This week just gone was peppered with discussion on new types of organisation designs and questions on whether traditional organisations can morph to a new design – flat, networked, nodal - or are they destined to stay hierarchical, bureaucratic, several levels structures?
Lee Bryant asks 'What is the use case for organisational structure?' He says that 'the rise of social technology in the workplace creates new possibilities for how we organise work.' But reading through various fascinating links he adds to his piece and from these to further links to other articles on the topic it seems that the new possibilities aren't being realised.
Certainly I've noticed the big, long established organisations I work with having huge difficulty in exploring or adopting any of these new possibilities.
Reasons for sticking with the way big organisations typically organise work in hierarchies, bureaucracies, management layers, and rather inflexible systems could be due to the desire for 'legibility.' Small organisations can be flat and flexible because they are 'legible', as they get bigger and more complex that 'legibility' decreases and a desire to 'simplify' in order to return to legibility takes over. The drive towards simplification is evident in many management ideas – seven steps, five principles, four box grids, etc. Venkatesh Rao in A Big Little Idea Called Legibility explains the inherent dangers of it and also offers four reasons why it remains attractive.