Organisation Design

By Abdul Khalid Abdul Aziz

It is common belief that an organization when formed serves a basic purpose. It could be that a group of individuals wanting to galvanize efforts to cumulate savings from members of their immediate community seek to establish a cooperative. A cooperative is an organization that is closest to a completely democratic model of organization. Every member has one vote, and every major decision is decided upon a general body of members at an annual general meeting. Yet again, another individual, together with like-minded friends, decide to incorporate an entity solely for commercial reasons: to make money for themselves and share the resulting profits after the hard work and diligence. The two examples cited above are at the two extreme ends of the scaleone egalitarian and another pernicious.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Apr 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524519315

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Copyright © 2017 by Abdul Abdul Khalid. 695410

ISBN:   Softcover   978-1-5245-1930-8

             EBook       978-1-5245-1931-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 04/13/2017

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Contents

Chapter One Organisations In Today’s Rapidly Changing Workplace

Chapter Two Organisation As A Living Organism: People, Systems & Processes And Environment

Chapter Three A Case Study

Chapter Four Analysis of Case

Chapter Five Redressing The First Of The Twin Challenges: Capital Raising

Chapter Six Redressing The Second Of The Twin Challenges: Organisational Capacity

Chapter Seven Looking to the future

Chapter One

Organisations In Today’s Rapidly Changing Workplace

Introduction

It is a common belief that an organization when formed serves a basic purpose. It could be that a group of individuals wanting to galvanise efforts to cumulate savings from members of their immediate community seek to establish a cooperative. A cooperative is an organization which is closest to a completely democratic model of organization. Every member has one vote and every major decision is decided upon a general body of members at an annual general meeting. Yet again, another individual together with like-minded friends decide to incorporate an entity solely for commercial reasons: to make money for themselves and share the resulting profits after the hard work and diligence. The two examples cited above are at the two extreme ends of the scale, one egalitarian and another pernicious.

Yet again the marketplace has evolved into a different marketplace even when compared to the past two decades. The social media and the internet have become the new normal or a new platform allowing people to interact and communicate with each other, to sell and market products, services and even, people, different from the past norms. The internet with its Facebook, twitter, snapchat and the like have become pervasive and intrusive at the same time. The internet is a disruptive technology. It has its good features as well as bad. In trying to make sense and understand the various ramifications and impact on ourselves as individuals, members of communities and fraternities, and not least, organisations is difficult enough. The task and responsibility are more arduous and daunting when a growing child is placed in the centre of the change processes taking place.

What has been alluded to above is the tremendous and profound change which is taking place in every sphere of our today’s living.

Organisation Development (OD): a journey of ideas and concepts¹

Organisation Development theory is a branch of knowledge which seeks to make sense of the various changes processes on how practitioners and managers ought to view organizations and their dynamics.

Organisation as system and living organism (ref:Artashes Gazaryan, 2006:Organisation Development (OD) a manual for managers and trainers. FPDL- partners for local development Foundation)^1

Open System

Biological sciences have been rich resources to today’s s management science, in particular OD, a science on how an organisation operates as one whole and complete system. Taken these principles, as Gareth Morgan (1997)^2 simply refers to his ‘ images of an organisation ‘ the following five features are important :

The concept of an open System. The idea of openness emphasises the key relationship between the environment and the internal functioning of a system. Environment and system are in the state of interaction and mutual dependence. The concept of an open nature of biological and social systems contrasts with the ‘closed’ nature of many physical and mechanistic systems;

Homeostasis: refers to self-regulation and ability to maintain a steady state. On the basis of what is termed ‘negative feedback’, where deviation from some standard or norm would trigger action to correct the deviation.

Requisite variety: that the internal regulatory mechanism of a system could be as diverse as the environment with which it is trying to deal with;

Equi- finality: the principle is that in an open system there are many different ways of arriving at a given end state. Living systems have flexible patterns of organisation that allow the achievement of specific results from different starting points, with different resources;

System evolution: the capacity of a system to evolve depends on an ability to move to a more complex forms of differentiation and integration, and greater variety in the system facilitating it’s ability to deal with challenges and opportunities posed by the environment.

Today’s world- the second millennium-the operating environment with which organisation operates has another distinct feature: the emergence of so- called disruptive technologies. These technologies could be a result of prolonged experimentation or a constellation of shadowy undertakings or the painstaking efforts by different groupings of engineers and scientists. Driven in large part by the consumerism tendencies to consume more of nature’s abundant albeit depleting resources, and come up with better gadgets and products and so forth: a materialism world.

Coupled to that of an ever expanding internet infrastructures of worldwide network of undersea cables and relaying transporter stations, the internet and social media systems have become pervasive and intrusive