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Liz Ferguson is the Senior Vice President of Wiley's global Research Publishing organization, boasting over 20 years of experience in scientific, technical, and medical publishing. With a BSc in Biology from King's College London, she is recognized for her strategic leadership in transforming academic publishing, particularly in open access initiatives and research integrity. Learn more about Liz on her expert page
In this episode of the Org Design Podcast, hosts Tim Brewer and Damian Bramanis welcome Liz Ferguson from Wiley's research publishing group.
Liz shares her journey into organizational design, which began unexpectedly as she took on a new leadership role managing a large team. Faced with the challenge of restructuring to better align with industry changes, she sought external expertise to guide the process. Liz discusses the importance of understanding the unique needs of her organization and how collaborative workshops helped identify inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement, and also kickstarted the team to see the opportunities.
Throughout the conversation, Liz emphasizes the value of being open-minded as a leader and involving team members in the change process. She reflects on the challenges of balancing strategy with the human side of organizational change, advocating for gradual engagement over abrupt transitions, but also knowing that people will have a preference for one or the other, there is no way to get it right every time.
This episode highlights the continuous evolution of organizations and the need for leaders to adapt their structures to meet changing market demands.
Wiley Publishing Group - https://www.wiley.com/
European Organisation Design Forum - https://eodf.eu/
[00:00:00] Tim Brewer: Hey, Damian.
[00:00:00] Damian Bramanis: Hey Tim.
[00:00:01] Tim Brewer: Welcome to the podcast, the Org Design Podcast. From Milan, Italy.
[00:00:07] Damian Bramanis: Yeah. EODF 2024. Very exciting. That today has been amazing, and we're still only halfway through. And love to welcome to the show today, Liz Ferguson, who is from the research publishing group at Wiley. Liz, welcome.
[00:00:23] Liz Ferguson: Thank you very much.
[00:00:24] Tim Brewer: We've just been lucky enough to listen to the previous session, which Liz spoke at. I know sometimes on the show we have practitioners, consultants that do org design for work. What we love about Liz's session as she got to do it in her role at work. So just like most of our listeners she's actually been on the coalface, getting experience in her role at work, and we can't wait to speak to her a little bit more about that today.
[00:00:50] Liz Ferguson: Thank you
[00:00:51] Tim Brewer: Welcome to the show.
[00:00:52] Liz Ferguson: It's great to be here.
[00:00:53] Tim Brewer: Brilliant. Let's start with. For most people, they don't go to school and they tell their friends, while their friends are having, oh, I'm gonna be a rocket scientist. I'm gonna be an astronaut, I'm gonna be a lawyer, I'm gonna be a doctor. Were you sitting in the classroom or I'm thinking org design.
Or tell us what journey led you or equipped you got you, the tools got you the study to, to end up in a role where it's pretty org design heavy.
[00:01:16] Liz Ferguson: so I did not deliberately move into org design, so I have been working in scholarly publishing for over 20 years now. I took on a new role within my organization managing, leading 800 people, and realized we needed a fundamental change in the way that we were structured.
Didn't have a clue about the concept of organizational design or the practice of it at the time, and found myself talking to a number of consultancies about how they might help us. And one of them spoke very clearly about what organizational design was and what it could do for us. And that was when the light bulb went on and I thought that was exactly what we needed. So I have lived it once.
[00:02:03] Damian Bramanis: What did you hear from them? That, that they explained that org design was,
[00:02:07] Liz Ferguson: I think it was, excuse me. They took us through their process and it seemed to me that of all the people we spoke to in that very early stage, it was the only process that would draw out from us what our business was all about, what our goals were, and would then lead us down the path of designing the organization for that.
Whereas I felt the others who were coming to us had a version of structure and what they thought worked for businesses in general ahead of time, and we would be applied to that as opposed to our business being absorbed into something else that had more rigor behind it. I think also having worked in academic publishing in particular for a long time, there's a level of intellectual curiosity that comes along with what we do, and I could see the thinking and the depth that lay under the process that was being described to us even at the highest level. And I, it just seemed too interesting for me to not get stuck into, and I remembered at one point of our HR people on those initial pitch calls asking a question and then asking a follow up question and another, and that particular team of people saying to us if you want to know more about this, you're gonna have to come to our five day course on organizational design for HR professionals or for whatever else. And that was when I first heard the words and thought, ah, this is a thing. It's not just a really good consultancy with a really good approach. It's actually a proper concept.
[00:03:38] Tim Brewer: rewinding before that epiphany moment where you. Got to look behind the curtain of org design and see that there was more substance to it. How did you know you had, or what was your hunch around the structure problem at work?
