Organizational Design as a Lever for Grand Challenges

Release Date: November 20, 2025

Speakers: Prof. Sandro Cabral (Insper), Prof. Isabel Fernandez-Mateo (London Business School), Prof. John Joseph (UC Irvine), and Martin Gonzalez, Organizational Design Lead at Google DeepMind

Hosted by the SMS Competitive Strategy Interest Group, this webinar on “Organizational Design as a Lever for Grand Challenges” asked a broad question: How can organizational design research and practice help build organizations capable of tackling society’s hardest and most persistent problems?
Across four short insight talks and a Q&A, the panel examined grand challenges as pluralistic settings—contexts with diverse actors, diffuse authority, and contested goals. John Joseph opened by situating organization design research in these environments, highlighting emergent structures, power dynamics, and the need to be explicit about which “stream” of organizing scholars are contributing to. Isabel Fernandez-Mateo then explored how design choices in hiring and evaluation shape inequality, especially as AI tools are introduced into these processes.

Bringing a practitioner perspective, Martin Gonzalez discussed concrete design issues that arise when organizations adopt AI in real time, including governance, an organization where “virtual” AI agents already embedded in work, as well as his impression from the field as a practitioner. Sandro Cabral closed the insight talks by focusing on cross-organizational collaboration—showing how tackling large-scale problems such as pandemics increasingly requires designing across public, private, and nonprofit boundaries.

The Q&A dug into what still puzzles scholars and practitioners about design in these settings, how to avoid fragmentation in the field, and where the most promising research questions lie—offering fresh perspectives for scholars, practitioners, and students on where organizational design can have the greatest societal impact.

In this webinar, we cover:
(00:00) Introduction to the webinar: Insights and QA
(04:13) John Joseph: Future and State of Organization Design
(12:17) Isabel Fernandez-Mateo: How does organization design shape inequality in hiring and evaluation processes and, in particular, what is the potential role of AI in these domains?
(19:37) Martin Gonzalez: What are the key organization design issues in today’s organizations? How is AI coming in here and what are first insights from the AI for Organizations Grand Challenges initiatives? What are researchers’ blind spots?
(31:54) Sandro Cabral: How solving societal problems requires more than ever a cross-organization approach?
(39:09) Start of Q&A
(39:53) What still puzzles you?
(45:24) Opportunities to examine org design through other theoretical lenses
(48:29) Why removing frictions within organizational processes can be misleading
(51:47) Examples of “aMagical thinking” about AI