Chapter 5: Redesigning Your Organization As a Partnering Network

OVERVIEW

We judge each other harshly and often unfairly. We do not credit that other people are more complex than they may seem to our small-minded view of them. Marriages break up because of this delusion, employees do not work well, and we needlessly separate ourselves from the talents offered by others.

—ROBERT ORNSTEIN, MULTIMIND

How many of us have ever thought about the source of the word organization? Its root likely derives from two Greek words—organon, tool or instrument, and ergon, work—implying a grouping of organisms working together as a means of accomplishing something. People might think of organizations as heartless, legal entities, but they are purposeful beings, much like plants and animals such as ourselves. Organizations experience the same needs, threats, and life cycles that other species do. So, if organizations live and die much as any other organism, why have we gotten into the habit of designing most of them as buildings?