The Eight Metaphors of Organization

[!NOTE] This is not original This isn’t an original document, it is more or less copied from ribbonfarm. Nevertheless, I think it’s crucial background, so I will host it here to make it easy enough to link

1. Organization as a Machine: This is the most simple metaphor and the foundation of Taylorism with words like bottom_up, top_down and centralized. Pretty much everything wrong with industrial work.
2. Organization as an Organism: A richer metaphor with ideas like evolution, birth and death
3. Organization as a Brain: Some overlap with the organism metaphor, but it is an information-theoretic way of understanding collectives. About building collective intelligence.
4. Organization as a Culture: Related to a sense of shared meaning and purpose
5. Organization as Political System: Discussed in The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office”.
6. Organization as a Psychic Prison: Something like a plato’s cave, haven’t sufficiently explored this.
7. Organization as a System of Change and Flux: My favourite language of complex adaptive systems, stability, entropy and chaos theory.
8. Organization as Instrument of Domination: These are themes of oppression, naked aggression, bigger army diplomacy, rules for rulers.

Other Related Meanderings: daos-display-organizationality daos-are-digital-organisms