The Organization as a Machine: An Outdated Concept - XPLANE | Organizational Change Management Consulting

it will probably be necessary to replace people who have invested many years developing and using the obsolete methods as well as to reorganize business units around new patterns of information flow.

If you are not evolving your organizational design, it might be an indicator that your product strategy is getting stale. In our experience, most rigid organizational structures are built to create processes for predictability, not successful outcomes.

the planners had once thought their job was delivering information to the decision makers, it was now clear that their task was to help managers rethink their world-view.

The hard elements are those you can write down on paper or can map on a computer screen. The organization has a structure described by the boxes and lines on its organization chart. Individuals have job titles and role descriptions. The organization operates through processes, information flows, and metrics, and it employs a system of incentives. N

Hierarchies are good at achieving the specific ends they were set up to achieve, but they are not well suited to addressing complex issues that have no readily apparent solution.