I'd like to build on Michael's thought about chaos.
A cousin to his observation is that older organizations sometimes share =
an interesting characteristic: they're like onions.
In their early years, most everyone knows everyone else and what they do. =
As the organization grows, this environment changes, and the layers of =
the onion begin to grow. By accretion, the onion grows thick, and many =
of the skins, which represent processes and even output, go unquestioned. =
Strangely, this leads to more chaos than necessary as new members to the =
organization sometimes create work-arounds to traditional means and =
actions (the onion skins). Root cause goes unidentified.
Bringing processes under control allows time to "let processes go." What =
a wonderful world we live in.
Best regards,
--Barry Mallis bmallis@markem.com MARKEM Corp. Keene, NH
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>