One question raised in the comments to my post on Perdition was from Chavin Parekh who asked for my views on the idea of Requisite Organization developed by Elliott Jaques. It is an important question, hence a post rather than a direct reply to the comment. Jaques opposed the dominant view in management science which focuses on individuals, their competences and capabilities more than it does on organisational design. Instead he argued that failures can in the main be linked to poor organisations design rather than some deficiency in the employees and leadership.
Now I am generally sympathetic to this position,but with some qualifications. I don’t want to make a specific critique of Jaques or associated ideas such as Stratified Systems Theory but I will make some general comments on the system v individual question
Of course we also need to recognise that this is a long term issue. Communitarian cultures historically see the individual as gaining meaning through their membership of a community. Socially atomistic cultures see communities as aggregations of individuals and individual interests. Atomism predominates in the anglo-saxon world so we should not be surprised to see its assumptions dominate the organisational literature. However as the world becomes more connected, communitarian principles and practices may offer more possibility of progress.
So this is another of those false dichotomies (rather like the hierarchy v anarchy one); we need to take a dialectical or co-evolutionary perspective. Good system design (especially if its evolved) can sustain bad people but can still be perverted by evil. Saints can overcome the deficiencies of bad systems in the short term but no longer, and predicating any approach to organisations on ideal qualities and competences is foolish and irresponsible.
One other consequence of this question by the way has been my removal of several commercial links from the wikipedia entry on Requisite Organisation!
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