Re: Organisational thinking
Hi Fred, thank you for your support,
> I'll side with Jan. Organizations don't do anything; people do. That
> said, we can still talk about organizational behavior, organizational
> learning, and even organizational thinking -- as long as we are careful to
> say what we mean and as long as we don't fall into the trap of attributing
> to organizations qualities that only people possess. I do not, for
> instance, think of a business organization has having motives, purpose, or
> even a mission. People possess those qualities or attributes and then
> project them onto organizations.
I like the word - attribute - because to me it means not only property but
also the properties given to them (as in: giving a tribute) by us. We
value organizations by giving them properties we regard highly, like
learing. Could this be a substitute for offering and sacrificing things to
now long outdated Gods? In a way we offer our precious time to
organizations. So perhaps we crave for caretakers, leaders, somebody to
bring deliverance or at least some-one to blame.
(Skip this remark: nobody will, for instance, talk about the Laughing
Organization. This would be ridiculous. When I used to work with this big
corporation we used to have a joke that whenever somebody was laughing, we
would say: - hay, if you would work here, you would not laugh : -). - Or:
hay, what organization do you work with? Being able to laugh :-))
On the other hand, we cannot think without attributing. So to get things
into perspective, I sometimes change attributes or exaggerate them or swap
or reduce them. Just a trick to trick thinking. Lewis Carrol does the same
with Humpty Dumpty, you probably noticed: paying words is exaggerating the
use of expensive words (translating the Dutch "dure woorden gebruiken" -
is this English? It means something like using words just to create a
distance between you and your audience, showing of with terms, jargon).
-- Jan Lelie 100730.1213@CompuServeEvery jargon is a conspiracy against lay-men (Oscar Wilde, I think)