Organizational Design: A Holistic View

Many elements of an organization's structure are clearly visible, such as organizational charts, categorizations such as a partnership or corporation, job descriptions, and various legal documents yet these still fall short of illustrating how an organization is designed, interacts with its environment, learns, and evolves.

The analogy of the blind men feeling various parts of an elephant and coming up with different perspectives is a real phenomenon with organizational structure as well given that various stakeholders will interact with the organizational structure and come away with very distinct views of how the organization is structured.

A single or few perspectives of organizational structure then are insufficient to describe a given organization.

Systems and the view of structure as recurring activities are the underlying themes of this book.