The elements of a healthy organization

Running an organization is not that much different from running a government. To prescribe a universal recipe that can produce healthy organizations has been tried and failed many times. Whenever there is a successful enterprise, be it Bell Lab, GE, Google or Amazon, we attempt to duplicate the same success in other enterprises. Most have failed. But that does not prevent thinkers to pour out thousands of books to announce the new models of successful organizations. Similarly from Plato, Aristotle, to Karl Max, there have been many political philosophers that tried to prescribe the “way” to run a “good” government, none have found the “silver bullet” yet. Over the years I have observed some crucial elements all healthy organizations seem to have. Having them does not mean the organizations are guaranteed to work, but without them the orgs are more likely to be dysfunctional. These elements stack on top of each other. From the bottom: The first element is a story. “The truly unique trait of 'Sapiens' is our ability to create and believe fiction. All other animals use their communication system to describe reality. We use our communication system to create new realities. Of course, not all fictions are shared by all humans,…” Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari. But the fictions or stories we believe as a group seem to be live things that go through birth, youth, to death. All stories eventually lose power. But they may also get absorbed into other stories, like a evolution. The second element is culture. “Culture is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.” When we try to promote another shining new organization model, like Scrum or Agile etc., we often forget the importance of culture. We try to pluck a seed from a big tree, throw it into another faraway place under different weather, water and soil environment, hope it grows into a big tree… that sounds ridiculous here but I am sure the same deed will be tried continuously in the future. The third element is structure. Structure defines the relationship between people and teams inside an organization. What they own and what they don’t own. When an event occurs, a good structure tells people clearly whose problem it is, while a bad structure gets the org into endless debate on the problem ownership. The fourth element is process. Process defines “how”. It is the nerve system of an organization. The fifth element is people. People are creators of organizations: the story, culture, structure and process, all of these are nothing but people’s mental constructs. But people can also become the “slave” of the organizations they create. They are the prinsoners of their own device. “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” Laozi

•