The True Nature of Organizations
~350 word | ~2 min read
In software, we’re fond of this idea called ‘Abstraction’. We deal with an object by dealing with it’s category. So instead of my trusty, Ol’Reliable Black Yaris, I’d have a generic ‘car’ or even ‘vehicle’. True the abstraction loses some detail. But abstraction also allows me to reason more easily about how that thing works, and how I’d interact with it. The thing is, that abstraction doesn’t exist. Its a model of a real thing.
Organizations are similar in this way. Organizations are an abstraction in that, they don’t actually exist. Yes the building, or the factory, or the money in the bank account are real. So are the people. But the organization, as we typically conceive it, is actually an abstract model.
We use Organizational terms like ‘Department’ or ‘Team’. These just describe the collective actions of many, many people in simpler terms.
“Organizations have processes.” No, they don’t. People follow patterns, formal and informal, in the actions they take.
“The Organization has decided …” No, it didn’t. A majority of the board decided. Or the CEO dictated. Or the people on the team chose to do such and such.
Organizations exist to make it easier to describe and reason about the collective actions of many, many people.
Abstractions are necessarily less detailed than the reality. That make it easier to hold the complexity in mind. But it means losing clarity when you reason in concrete terms. Organizations, are the voluntary inter-relation-ships among a large group of people. When you keep that in mind, it changes how you see a variety of organizational challenges.
The Organization is inefficient?
That means the way people are interacting takes more effort for the value we are producing than we’d like.
“We need a process for …” becomes “When such and such situation occurs, the people who see it should respond like…”
Realize that your Organization, being an abstraction, is a model. And at the end of the day, when the map and the territory disagree, trust the territory.
Or put an different way, when the ‘Organization’ and the ‘People’ disagree; Trust the People.
Then adapt the organization to match reality.