Intelligent Design is best understood as a failure of the imagination. We look at the world and see something with order. Jungles with thousands of species existing in equilibrium. Coral reefs, polar icecaps, rolling hills. The idea that is could have been shaped by forces without intention is ridiculous to us. Someone must have built it. Someone like us but bigger.
Because order only comes from intention, doesn't it? The world is a machine, fashioned by the Great Engineer.
Could the tents of Organizational Design be a similar failure of the imagination? Are our organizations more like machines or jungles?
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3 comments:
Org design works in reverse to ID: ID looks at how things are (the pre-existing reality), and then imposes an ordered explanation (an explanation which is nonsense, of course). Org design starts with the Great Engineer's pre-existing notions of order--the GE then creates a structure in accordance with those notions. The idea that organisations actually behave in accordance to these notions if the great nonsense here.
It's both a success and a failure of the imagination--the success is that someone can dream up these crazy-arsed explanations/justifications for things.
Toby
Mr Cooper - I like it! Org Design as Intelligent Design in reverse - totally!
Regarding success/failure of the imagination - what disappoints me about the various "Designs" is that they imagine some a little crazy but rather domestic.
Organisations are just big CD collections to be reordered. The development of life has guy writing out a shopping list.
Thanks man!
Except that with organisations if you re-order only the As, Bs, and Cs, then come back the next day, you find that the rest have re-ordered themselves into something like 'order in which I bought them' in response to your meddling...
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