Abstract
The organizational design process does not start with organizational structures. This chapter shows instead that the environment, the organization’s purpose, and strategy, as well as the complexity that needs to be processed form the starting point and how this can be done. The call for a “spring cleaning” concludes this chapter and the preparation of the design process in the narrower sense.
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Notes
- 1.
Espejo and Reyes (2011, p. 120) list as relevant perspectives the ones from “actors,” (i.e., those producing the product) customers, suppliers, owners, and “interveners” (i.e., those who influence the context of the company). What the relevant perspectives are depends, of course, on the context of the organization and needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis. In our approach, we limit ourselves to the stakeholders, who are directly related to the organization’s primary functions and are its most pertinent ones. Suppliers and organizations that influence the organization’s environment (e.g., the public sector institutions) can also be relevant but only if they exercise a dominant position over the organization, such as in centrally planned economies, or in the case of state-owned enterprises or enterprises delivering services and products mainly for the state.
- 2.
The reason is easily explained: As we said in volume 2, the purpose determines the equilibrium point of the organization and the way it processes variety. Different purposes entail different perspectives on the environmental varieties as well as different selection and prioritization logics, governance and control models. Diverging purposes thus lead to different equilibrium points and ways of processing variety. This heterogeneity or even contradiction of purposes consequently impedes the organization from processing variety optimally: The organization becomes paralyzed and a place of continuous conflicts. Diverging views on the primary purpose and objectives should therefore be addressed and solved before the design of the new organization even starts, without any exception. Any ambiguity in the purpose avenges itself in the aftermath.
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Lassl, W. (2020). What Kind of House Do We Want: A Bungalow or a Villa—Why and to What End?. In: The Viability of Organizations Vol. 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25854-2_9
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