Form follows function

What if the greatest risk to business is outdated design? This essay revisits “form follows function” to argue that business continuity depends on designing organisations in relation to the living systems that sustain them.

In recent weeks, I've spent a great deal of time reading and thinking about organisational design. I fell into a repeating cycle of historical transformations, past design traditions, schools of art and thought, and naturally started to see similarities between them and our current circumstance.

I ended up in 1896, when the architect Louis Sullivan wrote a statement that became the central concept of more than a century of art, architecture, and design:

Form ever follows function.

After the first World War, and as a result of the early century industrialisation, the phrase got a new lease of life in Bauhaus, which created a design language suitable for a changing society. The idea was to bridge the gap between fine art and industrial mass production, to create functional and well-designed everyday items for all.

The phrase is deceptively simple, a set of words that seems completely obvious once you've heard it. All objects need to be designed in accordance with their function. Self-explanatory. Or is it?

Not necessarily. The change required a substantial shift in thought. What if design is more than enjoyment for the senses? What if design belongs to everyone, not only the elite? What does the process of automation and mass production demand of design? Could the form emerge from function? On the premise that if you come to a deep understanding of the object's or building's intended function, the optimal form would naturally follow.

Bauhaus designers recognised that industrialisation had fundamentally changed the conditions in which people lived, in which objects were made and used. So, rather than redecorating old forms that had become dysfunctional, not to mention attempting to mass produce them, they designed for an entirely new reality.

This idea of a new reality reminded me of a small personal habit. I have a piece of paper from a fortune cookie stuck to my living room cupboard, saying: "Wait, you have the longer breath." I regularly stop in front of it, and pause for a moment.

For me, the phrase doesn't signify waiting for certainty, or waiting for the perfect moment. Rather, it tells me to stay in the moment long enough to realise its true shape, to bare the discomfort of uncertainty even when impulse tells me otherwise.

I believe it has helped me consider a wider range of possibilities and perspectives, form a more multifocal view of reality, and shift my design as the times demand. Sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.

And what I've come to realise of late, is that businesses seem to be facing a similar moment. Whether to drive full steam ahead, inconsiderate of the changing circumstances, or whether to pause to re-evaluate and recalibrate.

For decades, we've designed to optimise. To create leaner supply chains, move money faster, inform at the speed of light. This addiction to removing friction has become a signifier of progress, with growth as its ultimate measure.

Our organisations are not designed badly, that's not the case I'm making. They are designed on specific assumptions, according to their time.

But if we decide to recognise that the material conditions and assumptions on which businesses operate have changed, due to for example regulation, what do we do next? It is rare that companies have the resources, especially at times of serious disruption, to invest in redesign. But counterintuitively, that might be the best bet.

Creating value remains the function. Continuing to do so is the real design challenge.

Extreme weather, war, AI, resource constraints, and financial instability create conditions where we no longer talk about an occasional hiccup. We are dealing with changes that define the environment in which businesses function every day.

That should change the design brief itself.

Organisations cannot ignore their existence in the market economy. And the economy is vital for supporting our critical infrastructure. Companies need to stay competitive, innovative, they need to generate returns. Employees need work. Bills need paying.

Thus, organisations need to continue to function in changing conditions.

Perhaps this is also why the conversation about sustainability so often feels disconnected from everyday business decisions. Why would I focus on anything else than making money? It might sound like something entirely disconnected, or counter to basic business principles.

And so it is, if it's treated as a separate objective. Regulation dictates compliance measures. We can comply by reporting these numbers and measuring these indicators, by buying carbon credits, installing solar panels, hiring a new person or a team, by starting a new project and communicating about it. But at the end of the day, these are only add-ons, something separate from the actual operations and the effectiveness of them.

In reality…the real reality, organisations have never operated outside society or outside nature. We, and our companies, operate within, and as part of, living systems.

We have simply built as though we didn't. And we're paying for it now, and adapting to our unfortunate past decisions, which have always been made according to prevailing assumptions and assumed conditions.

But let's say a drought interrupts the operations of one of your supply chain partners, or farmers become unable to farm for losing the top soil, or your employees suffer from heat stress, or the financial and insurance systems tremble under shocks, or trust becomes a commodity in an age of artificial content – we're not discussing externalities.

We are talking about operating conditions.

And once the operating conditions change, so should the core design.

We don't judge a bridge by its objective to withstand gravity. We judge whether the laws of physics have been used as its fundamental design principles.

Or, alternatively, if we design a chair. We don't decide what it should look like first, and add strength as an optional mandate. The chair's function as a weight-bearing object determines all of the consequent decisions: the materials, the structure, the proportions, ultimately, the form itself. The form is to a large extent dictated by the function, even if not by choice.

The same should become true for organisations.

Once the prevailing conditions affect a business's ability to create value, they should become part of the design brief. An orientation towards continuity. Form following a continued function, if you like.

The Bauhaus movement came into existence because the prevailing operating conditions changed. Society started to function differently, production methods changed, information systems changed, new job roles were created, old were thrown into the bin. Life was lived in a different way, which demanded design to adapt to that difference.

I just wonder. Perhaps our own age demands something similar.

Not another Bauhaus, we've been there. Another way of approaching design. One that observes more closely the conditions in which we actually live and work, rather than the ones we assume.

An orientation, if you will, towards continuity.

Eventually, irrespective of my intellectual endeavours, reality will dictate redesign.

Further reading and influences

This essay draws loosely on ideas from Louis Sullivan's "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," Walter Gropius's Bauhaus Manifesto, Herbert Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial, Donella Meadows's Thinking in Systems, Fritjof Capra's The Web of Life, and Sandhya Sabapathy's Burn Bright, Build Slow.

For current evidence that environmental "externalities" are increasingly becoming direct business costs and operating constraints, see the World Bank's 2026 report Competing in the Face of Climate Risks and KfW's 2026 Climate Barometer.

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