Organizations are systems whose most relevant components are human beings; they are created to pursue goals that no individual effort could ever accomplish. The two main features of an organization that we concentrate upon are its structure and its pattern.

Structure is the way in which accountability is created through a well-defined and somewhat rigid definition of what everyone is supposed to do in order to accomplish the goal of the organization. Pattern is the informal and often fluid community of practices that is generated ad hoc in order to carry out the tasks necessary to accomplish the work at hand.

From the point of view of the people that work in the organization, a structure satisfies the need for stability within the organization; the pattern, instead, addresses the need for flexibility and creativity necessary to cope with the complexity created by the ever-changing environment the organization is immersed into and influenced by. In other words, people in the organization need to have both a precise set of references and, at the same time, enough freedom to exert their creativity.

From the standpoint of the leadership of the organization, i.e. the top management and board of directors, structure and pattern reflect, respectively, the need for control (often financial) and the need for understanding and addressing promptly the market (increase sales/profit).

Management is what enables an organization to operate successfully through a suitable orchestration of individual efforts. What makes the management of an organization a very unique form of system management is that human based systems, unlike machines, cannot be truly controlled. Human based systems can only be influenced.

This is not too hard to understand. The nature of work has evolved dramatically over the last 60-70 years, and so have human needs, calling for an ever-growing request for job satisfaction and empowerment. Accordingly, managing an organization means, more and more, fostering and managing people’s desire for fulfillment within the boundaries of their professional expertise and intrinsic motivation to personal development.

The value of an organization is increasingly in the knowledge it is able to generate and share; such knowledge can only be generated by its individuals and can only be taken to fruition if the appropriate organizational design is put in place. The key to creating a suitable way for people to work together and thrive is to challenge the fundamental assumptions we make about the design of an organization, its policies and its measurement system.

Only by unveiling the inherent project-like nature of work and providing a coherent and cognitively sustainable shape to the myriad of informal networks taking place in our organizations can we unleash the power of people’s creativity and intrinsic motivation to succeed.