Stephen Billing’s Blog

Here is the best definition I have yet come across for what an organisation actually is. It comes from Ralph Stacey’s article Learning as an Activity of Interdependent People (unfortunately only available on subscription).

Ralph says that "an organisation is the thematically patterned activities of interdependent people, which constitute their closely interconnected individual and collective identities."

I think this says it elegantly and comprehensively.

First of all let’s take the idea of the patterned activities of interdependent people. So a person alone is not an organisation, it takes a number of people to make an organisation. The people are interdependent, which means that they rely on each other. They cannot achieve their own ends, nor can they achieve the ends of their group or organisation, without each other.

The activities of the interdependent people are interactions between them i.e. human interactions. These activities or interactions of interdependent people have thematic patterns. These patterns are the coherent population-wide evolving patterns that emerge from many interactions amongst people, without any overall blueprint or plan. By the way, this emergent process of patterning is what is known as self-organisation.

The themes of these patterns emerging from human interaction are the closely related themes of power relating, ideology and identity. Power relating is caused by something already mentioned – the fact that interdependent people have need of each other. Differences in distribution of power occur as a result of the different amount of need one person has for the other at a given time. In other words, if I need you more, for example if I want you to give me a job when there are dozens of other candidates, then the power balance will be tilted towards you. On the other hand if there are no other strong candidates then the power balance tilts towards me.

Now we round off the definition. Ideologies are our social beliefs that we gain through our experience of the world and our imagined or experienced view of what others think of us and our actions. Our ideologies or social beliefs are therefore influenced by our collective identities, that is to say the groups that we feel we belong to. Our collective identities also influence and are influenced by our individual identities.

Ralph’s explanation of what an organisation is points to the collective and individual identities that people have – we belong to groups and identify with them, while at the same time having a sense of being an individual self. The interaction between these interdependent people with individual and collective identities results in identifiable population-wide patterns. These patterns are themed in terms of shifting collective and individual identities, power relating, and ideology or social beliefs. 

Voila, brilliant. Thanks Ralph.