This is an appropriate tool to bring back in front of people because of the trend to utilize design thinking as a way to solve business problems. I have an architecture degree but run a sales and marketing consulting firm. I use my design education every day. 7-S is a design platform that allows the designer to create different shades of each color.

Although the McKinsey view is that co-ordination became a critical factor in organization effectiveness (rather than structure) 40 years ago, it is notable that 40 years later managers—at least the ones I work with—are still, for the most part, equating organization effectiveness with structure. Any design or re-design of an organization or business unit seems to start (in the manager’s mind) with a rearrangement of the names in the boxes that feature on the organization chart. I wonder why this is. Possibly because it is visible to others “Today the chart looks like this. Tomorrow it will look like that. See we are doing something different.”

Despite the 7-S model showing linkages between all the elements and the point being made that they are like “the knights of the round table”—all of equal importance. It seems that for those who are fixed on the notion that design = structure it is hard for them to change their mental model that adjusting the structure (or the people in it) will work on its own to make the organization more effective. (An alternative possibility is that they see the idea of tackling all elements as too large scale a project for their time and budget).

One flaw I observe in the 7-S model is that it does not have an “S” for “surroundings” or external/operating environment, and it is this aspect that has at least as much of an impact on organization effectiveness as the others, and is much harder to co-ordinate, predict, and work with.