In my auditor’s peregrinations (I borrow the term from a recent Mr. Greg Hutchins’s e-mail message) I often met with organizational structures represented – more or less graphically – as pyramids or triangular shapes: the organization’s top management down to the work-force level.
I have always been rather skeptical with this kind of organizational representations, to the point that sometime ago I wrote an article comparing organizational structures to our solar system: Sun, Planets, Satellites, Comets, Meteorites, etc.
ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES
In my more recent peregrinations, I met with two interesting National Geographic documentaries, that made me think again at how organizational structures can be better represented.
The first documentary wass about ancient mega-structures such as pyramids and obelisks. Scientists believe that the giant stones were moved by means of devices generally resembling sleds.
But the Romans, when building the Baalbek (Lebanon) site, reversed the principle and moved eight-hundred tons weighing stones transforming them into the axle of a wheel.
The second documentary was about birds – yes, birds. I am very fascinated at how they fly. I could not therefore keep myself from knowing more about birds’ flight, so I bought myself a Kindle copy of professor Henk Tennekes’s lovely book The Simple Science of Flight: From Insects to Jumbo ets.
And here is where I came across once more with the hub-and-spoke system. This time applied to airport system technology.
Not being satisfied with what I was coming to know, I went further and discovered that the hub-and-spoke system has also sub-hubs and sub-spokes.
Et voilà! My solar system was here again.
A pyramidal or triangle-shaped organizational structure obviously implies linear top-down and bottom-up interactions, that are very seldom found in actual organizations.
In one of the above National Geographic documentaries, it cited a research study carried out by Rome University. Starlings to free themselves from the peregrine falcon, that feeds on them, fly in flocks, in a way that each bird communicates with the next seven birds, and so on, until the whole flock flies as a single bird.
In this way, the starlings can more easily escape the peregrine falcon’s attacks.
Organizational structures are by nature branched.
When we – as auditors – try to know or at least to understand, who, when, how, where does or does not do what, we often find ourselves in a maze. And, we have no Ariadne’s thread to get out from it.
First thing, we have to be aware of is that organizational structures are not theoretical but are real. Khalil Gibran writes that “if a tree could write its auto-biography, it would not be different from a people’s history”.
Organizational structures change all the time. Events – both external and internal – make tend to force organizational structures to fit for their actual environment, again external and internal.
It would therefore be a big mistake to look at an organization as at a fixed, immutable structure, where the “top” is always at the top, and the “basis” is always at the bottom. No organization is – geometrically speaking – a line; nor is it a two-dimensional figure. It rather is a three-dimensional “being” that lives in time, too.
Of course, looking at organizations from this (new) perspective is very demanding, both to consultants and auditors. But we cannot – we must not – ignore that we live in, we are part of, a technological world that is always on the move.
Erich Von Daeniken might have been wrong in his book and film Memories of the Future, National Geographic might be equally wrong in its serial Once Upon a Time in the Future.
Might be we still make confused over the right type of organizational structure.
Whichever the case, it is our duty – not only as consultants or auditors – to look for, to know, to understand the real complexity of the organizations we work for and with.
Pyramids and triangles and lines are geometrical shapes. In nature, there is no such thing except for crystals.