Why Organisations Grow
To solve current dysfunction, understand why organisations grew in the first place
How and Why Organisations Grow
These ideas rely heavily on Christopher Alexander's first book Notes on the Synthesis of Form and this paper by Alex Ryan on emergence.
Our lives and our societies are characterised by a series of creative projects. We grow food, build shelter, create tools, and imagine new forms of art and music.
A project, to be successful, solves many constraints at once. To create a home you need to, all at once, manage construction costs, predict the future use of a piece of land, create a beautiful spot that people would want to live, and ensure you can keep the rain out - along with dealing with all the other local conditions. The interconnectedness between these constraints means that decisions to try and solve for any one of them invariably ends up affecting all the others.
Solving these kinds of complex interdependent issues is the domain of design. Design takes all factors into consideration to try harmonise the various requirements via a single wholistic soloution:
Consider a simple example of a design problem, the choice of the materials to be used in the mass production of any simple household object like a vacuum cleaner. Time and motion studies show that the fewer different kinds of materials there are, the more efficient factory assembly is - and therefore demand a certain simplicity in the variety of materials used. This need for simplicity conflicts with the fact that the form will function better if we choose the best material for each separate purpose separately. But then on the other hand, functional diversity of materials makes for expensive and complicated joints between components, which is liable to make maintenance less easy. Further still, all three issues, simplicity, performance, and jointing, are at odds with our desire to minimize the cost of the materials. For if we choose the cheapest material for each separate task, we shall not necessarily have simplicity, nor optimum performance, nor materials which can be cleanly jointed… This is a typical design problem; it has requirements which have to be met; and there are interactions between the re quirements, which makes the requirements hard to meet. This problem is simple to solve. It falls easily within the compass of a single man's intuition.
Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form
This example of the choice of materials may easily fall within the compass of one man’s intuition. Alexander however goes on to describe how when a designer attempts a problem like the layout of a city for a million people the idea that a soloution could be grasped by one individual is improbable at best.
The Scope and Resolution of Design
This break down in ability happens because every design problem has a scope and at some point this scope gets too large for any one person.
Scope is the amount of ‘stuff’ included in the design. This means the physical space covered by the design but it also considers the number of components that need to be considered. The scope could vary from the putting together a wood chair to cultivating a 2 acre garden to building the world’s largest car factory. As we move from one to the next the scope increases in terms of both physical scale and the number of components being worked through.
Ever design also achieves a certain level of resolution - the granularity of attention at which the soloution operates.
High resolution soloutions deal with the most minute details. In the case of cultivating a 2 acre garden this might mean selecting every plant and carefully planting it in its own location.
Low resolutions solutions sketch out coarse grained elements usually covering a larger portion of the scope. For the garden this could be understanding which sections are given over to vegetables or flowers.
As described by Alexander, many design problems can be solved by a single person. They can carve out a scope that they can, quite literally, get their arms around. Then they can start to address all of the elements within that scope at as fine grained a resolution as is needed to come up with a satisfactory design.
However, at some point the scope is simply too large and it becomes necessary to bring in other people to solve.
As scope increases two things happen. First there is simply more 'stuff' to be dealt with. For the garden example, if one person had enough time and energy to deal with the planting for the 2 acre garden, when it expands to 4 acres while they may theoretically still be able to deal with it their physical ability to do so may no longer be there.
Second, as more and more things get included in the design problem new aspects of the required soloution continually emerge. In the case of the garden, perhaps for your original two acres no matter what you planted having enough water was never an issue. However, on the new 4 acre plot you have the same water source, suddenly you need to be thinking about what you choose to plant based on how much water it needs and the various kinds of drainage as you have a limited supply.
People are bandwidth constrained. As the quantity and kind of problems that need consideration for a design problem increase there comes a point where they simply cannot be handled by an individual any more. As this happens you need to not only bring on these new people but figure out in turn how they are organise. Do you break off parts of the scope or give different people varying resolutions to consider r some mix of the two?
In the case of the garden, at first as the scope increases perhaps it is as simple as parcelling up bits of the land to have them worked by varying people. However, imagine that the garden were to expand from a 4 acre lot to a 40 acre farm. At this point perhaps the layout of the garden, procurement of new plants and an understanding of the state of the constituent parts becomes a near full-time job and the organisation morphs to support a set of managerial roles.
Just like the elements of the design problem itself these problems of organisation are dynamically emergent. New superstructures, roles, hierarchies and relationships emerge and disappear constantly as different people join an organisation and the nature of the underlying problem shifts over time.
There are no easy solutions to this. Some of our projects have massive scope like cities, disease management and electricity generation. For these the issue of how to organise the people that create the soloution is a huge part of underlying problem. But it’s just as much a problem for smaller scopes like running a food co-op or a
There are no easy solutions to this. At corporations it has become fashionable to refer to 'matrix' organisations and the idea that you can break up most work into 'vertical' and 'horizontals' of varying kinds. But, even this idea is more about the kinds of structures that managers can easily hold in their minds than the natural organising principles of groups needed to solve problems with a large scope.
Different organising principles constantly emerge and disappear
However, if we can remind ourselves why more people were needed to solve the problems in the first place it can be incredibly helpful to avoid some of the dysfunctions that organisations can find themselves struggling with. No matter the scale of the design problem it has some definable scope, some set of definable resolutions that it is being solved for. At large scopes there may be many emergent features that need to be dealt with. However, for each person you should be able to trace back their work to its relationship to the fully defined problem in a way that the entire organisation can find meaningful.