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Traditionally, we viewed businesses as a hierarchical organization chart, a structure that we replicate in management committees and agree on actions that are replicated down the hierarchy using the same logic. This structure, however, inherited from the dawn of the industrial revolution and military and ecclesiastical institutions, has little to do with the true complexity of twenty-first-century organizations. In today's world, intangibles, particularly knowledge, have piqued the interest of businesses and governments alike. Production is governed by knowledge, which governs practices, processes, and resources (Beer, 1981, 1985, Bullen & Duncan, 1997). Organizations have been forced to redefine organizational dynamics to spread value along the way, owing to the complexity and agility required under current scientific and technological conditions (Bullen et al, 1997). According to this premise, the likelihood of value dissemination is rooted in an organizational culture that creates diffusion pathways based on relationships and processes (Lavanderos & Fiol, 2010, Bateson, 1991). Similarly, if current conditions include complexity, speed, and consistency, management models supported by rigid structures such as hierarchies will limit value diffusion and generate waste throughout the organization. This waste manifests itself in a variety of ways, including a lack of coordination between areas (both intra and inter-functional), rework, commitment failure, programming breakdown, favoring functional goals, and other “invisible” failures (Marchiori and Franco, 2019). In addition to the foregoing, we are entering a qualitatively different world that is difficult to comprehend and assimilate due to the accelerated rate of change. We are witnessing the birth of a network society (flat, cross, and dynamic structures) that is diametrically opposed to the traditional pyramid-shaped society inherited from the Roman era. The network society is nimble, adaptable, pervasive, ductile, and creative. Similarly, new ways of creating value imply disseminating knowledge (Eigen & Eigen 2013, Espejo & Foss 2018, Malpartida & Lavanderos,2000, Wang & Olson, 2018, Zeleny, 1986). Such complexities necessitate the development of attitudes and competencies centered on knowledge sharing and development, motivating people to collaborate in an accountable managerial culture based on dialogue. Failure to do so will hasten waste generation. Agility, flexibility, ubiquity, ductility, and creativity all contribute to the required efficiency of twenty-first-century organizations, without which they are unlikely to be able to reinvent themselves.
In this sense, firms that can internalize and manage viability mechanisms will lead to a shift in productive models in the new economy (Beer, op.cit, Espejo & Foss 2018, Zeleny op.cit.). These flat, process/relationship-organized, highly coherent, and congruent companies will define and shape the 21st-century business paradigm. These changes require us to consider new approaches to organizations as systems, rather than inputs and outputs, and to consider them as relational models. When we shift from rigid forms like hierarchies to more ductile ones like collaborative networks, we should consider how they contribute to different information and communication strategies.
If we consider a company to be a group of people interacting and managing processes to produce goods and services, the profitability of the end result is a function of communication, cohesion, conduction, and coordination (Abel, 1998, Arnold-Cathalifaud, 2008). If these processes are flawed, costs—visible or invisible—arise, reducing profit. If we define an organization as an organized network of relationships, the viability and profitability of the organization will be determined by its cultural flexibility in internalizing the warping process or decisional plasticity (Lavanderos & Massey 2014, Mayurama, 1980, Varela, 1984, Morin,1991).