Organisations

Every Organisation exists twice, once on paper, and once in reality…

The Assumption

What is your organisation?

Is it the neat hierarchy of boxes and lines on the organisational chart?

The forensically defined roles and responsibilities in the job descriptions?

The cleanly documented processes, policies and procedures sitting on SharePoint?

The logical workflows and data linkages within and between systems?

The politely polished meeting minutes, surgically stripped of feeling, meaning, or context?

Or is it something else, something altogether messier and more human?

“The map is not the territory…the word is not the thing.”

Alfred Korzybski

The Reality

The uncomfortable truth is that every organisation, yours included, is a collection of humans: a troop of social, emotional, tribal, storytelling apes.

Each of those humans brings their own experiences, beliefs, biases, and agendas to work with them each day. Given the proportion of our waking hours that most of us spend at work, it’s little wonder that organisations are the stage on which we act out much of our human drama, the backdrop to our hopes and fears, the setting for our greatest triumphs and most crushing failures.

Social identity, group dynamics, and naked self-interest abound: every interaction dripping with meaning, every decision fraught with bias.

“The history of civilisation is an attempt to codify, classify and categorise aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.”

Tom Stoppard

Most of organisational life occurs in the messy middle, the grey areas, the spaces in-between; processes and policies be damned. Not only are humans not nearly as logical as we’d like to think, organisations aren’t nearly as understandable or controllable as we’d like them to be.

Yet we cling to the comfortable illusions that organisations are linear and people are logical calculation machines, then we’re surprised when humans behave like humans.

The Impact

Organisations are chock-full of absurdities caused by misunderstanding both humans and organisations, places where:

• We spend more time talking about the work than doing it.
• Endless back-to-back meetings beget more meetings.
• Decision-making prioritises defensibility over truth-seeking.
• We talk about collaboration but reward individual performance.
• The real organisation defeats the paper organisation.

Navigating all the absurdity imposes a huge tax on organisational productivity and employee wellbeing; declogging this sludge ought to be high on every leader’s to-do list.

What if we engaged with organisations as they really are, not the way they appear on paper…?

Explore further