Organizations

What is about organizations that make it so complex ? A very simplistic way of looking at it would be a group of like minded ( maybe), similar ( ambitions, attitudes, aptitudes ( ?)) kind of people who would come together to achieve a set of objectives. These set of objectives would then reward them with monetary or some other kind of rewards which would satisfy them in some sense. Well, this is quite a rudimentary simplistic sort of looking at things but this is how they would have started out.

Time progressed, humans became more complicated, objectives got more complex & the notion of rewards got undervalued. Welcome to the modern organization, a complex "interlock" of completely unlikely individuals coming together to achieve goals for which they may not have a liking towards or even worse, do not really care for. They are in there as it provides them with monetary rewards to ensure that they are able to enjoy the modern benefits which life ( read companies) offer them. So the concept of organizations which used to be binding people's efforts towards achieving common objectives has diluted to a large extent.

Is it surprising then that we have different kinds of organizational structures in place to explain this massive complicated mess ? True to MBA's & similarly educated individuals there are models, theories, diagrams and oh yeah metrics to categorize this seemingly chaotic madness into next boxes. Type A personality, open culture, org 1.0 - 99.5, matrix, functional, vertical, non hierchical, flat, agile blah blah blah. If one was to collect all the terms and list them in alphabetical order it would be turn out to be one voluminous testament ( would beat old plus new combined together hands down)

But all these explanations are looking at categorizing human beings into neat boxes with similar behaviors, attitudes, motivations and various other parameters. And that is where all the models fail. Jim Corbett once said the mind of the simplest man is more complicated than that of the most cunning man-eater. People revolt at the idea of them being neatly categorized into boxes like robots but that modicum of common sense seems to be absent in highly paid consultants & incompetent human resource function. Don't get me wrong, we do need structures to make sure work happens effectively and efficiently by a vast group of people but the trouble starts when these structures take precedence over the subject matter i.e people. This also explains why organizations who are obsessed with org structures lose good people and ultimately meet their timely demise.

In the next part, we would cover the last paragraph in little more detail