metrics we are tracking to something we've done in our design work?
