Organizations as Brains. This post is based on Chapter 3 of Gareth Morgan's classic book Images of Organization (Sage 1986), which opens with the following question: "Is it possible to design organizations so that they have the capacity to be as flexible, resilient, and inventive as the functioning of a brain?
" To start with, Morgan makes two important distinctions. The first distinction is between two different notions of rationality, and the second involves two contrasting uses of the "brain" metaphor. Mechanistic or bureaucratic organizations rely on what Morgan calls "instrumental rationality", where people are valued for their ability to fit in and contribute to the efficient operation of a predetermined structure. Morgan contrasts this with "substantial rationality", where elements of organization are able to question the appropriateness of what they are doing and to modify their action to take account of new situations.
The Analytic Organization. There are several possible ways of defining the term "analytic organization".
One way is to define a set of capabilities and working practices loosely called "analytics", and use the label "analytic organization" for an organization that has reached a certain level of collective competence or "maturity" in these. This is the approach taken by Peter Graham, who recommends the following set of characteristic features (Building the analytic organization, Information Management, August 2007). Formal functional role (e.g. The Organization Is Alive. Over the past 30 years, management thinkers have largely come to accept the idea that organizations are not machines; they are as unpredictable, unruly, self-organizing, and even sentient as any living beings.
Gareth Morgan, Arie de Geus, Peter Senge, Meg Wheatley, and others have written eloquently about this. Even those who don’t buy the idea of organizations being literally alive are bound to agree when writers such as Jon R. Katzenbach and Zia Khan (in their book, Leading Outside the Lines: How to Mobilize the Informal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results [Jossey-Bass, 2010]) suggest that hard-nosed, engineering-oriented leaders need to develop virtuosic skill at managing the informal, personal aspects of a company. The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (9781591841432): Ori Brafman, Rod A. Beckstrom.