I suspect my early experiences with organizations were similar to most. Most of what we encountered was pretty simple to see and understand. We were students in a classroom, there was a teacher in the front of the room and a principal down the hall. Add a librarian, a school nurse, and the cafeteria ladies and you pretty much had it all.
At the other extreme, we tried to get the phone company or the Department of Motor Vehicles to help with a simple problem and encountered bewildering complexity. Why organizations looked the way they do wasn’t a question that occupied much of my attention.
My path to organization change and design was by way of programming and information systems design. What I learned in systems design was that complexity was the enemy. You had to understand the complexity of the problem you wanted to solve for there to be any hope of crafting a solution. The biggest mistake you could make was to miss some essential element of the complexity. The second biggest mistake was to add complexity by accident with your solution.
My technology training and experience tackled complexity with notions of designed modularity and looking for the natural places to carve the overarching system into discrete pieces. There’s a rich assortment of models for thinking about problems of organizational design. I’ve taught them and I’ve used them. What I’m working through now is whether I can articulate a stack of organizational ideas that might help keep the complexity under control when looking at a new problem.
One organizational stack that intrigues me is
- Purpose
- Power
- Process
- Practice
- People
I like the alliteration and I think the layers are largely self-defining/self-explanatory. I can see how I might map what I observe onto layers and how I might navigate up or down the stack while exploring a design question.
I’m now curious whether this cursory perspective is enough to generate some reaction.