REPLY Why don't organizations function better? (SD6547)

[SDMAIL Bill Braun]

Posted by  Bill Braun <bbraun at hlthsys.com>

Thank you for the response Wade. I am prone to philosophizing; in this case 
I was being concrete. Jay talks about managers as designers, that is, 
[re]designing an organization.

I find your points right on the mark insofar as a philosophical foundation are 
concerned. The driving question that has my attention is, what are the core, 
basic, building blocks of organizational design, tangible and specific, in the 
spirit and application of Jay's question, "why can't we design organizations 
with the specificity of chemical plants?" More to the point (me thinks) is, what 
questions will reveal what we need to know to design such an organization?

I'm not naive about the variability of human behavior; that said, if mental models 
give rise to structure which in turn give rise to events (SPE pyramid) specifically 
what are the structural elements?

In other words, if all the members of this list were offered an obscene amount of 
money to design an organization (where its environment and market was known) what 
would we do? How would we use SD to accomplish such a thing?

This is seemingly at odds with Jay's admonition of being problem focused; yet, if 
structure leading to behavior is a valid theory (not expressing doubt here), is it 
reasonable to pose the problem of, how do we design an organization in such way that 
it is capable of responding to what ever happens in the external environment in such 
manner that it sustains its existence? This is akin to Jay's point that the most 
important person as far as airline safety goes is not the pilot, but the engineer 
who designed the plane to fly safely under a variety of conditions.

Bill Braun
Posted by  Bill Braun <bbraun at hlthsys.com>
posting date  Fri, 31 Aug 2007 18:30:39 -0400