Camping on Seesaws: Prescriptions for a Self-Designing Organization

This article prescribes how an organization can meet social and technological changes and reap advantage from them. Long-term viability maximizes in a self-designing organization, in which those who perform activities take primary responsibility for learning and for inventing new methods, and in which nonparticipant designers restrict themselves to a catalytic role. Designers can form such an organization by putting together processes, the generators of behaviors. Although complex interactions among processes make designers’ forecasts unreliable, people can mitigate serious future problems by keeping processes dynamically balanced. Six aphorisms caricature the desired balance: Cooperation requires minimal consensus; Satisfaction rests upon minimal contentment; Wealth arises from minimal affluence; Goals merit minimal faith; Improvement depends on minimal consistency; Wisdom demands minimal rationality.