Stephen Billing’s Blog

When I started my doctorate I took organisations so much for granted that the question of what an organisation is had never occurred to me. But if you’re working to change your organisation then it’s worth thinking about what your organisation actually is. How you think about organisations will affect what you do in trying to change your own one. Also important is how you are thinking about change. But for now, let’s consider the question of what an organisation is.

Clearly people are involved, but if you say that organisations are a group of people who make up or perhaps identify with the organisation, then how would you explain how when people leave organisations the organisation can still continue. When I left paid employment at Telecom, the company continued recognizably as Telecom. Even when a far more important person than me such as the CEO left, Telecom remains Telecom.

On the other hand neither is it the buildings, equipment and assets of the organisation that the company owns that constitute the organisation. If this were so, then how would you explain that without the people working in the organisation those things would just sit there as pretty useless physical objects?

Is it both the people and the physical assets? Well, again you have the problem that people can leave and equipment can change while the organisation continues – even the core business can change as an organisation ‘reinvents’ itself.

Ralph Stacey, the supervisor of my doctoral study, has a view that organisations are patterns of relationships between people. I find this idea very provoking in thinking about the essence of what makes an organisation. He suggests that organisations are ongoing patterns of interaction. In other words, organisations are not the people themselves, nor are they the physical assets owned or used by the legal entity that records the existence of the organisation, but rather organisations are the interactions between the people over time.

This view has some rather important implications for how we see organisations. For example, if organisations are patterns of interaction then they are not things, much less living things with goals and intention of their own. Usually when people talk of organisations, they refer to processes, market positioning, technologies, monitoring, plans and budgets.

Conversations are dismissed as ‘mere talk’. And yet budgets, plans and technologies are really tools that we use in our ongoing interactions with each other. The usual way we think about organisations concentrates on the tools, whereas I am now thinking of organisations as conversations. And paying attention to the conversations rather than the tools has certainly had a huge impact on my own effectiveness as a change management consultant, my experience with my clients and my consultancy business results.