Organic dynamics, or growth, for organic material is quite predictable. Unlike human beings, with their consciousness, humor, creativity, language and other unique behavior. However, if you look at organizations from a birds-eye view, I think that the organization as a whole might (or should?) have some organic characteristics. How humans learn, adapt and evolve are quite organic by nature. When many humans exist in the same organization, the organization grows, adapts and evolves as well.

My point is, organizations are so complex, at least their dynamics, that the organic characteristics that humans possess should be more leading for the evolvement of the internal dynamics than sometimes so called strategic decisions by management. Like with participative management, the emergent and the designed should be in balance.

Maybe the interplay between strategic decisions and organic (or lively) dynamics should be better balanced. And maybe my feeling is that the latter is somewhat underrepresented in many organizations.

Chris, thanks again for letting me sharpen my view on the subject.

Another interesting post in your continuing quest on “self-organization and online collaborative spaces”. Thank you for referring to the related post on my Informal Coalitions blog.

So what of this proposition that organizations might be best though of as “organic”?

Your reference to Burns and Stalker’s work takes me back may years, to when I was studying for a post-graduate diploma in management studies. Back then, I was a keen supporter of their organic model, with its lack of hierarchy, emphasis on collaboration and perceived flexibility and responsiveness. And, in terms of design principles, I would still see the notion of an ‘organic’ organization as being broadly preferable to one that was overly ‘mechanistic’. This is not least because the term implies some recognition of the dynamics of organization – its fluidity, emergence, interaction and so on – rather than casting it wholly in terms of its formal, structured aspects. At the same time, I believe that hierarchy also has its merits; provided that it is properly understood. Indeed, you might argue that hierarchy is itself a phenomenon that is found in the natural, ‘organic’ world.

But this is not the main point that I would make. In fact, talking about the topic in the way I have done so far exposes some of the reasons why I feel it is not as useful as it might at first appear to speak of organizations in these terms. In the paragraph above, I have referred to the characteristics described as “mechanistic” and “organic” as principles that might inform organizational design. And this is how Burns and Stalker thought of them. In broad terms, they argued that the former design was most suited to organizations in ‘stable’ business environments; with organic principles being best suited to environments which were more turbulent and less predictable. They later concluded that moving from one to the other was much more problematic than they had at first envisaged. And, from a complex social process perspective, we might now argue that outcomes in so-called “stable” environments are also much less predictable than they might at first seem.

However, intentional design is not the same thing as underlying dynamics (which is why outcomes so often diverge from plan). So the real question for me is whether or not organizations can be considered to be organic ‘by their very nature’? In other words, are organizations organic (or “organismic”, as Burns and Stalker originally called this model)? Some people would answer a resounding “Yes” to this. They see them as “living systems” – as organisms, if you like. They would also, therefore, have no problems in using the above phrase “by their very nature” (without the inverted commas) in relation to organizations.

But here I would have to differ sharply. To begin with, organizations comprise interdependent people in self-organizing interaction. They are not bounded “systems” made up of component ‘parts’. Secondly, these people are conscious and self-conscious; they use ‘talk’, in the broadest sense of the word, as the medium of interaction; they act politically, in pursuit of partial and/or self-interested goals; they behave idiosyncratically; they have the capacity for humour and creativity; and so on. None of these characteristics are present in other living organisms.

Paradoxically, then, it is these uniquely human characteristics of people in interaction that mean that it is misleading to think of an “organization” as an organism. Or as an organic, living system. This might serve as a useful short-hand to inform organizational design. But I would argue that it is not an accurate way of describing the complex social dynamics of people in interaction. That is, the imaginary construct (or ‘thing’) that we refer to as an organization.

Cheers, Chris