The implausibility of the ORGANISATION AS A LIVING ORGANISM metaphor is intriguing. I have heard many people — btw including myself in the past ;-) — suggesting we should interpret organisations, or society, based on biological or physical metaphors. Often the notion of “complex systems” gets mixed into it — shooting across all boundaries of logical incommensurability — and “natural law” is being invoked as a yardstick for societal morality.
After having spent some time to look into this more closely, the absurdity of much of the suggested implications is evident. Certainly, human beings are part of nature (which we shouldn’t forget!!), subject to the same needs and aging processes as other mammals, but society is an artificial environment not subject to inexorable natural laws: we can (and must) change and improve society. However fascinating the analogy of a “natural body” (which btw isn’t new but amply invoked in pre-modern cosmologies), society doesn’t function like a living organism.
And, more importantly, it shouldn’t. It is wrong and misleading to cite nature as a moral foundation by which to measure our social arrangements: there is no morality in nature (by definition), and not much that is natural in society. Hence, I’m now convinced we cannot — or should not — use such superficial analogies, especially when we unwittingly evade the necessary work to understand and examine the “political” principles of our Organisations.
Much of how our Organisations function is the result of underlying ideologies. In fact, any (re-)prioritisation of our values implies changes in Organisational institutions: if efficiency and expertise are more important than participation and greater employee satisfaction, we build expert-based organisations often neatly separating (central) decision-making and execution. In the opposite case, we create “industrial democracy”. Hence, organisations need to make conscious decisions on values that get enshrined in “organisational institutions”.
Here, the invocation of “living” systems etc can quickly distract from the fundamental need to examine what the “character” of our Organisation is, and what it should become, and how. That’s tough work as institutions are about who makes decisions and holds power, what we value, how resources and money get allocated, to whom, and how we structure.
This is also where many transformation efforts only scratch the surface. It isn’t just about “culture change”, growth mindsets or psychological safety — ie “development” on the side of workers — and clean washrooms, minimum wages or other trivia won’t fix it (Marcuse recounts examples of dissatisfied factory workers a century ago, but the suggested solutions then aren’t dissimilar to some of our modern interventions). We also need to take a hard look at the core of how our organization “constitutes” itself.
Sadly, in crafting better “political institutions”, laws of nature or analogies to living bodies won’t help us much…
From: “Sunday Morning Thoughts on LinkedIn” — I will report some of the interesting LinkedIn dialogues here, paraphrased and applying the Chatham House Rule — trying to protect some of the sentiments, thoughts, and above all our stimulating discussions from oblivion ;-)
