Organizing for good—using organization design to take on grand challenges

Abstract

Over the past decade, scholarly work has surged around grand societal challenges, such as climate change, public health, and poverty, often framed by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These complex and global issues demand innovative organization design solutions. The “Organizing for Good” campaign, launched by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the Organizational Design Community (ODC), aims to spotlight, curate, and stimulate research and practices contributing to the SDGs. This introductory essay serves as a prologue to a special issue in the Journal of Organization Design, which closely aligned with the campaign’s objectives. It delves into the concept of organization design as a tool for addressing these challenges, viewing organization designs as problem-solving systems for collective action. Furthermore, it provides an overview of how the SDGs intersect with the scholarly community focusing on organization design, previews the content of articles featured in this special issue, and raises questions for future research.