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March 16, 2004 By Uncategorized One Comment

Ton is musing about organizational structure:

While browsing the Actionable Sense Wiki…I came across this statement of mine, that I scribbled down some weeks ago:

Organisations are clusters of relationships between people. |
The invididual and the network are the relevant economic units, not the organisation. |
Value is in the relationships, organisations are transactions along those relations.

The first statement puts people and their relations in the spotlight, thus including informal structures in orgs, not just the formal ones.

The second includes all stake holders in any situation from the get-go not just share holders.

The third brings into view that the prime goal of organisations is value creation, not it’s own continuity.

The sum total accepts every organisation as a temporary phenomenon, created and dismantled to fit value creating endeavours by networked individuals. Would this be called something like the ‘Open Space Organisation’?

And I replied:

Have a look at Michael Herman’s ideas of the Inviting Organization.

What the Inviting Organization does for me is that it starts with the intrinsic motivations for people to aggregate into structures. The results look something like what you’ve drawn, but the origins, the role of the founder, you might say, all come back to an invitation.

In these kinds of organizations where structures evolve and dissolve as they are needed, the anchor for me is the invitation that is issued. We gather around it, work with each other and then go our seperate ways when it’s over…issueing new invitations all along the way.

For more on these kinds of organizational structures, have a look at Birgitt Williams’ Conscious Open Space Organization, Alan Stewart’s conversing company and Harrison Owen’s Interactive Organization.

For me the key is that we begin the process of organizational development from within individuals rather than with the structure determined from the outset. In otherwords, we begin with the subjective and intersubjective relationships, as Ton has noted, and then build our structures out from there.

I have to post more on the internal/external stuff soon…! Look for a clearer way to represent it all in an upcoming post.