Reference:Glossary of terms/Design
From STS Roundtable
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This glossary of Socio-technical systems terms was published by, and is copyright of, Eli Berniker, May 1983
| Introduction | Systems and Organization | The Means | The Human System | Getting Something Done | The Analysis | Design | Design Concepts | Design Structure and Process | Design Principles |
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Organization Design
Organization design refers to the purposeful design, invention and creation of effective and adaptive organizational systems. It is not an engineering process because organizations cannot be manufactured like automobiles. They are living systems that grow.
Like children, they need help to get started and growing, but they develop according to an internal logic in accordance with the real and changing environments they face. Organization design is an enabling process that attempts to optimize potentialities and capabilities with which the organization can respond to future challenges and opportunities.
Organization design is not really separable from STS analysis. Organization design tends to focus on a more general level than STS and seems somewhat more appropriate for new plant designs rather than redesign. It also adds to the kitbag of tools available to the designer. These tools are policy level tools to be used in parallel with STS analysis.
Organizational Philosophy Statement
Creating an organizational philosophy is the first step in the search procedure leading to organization design. It is a process of making sense of the purposes, environments and principles involved in making design decisions. The philosophy is expressed as a set of tested statements expressing the values and purposes of the organization designers. As statements, they seem pretty simple. It is the process of learning how they relate to the concrete problems and realities of each organization that is critical.
Theories of Human Behavior and Organizations
As a rule, practical managers do not base their decisions on "theories." At any rate, they do not know what theories, models or assumptions guide their understandings. But managers do have ideas about how people and organizations work that they use to explain what is going on around them. Systematic organization design requires that these ideas (which are private theories) be placed on the table so that a design team can understand its own design decisions.
The Process of Developing a Philosophy Statement
A process in which members of a design team analyze the organization-environment set, share private theories, assumptions, values and futures to produce a document codifying agreed-to values and purposes. The document becomes the organization design charter. It is useless to copy an organization's philosophy statement since most of the meaning and content are created in the shared experience of knocking heads, testing values and struggling to make sense out of the future. This is a shared learning experience that is not captured in the charter.
Testing Values and Purposes
Testing asks, "How far are you willing to go in practice to carry out your values and purposes?" It involves giving concrete examples from practical organizational experience. Only after testing are statements included in the philosophy statement. It separates "embroidery" from the cut of cloth which is the key to design innovations.
"Central Character of Technology"
No technology is perfectable, notwithstanding engineers' dreams to the contrary. This is especially true when technology is applied in the messy real world in which organizations must function and earn their keep.
The term "central character of technology" refers to those major gaps in the technology that drive the organization. They may be in the inputs, in the outputs or come from within a technical system designed around a poorly understood process.
These gaps define the crucial responses to be made by the organization's members if the organization is to succeed. It is in the management of these headaches that people can contribute the most to productivity and organizational performance. A core principle of organization design is to create an organization with optimum capacity to respond to the contingencies generated by gaps in their technology. An important initial step of the design team is identifying and defining crucial technological problems.