[00:03:53] Liz Ferguson: Okay. The symptoms that I was observing were from coming into this very large group, from a small group dealing with disruption and change in our industry, and I could see that this large group that I'd just been invited to, to lead were aware of the challenges that we were facing in our industry and had some knowledge of how to address them, but that knowledge wasn't necessarily evenly distributed.
The degree of comfort with it wasn't evenly distributed, and we weren't necessarily best shaped to take advantage of the opportunities that disruption brings, 'cause disruption isn't always damaging and isn't always negative. It can actually create some new possibilities as well, and we were still grounded in a structure that really suited the strengths of the industry that we were embedded in, but not necessarily best suited to take advantage of what was coming down the pipeline at us, and because I'd spent my past few years in the organization thinking about all of those opportunities, I knew that we weren't in the best shape for that. I didn't know what the best shape was, and that was why I decided we needed a process to help us figure that out. Yeah.
[00:05:05] Tim Brewer: So would you say that most of the issue was external to the organization, where the industry landscape had started to change
[00:05:15] Liz Ferguson: An awful lot of it was, yeah. The industry landscape was changing and our pace of change internally hadn't necessarily completely kept up to pace with that. So some of the individuals within it certainly had done, many of them had done, but we weren't necessarily giving them the right structure and the right tools to really benefit from what was going to happen. Yeah. Or what was happening.
[00:05:36] Damian Bramanis: And so there was a point there where you went to seek external help. Okay. What was the thinking behind, should I go and seek external help? Is this something that I can deal with? And was there a sort of a benefit that you saw to, to getting more expertise in?
[00:05:52] Liz Ferguson: Yeah, the thinking that laid behind this was having been in that organization and in the industry, which is a pretty niche industry, for more than two decades, I'd seen reorganization come and go, both in the company that I work for and in multiple others as well. And they all felt a little bit like it was more than moving seats around, but many of the structures were still very traditional and rooted in this big strength of history. The industry goes back 200, and my company goes back over 200 years. And they all felt very rooted in that, and I felt we needed something that would make us think differently about how we were choosing to organize ourselves properly and think about the work that needed to be done in a different way. It felt like we needed people who had a better understanding of how organizations and small piece of organizations, 'cause my part of this, it's not the entire company, it's one part of the company, how we could really address these external factors, but from a very internal perspective. And I didn't feel we necessarily, I certainly didn't have the skills to be able to do that myself and when I talked to our HR business partner, she advised as well that we bring in expertise to help guide us.
[00:07:11] Damian Bramanis: So it was a little bit about perspective, being able to step back and see more than just what was inside your part of the organization.
[00:07:19] Liz Ferguson: Yeah. And have people provoke us into different forms of thinking and different questions that we wouldn't have come up with by ourselves.
[00:07:26] Damian Bramanis: What was the the initial sort of fact finding work? Because we've seen in the past, a lot of the org designers spend inordinate amounts of effort in understanding what's happening in the organization and in finding out what's happening on the coalface and understanding people, how did that come about? What's happening there?
[00:07:47] Liz Ferguson: We did a lot of it through workshops, so I had a number of conversations and so did the HR business partner in our change management person as well with the consultancy. But the whole process was based around workshops. So the very first one kicked off with, it wasn't so much how we were structured, but how are we working today? What are the good, bad and indifferent features of it? What are all of the very practical things that people are doing on a day-to-day basis? How do we report on our business to others? Who do we report to? How often? In how many different ways are we interacting with different teams and so on? And that, I assume gave the consultants some good insight into the way that we were organized, set up the kinds of things that we were doing. It also prompted the team from my side to think, "crikey, some of this doesn't really work that well, does it?"
At a deeper level than just, we are not set up as well as we might be for the future. When you start to write down, for example, all of the reporting that you do. All of the ways in which different teams interact and how decisions get made, you suddenly realize that you are repeating an awful lot of effort. You are duplicating functions where you actually probably didn't realize you were and so on. So it was, I assume, on the part of the consultants designed to be an eye opener for us and a learning experience for them to get under the skin of what we were all about.
[00:09:13] Damian Bramanis: So the process naturally got change to start to happen and the motivation for change and the understanding of priorities?
[00:09:20] Liz Ferguson: Yes, it felt very natural to us. I'm sure it was very deliberate on the part of the consultancy we were working with.
[00:09:25] Damian Bramanis: We talked about some of the dilemmas with org design about do we set the strategy and people follow the strategy, or do we start with the people as one of the dilemmas? And we talked about the dilemma of ripping off the bandaid versus breaking the new slowly.
