Mar 12, 2017 06:17 AM
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/02/21/pr...al-theory/
EXCERPT: Organizational Theory isn’t a science, though it would like to be. Unfortunately, building a scientific approach requires understanding from a number of fields that themselves are still only aspiring to be sciences. Because psychology, economics, and sociology are a mish-mash of rules of thumb and vague, non-predictive, and generally unfalsifiable “theories”, organizations are reduced to ad-hoc rules and guesswork: critical, but prescientific.
For now, to abuse the parable of the blind men and the elephant, organizational theorists are still groping at their respective elephants, unable to figure out that the trunk is next to the tusks, or even that they are part of the same animal. It’s not a science: if anything, it’s a field of engineering, albeit one without a grounding in physics or Asimovian psychohistory to draw from. Precisely because the field isn’t scientific, understanding the engineering rules of thumb that were developed over time is fantastically useful for a practitioner.
Henry Petroski’s excellent To Engineer is Human introduced me to the history of engineering. Failure is the watchword of that history. Even generations after Newton, science was simply incapable of answering basic engineering questions, like “what load will this beam support?” So engineers developed rules of thumb in different domains that assured safety, grounded in experience. This approach was almost scientific — the theory is that this structure will be stable, and if it’s untrue, it will be falsified all on its own. Organizational Structure is similar: we know a lot about what doesn’t work.
As with most fields, it’s easiest to dissect organisms once they are dead, so I’ll stick to ideas that are older than I am. Understanding the various theses and antitheses won’t lead to synthesis without the basic grounding to unify them, but the history of failed ideas can still give us a map of the pre-scientific minefield of organizational design. Once we’ve traced out the map, I’ll add some ideas about how we can navigate around the unknown dragons, and find useful insights into organizations without actually pretending to understand them....
EXCERPT: Organizational Theory isn’t a science, though it would like to be. Unfortunately, building a scientific approach requires understanding from a number of fields that themselves are still only aspiring to be sciences. Because psychology, economics, and sociology are a mish-mash of rules of thumb and vague, non-predictive, and generally unfalsifiable “theories”, organizations are reduced to ad-hoc rules and guesswork: critical, but prescientific.
For now, to abuse the parable of the blind men and the elephant, organizational theorists are still groping at their respective elephants, unable to figure out that the trunk is next to the tusks, or even that they are part of the same animal. It’s not a science: if anything, it’s a field of engineering, albeit one without a grounding in physics or Asimovian psychohistory to draw from. Precisely because the field isn’t scientific, understanding the engineering rules of thumb that were developed over time is fantastically useful for a practitioner.
Henry Petroski’s excellent To Engineer is Human introduced me to the history of engineering. Failure is the watchword of that history. Even generations after Newton, science was simply incapable of answering basic engineering questions, like “what load will this beam support?” So engineers developed rules of thumb in different domains that assured safety, grounded in experience. This approach was almost scientific — the theory is that this structure will be stable, and if it’s untrue, it will be falsified all on its own. Organizational Structure is similar: we know a lot about what doesn’t work.
As with most fields, it’s easiest to dissect organisms once they are dead, so I’ll stick to ideas that are older than I am. Understanding the various theses and antitheses won’t lead to synthesis without the basic grounding to unify them, but the history of failed ideas can still give us a map of the pre-scientific minefield of organizational design. Once we’ve traced out the map, I’ll add some ideas about how we can navigate around the unknown dragons, and find useful insights into organizations without actually pretending to understand them....