On the form of organizations

Between 2005 and 2010, Nokia kept its engineers, its technology, its brand and much of its market, and lost the smartphone battle it had seemed placed to win. In the same years LEGO changed much of what it made and how it made it, and stayed recognizably itself. Same parts, different organization. Different parts, same organization.

Whatever persisted in the second case and vanished in the first is what makes an organization one organization. We can say with great precision what an organization has, its people, capital, structure, strategy and culture, and what it does. Asked what an organization is, we still answer with an inventory.

I first met this problem far from organizations. My doctorate was on Mediterranean storms, some of which organize into tropical-like cyclones, and on how the composition of the smallest particles they carry can change the organization and intensity of the whole. A cyclone has no matter of its own. Air and water pass through it. It exists because of the transformation it performs, turning the heat of a warm ocean into an organized circulation, and it ends when that transformation stops. It can stop being one storm while all the air remains.

Then I worked inside organizations, and saw the same thing from the other side. Initiatives that began without a mandate came to carry consequence for the whole organization. A result already produced sat unused because nothing took it up. Neither the organization chart nor the strategic plan explained why. What explained it was the way the parts were related, and there was no science of that.

Palmsight tests a hypothesis: that an organization is a form naturally generated and sustained by a transformation, of the same kind as a flame, a vortex or a storm. The transformation turns talent, resources and demand into coordinated action and value, and the organization lasts as long as it does. Design, authority and intention take place inside it. To make that form something one can study, the framework proposes the organizational regime, the construct that represents the relations through which the transformation acquires, reproduces and changes its form, in four coupled dimensions observed through people, assets, leadership and mission.

Physics enters for a precise reason, and only there. Organizations are not hurricanes. They contain meaning, authority, learning and conflict, and I assume no physical law over them. But physics has studied in depth the open forms sustained far from equilibrium by a transformation they perform, with mechanisms that are tested and ways of failing that are known. In a natural reference system, relations are not stipulated one at a time; they fit one another, so they can be tested together. The framework transfers those relations one at a time, and retains each only if it holds in organizational evidence. Two failures are possible here, and they mirror each other. A physicist could mistake analogy for explanation; an organization scholar could inherit the metaphor without the means to find where it breaks. The framework is built to avoid both.

If it is right, a few things change. Transitions could be recognized as they approach, rather than named after they have happened. The distance between what an organization declares and what it actually pursues would become measurable, and with it, which initiatives become real. It would become possible to say why organizations facing the same environment reach different opportunities. And organizations could be compared by the form of what they sustain, not only by their size.

It may not be right. The transfer from physics may fail, regimes may not emerge, the constructs may collapse into what we already measure. The framework is stated so that each of these would show, and each failure would leave something: the boundary of the transfer, propositions in organizational terms, and a computable representation of what an organization is.

The parts of an organization are visible. The form they produce is not. Palmsight sets out to make that form an object of science.