Did you come across those dilemmas in the process?
[00:09:43] Liz Ferguson: We did and to some degree the first one was easier than the second. So as one part of a larger organization, our strategy was clear. And also I was really confident that the strategy that we had as a unit within Wiley was also the right strategy.
It have been partly designed. By me over the preceding period anyway. But it was in line with where the market was shifting and was going. So the strategy wasn't really in question for us. It was how we made the org work most effectively around that. I think even if the strategy hadn't been entirely clear or if we weren't as committed to it as we were, it still feels to me, having thought about it over the course of today with the sessions here at EODF, it feels to me that is the right way round. As long as the people that you are working with have a constant regard for the teams and the individuals that they're working with, that's always there in the background. The strategy, the goals that the business have to achieve kind of do need to come first when you're talking about the world of work, because otherwise, what is it that gets people in the door and motivated in the first place? We weren't going to suddenly change overnight and become a, I don't know, an engineering entity or whatever else it might be.
So the strategy has to come first to me, and you make sure that it's that, that you put the right tools, processes, and organization in place for people to thrive against that background. When it comes to, do you take people there on a gradual change trajectory versus ripping the bandaid off? We had more often gone for something like a ripping the bandaid off process in the past, and we have a really good and strong change management function where I work. So we have been educated that is a far better way of doing things and the consultancy we worked with also made it very clear that it is much better to get buy-in and engagement and to increase people's level of understanding as you go through a process rather than surprise them with it at the end. I do still think there are some individuals, because we got mixed reactions, some individuals who thought we hadn't done enough of the change management piece, some who said, "we get it, you're gonna do something, you're going to change something, just tell us what it is now", who might have preferred the bandaid approach, but overall, I'd say probably the largest majority benefit more from that gradual awakening into what it is we're trying to do.
[00:12:19] Damian Bramanis: Yeah.
[00:12:19] Tim Brewer: some of the podcasts or some of the sessions today, it's not just the fact that it's gradual. It's not just the fact that it's gradual, but it's the fact that they're on the journey. They feel a part of the journey too and have contributed on that journey. So I think that's super interesting. I do have a question for you and what you've learned over that period of time, going through, finding a partner to help with the reorganization and leading the reorganization.
Are there any significant reflections you've got over that period of time where you've had really important learnings in your leadership journey? Either from something not working out right. You don't have to tell us necessarily what it is, but the learning or something going really well and going, "oh wow. I never would've thought to tackle that problem in that way". But the outcome was particularly successful.
[00:13:11] Liz Ferguson: I think a couple of things, I said when we were talking in the session earlier that I genuinely had no fixed opinion about where we would land with the work that we were doing, and I really didn't. Had some opinions about what we didn't want. I had some opinions about some of the attributes we might need out of a future organization, like being more forward looking and so on, but not how that might affect our design.
And actually as a leader, going into something completely open-minded and being able to take on board the skills and experience of the consultants that we were working with, coupled with the input of a good number of the team, 50, 60 people, most of whom, all of whom I knew, but hadn't really worked with that closely.
And seeing them close up in some really difficult and tricky conversations and mind bending conversations as well, was incredibly useful in terms of really getting to know that next layer of the organization. So that was terrifically valuable. The other piece of it, I typically think that the way I work is open and transparent, but being open and transparent in front of 50, 60 people about what you really don't understand, don't know, don't have an opinion on. I have opinions on lots of things, and this was a year of. At least at the early stages of it, there was a long period of not having an opinion and just trying to take on board what I was hearing around me and trying to formulate thoughts and structures and ideas and doing that in front of everyone when you've just taken on a new leadership role is quite exposing.
[00:14:51] Damian Bramanis: Yeah. Quite related to that organizational design and as a leader can be quite confronting because it's making very high stakes decisions and it's connected to people's sense of self-worth and related to, how people find meaning in their lives. And you talked about starting with this open mind, but that process naturally goes to making decisions and needing to enact some change.
How did you find your internal process of gathering certainty? And did you ever reach the stage where you were certain this is the right thing to do, or was there always, this sort of fear that things might not things might not work out or that there's, there could be multiple options and it wasn't clear which one to take.
[00:15:40] Liz Ferguson: Yeah, I don't think I ever felt fear around it, and that's partly because the roles I'd occupied prior to taking this team on were about trying to make much more business- oriented judgements rather than people- oriented judgments, but business judgments about what might be a path that we could take in a disrupted and challenging market environment.
