The Organization as a Machine: An Outdated Concept - XPLANE | Organizational Change Management Consulting

The modern organization is rooted in military history—at the time, the most efficient model for coordinating large groups of people to achieve strategic objectives.

The impact of these influences remains today. It shows up in the language of business, for example – think of all the business jargon that clearly has military roots. [...] Even my own business school was organized into cohorts—a structure modeled after the Roman legions.

...we’ve been trained to think of organizations as homogenous and mechanistic, with a clear set of rules, a command-and-control structure, and the ability to leverage hierarchy to get things done quickly by issuing top-down directives to reallocate resources to meet objectives.

The untangling of the military from modern organizations is accelerating, and its influence is waning.

Historically, men predominantly led and populated armies, lending not only an overtly military language to business but also a masculine one, impacting not only the words of business but also its culture. The structure favored men...

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Our current approach to leading change in organizations didn’t happen by accident—it was the product of the era in which most management thinking developed.