Organisations are complex sociotechnical systems. And all organisations exist in various states of dysfunction all the time. Some parts of the organisation may briefly reach a “functional” state where everything works effectively, and everyone knows what is happening. But those states don’t exist for long. We can think of this as the organisational entropic force – the constant introduction of external and internal forces and changes mean that a functional state is rapidly drawn back to dysfunction.
We can constantly strive to reduce this dysfunction, and we should, but we must remember that there is no such thing as a truly, completely, consistently “functional” organisation, and there never will be.
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