Background

Many of our social problems have been tracked back to the idea that organisations are somehow like machines with replaceable parts (e.g. the people). Some organisational theorists promoted the view that people’s behaviour could be ‘optimised’ by management to speed up assembly lines and increase production efficiencies. This was done to help people ‘keep up’ with machines by adjusting their work accordingly. It is this ‘machine’ metaphor that forms the underpinning of many dysfunctional ideas such as those propounded by Margaret Thatcher and John Howard.

While the use of the machine metaphor has helped some, it fails totally in areas where people’s knowledge is needed to help the organisation succeed - where organisational structures need to adapt themselves to meet new needs. Machines are no good at adapting to new circumstances or repairing themselves, or figuring out what to do next.

A more useful and accurate view of organisations is that they are groups of people that work together for mutual benefit. This introduces a ‘biological’ or ‘organic’ view of organisa­tions which transcends the idea of organisations as machines and introduces many powerful strategies to help assure survival and growth, strategies that are compatible with the idea that humans are biological life forms and not machines.