What is Sensible Organization

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There are many things about work in today’s organizations that just do not make sense. We observe contradictions, stresses, and tensions everywhere. The advancements of science and technologies, which promised to take away the drudgery of the human condition do not seem to have fulfilled their promise. We have replaced ‘drudgery’ with the new disease of ‘affluenza’. We fondly reflect on the creativity and community spirit of pre-industrial age cottage industries and the subsequent de-humanization of the workforce in the assembly line of factories of the industrial age. The notion of ‘sensible organization’ is a return to the human and social values that have disappeared in the modern workplace. Sensible assumptions about most modern organizations, which have complex hybrid structures consisting of hierarchies and networks, is that they are often more like organic ecosystems than machines. Moreover, it makes sense to adopt the position that this mechanistic-organic hybrid is now a natural state of affairs and should not be resisted. Indeed this creates an ideal context for innovation, creativity, and growth—a context in which rational planning should give way to processes that stimulate patterns of propitious emergent activity with an emphasis on sense-making, unstructured decision making, and shared situational awareness. Learn more in: Complex Organizations and Information Systems