Part - I

Organizations - this word has never been as well known as it is today. ‘Organization’ today, is used in a broader sense and a lot has been written about it. While everyone wants to belong to an organization, there are conflicting ideas about organizations - right from what organizations are, how to run them, to why organizations exist.

What are organizations? Are they machine-like entities that are created and maintained for purely economic purposes? Are the human beings who comprise organizations purely economic and rational? "The evidence of managers’ own eyes, ears and feelings reinforce that the core of a company’s nature, its heart, is its existence as a continuous work community - in short, as a living, learning company," says Arie De Geus, former Executive, Royal Dutch Shell.

How are these living organizations nurtured and kept alive? The traditional method of managing organizations has been associated with control and centralized authority. However, from the age of industrial revolution and mass production, organizations have come a long way from the knowledge era with practices of decentralization of control that restore the balance and ensure equal ownership, commitment and involvement. Why this change? Why have organizations consistently decreased their exertion of central control?

In this regard, it is worth considering the study of how anthills, beehives, cities seem to have a life of their own and manage to survive by themselves despite the lack of sufficient centralized control and pacemakers. These studies eventually led to the theories of selforganization - theories which proved that groups of individuals, each following a simple set of rules, eventually form an organization of higher order and purpose, survive the longest, even after the best controlled ones die.

Take for example, a single anthill, which lives on an average for 15 years, whereas individual worker ants don’t even live for a year. Yet, these anthills grow, learn, and mature over time as one entity - an old ant colony as a whole (one entity of higher order) behaves differently from a young one, very similar to human adults behaving differently from children and teenagers. So what enables the anthill to live on, ahead of its lesser mortal members? "It is the self organization of these worker ants, who, while responding locally to their environment, following a set of principles, create a higher order of existence," says Steven Johnson, in his book on Emergence.

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* Contributed by -
Rajarshi Samuel,
PGP 2003-05,
TAPMI, Manipal.
Published in Bi-annual Journal of TAPMI - 'Amartya'.