The first is: "It seems to me that it is a natural tendency of people to
self-organize to achieve their common goals."
My response:
This is true to a degree, but I have seen too many teams self-destruct due
to personality conflicts, hidden agendas, bad processes, lack of
resourses, etc. to put too much faith in "self organized" structures. I
would argue that the entire emergence of the "Learning Organization" as a
subject of study and discussion is a testament to the limitations of
people's natural abilities to self-organize.
The second of John's points I would like to comment on is "while we may be
able to argue that formal organizational structures facilitate coordinated
performance, I would also suggest that they often get in the way of it."
My repsonse:
I completely agree with this statement but believe, from my experience,
that there is a corollary statement that should be considered: "local,
informal, organizations will tend to seek local, informally optimal
results".
I work in an effort to re-engineer planning and scheduling for a large
company. Many of the disfunctional practices we are trying to eliminate
are completely rational, and even ingenious, by the standards of the
small, self-organized groups that developed them. Never the less, the sum
of all these local optima is not the global optima; it is a mess. A good
hierarchy, and I don't believe I have ever worked for one, would foster
the alignment of self-organized groups with overall goals, visions, values
etc.
This is an interesting area of discussion. I have wandered into it both
as a participant in self-organized groups (which did threaten the
hierarchy, just as John described) and through a, so far, shallow
acquaintance with the "emergent behavior" or "emergent intelligence" area
of Chaos theory.
Regards,
Robert L.
RLucadello@aol.com
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>