informal coalitions

A deterministic universe - if only things had been different

As someone who believes that outcomes in organizations - and life in general - emerge from the complex social interaction of people in conversation, the cover story of a recent edition of New Scientist (22 March 2008) caught my eye.  Headlined The UnCertainty Principle, it drew attention to a recent series of papers by "a sizeable minority" of physicists which claim that the universe is objective and deterministic.

Giant Hairball meets the wiggly world of organizational dynamics!

In commenting on a recent post, Paula Thornton interestingly makes a connection between my description of the "wiggly world of organizational dynamics" and Gordon Mackenzie's notion of the Giant Hairball, as entertainingly described in his book Orbiting the Giant Hairball.

Mackenzie uses the Giant Hairball metaphor to describe a corporate world which is "honeycombed with ... established guidelines, techniques, methodologies, systems and equations."  These, he argues, create an "inexorable pull of Corporate Gravity ... toward the tangle of the Hairball, where the ghosts of past successes outvote original thinking."

Mackenzie's Hairball, then, describes what he sees as the impenetrable, tangled mass of the formal organization, which grows up over time as a result of the quest to achieve "conformity with the 'accepted model, pattern or standard' of the corporate mindset".  My Wiggly World relates to the hidden, messy and informal dynamics of organization that underlie its formal manifestations. The two are inextricably linked.  But how?

Mechanistic metaphors and organizational dynamics

This is the fifth in a ‘mini-series’ of posts on Katzenbach Partners’ interesting and important report about the power of the informal organization. I am delighted that the report is helping to raise awareness of the impact of the hidden, messy and informal dimensions of organization. It is cleverly put together and its stories engaging.

At the same time, there are a number of aspects of the report with which I would take issue from an informal coalitions view of organizational dynamics. Here, I want to draw attention to the inconsistency between the authors’ use of a well-worn mechanistic metaphor to describe how organizations work and the general tenor of the report, which recognizes that more complex social dynamics are at play.