So I was in, in that setting, whichever path you chose there were going to be risks and opportunities, and you just had to figure out how to make the best of them or how to overcome the challenges as you went through it, and so I think that stood me pretty well in this process we went through of organizational design as well.
I didn't expect everything to be perfect, so it was okay for it not to be perfect. I didn't want it to be a negative experience for anybody at all. And I think for some of the team, it was challenging, but we tried to put as much in place as we possibly could to make it a positive, constructive experience that they could learn from and grow with too, because I think we, we approached it knowing not everything would be perfect from the outset that. Gave us some space to say we, we can change things as we go. If it's really not working. If certain elements of it aren't delivering quite as we anticipated, we'll change it. And that's okay. And it's all right for people to tell us where it's not working. And that doesn't necessarily mean we respond to every single thing and do something about every request we get for change, but it meant we were open to that.
[00:17:25] Tim Brewer: Now coming out the tail end. You've had some time to see the change come through and settle down. How have you helped the team adjust where the strategy required a change? Or even if they bought into the change, but it was still really uncertain 'cause they were changing roles or changing parts of the organization? How have you helped team members through that time of uncertainty?
[00:17:50] Liz Ferguson: We have invested a lot of time into post-implementation, listening, actually an awful lot of listening immediately after the implementation, which we knew we were going to have to do. But those sessions extended way beyond I think the duration that we'd initially anticipated. We've made use of some of the structures that we had in place within the organization, like employee resource groups, especially to listen to early career members of our community and others who have specific experiences around work that might be different than those that we thought about when we were building the design.
I hired a new position that reports to me who has done tremendous work in this space. It's where she's spent the majority of her time in her first year in the organization who has pulled together a group of individuals from across the business with multiple levels and extents and durations of experience and expertise in the world of work generally, or with us, who we've given free reign to say, this is where we feel we need to focus some time and energy next, this is what we feel we need to do about what we're hearing back as well.
[00:19:05] Tim Brewer: Did that exist in the organization before you entered in to change or that feedback loop around the organization structure?
[00:19:14] Liz Ferguson: Not in my part of the organization, no. no. And we've all always had employee engagement surveys, questions, forums where people can gather to, to talk about, with various different groups about their experience of work. But it wasn't specifically around. Organization, the way in which we get our work done, what we all rely on each other for and so on.
[00:19:36] Tim Brewer: Do you anticipate that will lead to not just post changed improvements, but like more of a consistent approach to
[00:19:45] Liz Ferguson: Yes. Absolute. Absolutely. Yeah. We are over a year since the implementation of this model now, and it will continue to change and morph and evolve. But what I'm seeing is those kind of engagement activities are also morphing and changing and evolving as the organization itself becomes more mature and people become more used to it.
So the team just held a focus and development week, which is specific to our part of the organization where we said you, you have the right to decline meetings. No matter who is inviting you to them, we want you to think about some of those longer term work things that you really want to wrap your brain around or on your own personal development. We set up time together with our HR talent partners to think about how to help you develop your career and give people space for one-to-ones. That's not something I think we would've done without this kind of change. It's really helped us develop a program of activities that are really quite different for us.
[00:20:40] Damian Bramanis: Liz, that's been a fantastic story. Really loved talking to you today, and I really love listening to your story about starting from a novice mindset and following a process which includes people and listening well, and collaborative org design. I think there are some really good lessons to learn really good outcomes to hear as well.
Is there anything that we haven't covered, which you think would've been useful to you, if you rewind, rewound back to before this process started.
[00:21:11] Liz Ferguson: Oh, back to before this process started. I wish I knew that the thing called org design existed. It it's not been in, any of my, I dunno, leadership training programs, management courses, whatever else you want to put it and, I probably wouldn't have had an opportunity to use it in the way that I did this time around, but I wish I knew it existed and yeah, and I'm very glad now that I do.
[00:21:35] Damian Bramanis: Yeah. If anyone is interested by what you've talked about today and wants to learn more, are there any resources that you point them to or ways to get in contact?
[00:21:44] Liz Ferguson: Feel free to contact me on LinkedIn and I'd be happy to point people towards the kinds of resources that we've developed that we use internally and to share some of our experiences. Absolutely.
[00:21:54] Damian Bramanis: Fantastic. Cool. Thank you very much, Liz. Really a pleasure talking to you today and thank you very much, Tim.
[00:22:01] Tim Brewer: Thank you, Damian. Have a great day everyone. Bye. Bye.
[00:22:05] Liz Ferguson: Bye.
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