The Organization as a Machine: An Outdated Concept - XPLANE | Organizational Change Management Consulting

“The structure that a mature enterprise takes on at any point in time essentially represents the accumulation of a long series of prior resource allocation decisions . . .. If these decisions are made without a coherent guiding philosophy or strategy, the organization that results will be like a stalagmite: shapeless, inefficient, and of little use

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A corollary of Conway’s Law is that an organization’s structures themselves can be constrained by the architectures that they designed many years earlier. And without intentional action, it’s a Catch-22. “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking we used when we created them,” Einstein said. An example of this antipattern is a mi

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Actually, one could argue that every organization’s real structure looks like this: an intricate web of fluid relationships and commitments that people engage in to get their work done. Unfortunately, most organizations force a second structure, the one with boxes piled up in pyramid shape, on top of the first. No wonder it sits there so uneasily—i

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