How can organizations be so powerful, you ask? Aren’t they made up of individual people, people who have a choice about supporting what organizations do? Well, they are made up of individuals, which gives rise to some common misconceptions about organizations, among them
- that organizations share the same characteristics as individuals;
- that organizations are intentional;
- that organizations are sentient; and
- that the individual is the basic unit of the organization.
It is this last misconception that gives rise to the others, imputing qualities to the organization based on a familiar–and utterly inaccurate–framework. If organizations were simply bigger versions of individual people, they could be understood through an easy transfer of human psychology. They are not. To employ a well-worn cliche, they are far more than the sum of their parts.
The basic unit of organization is the decision, not the individual. Much as a single molecule of a compound (rather than its constituent atoms) retains the characteristics of that compound, it is the decision rather than the individual that retains the characteristics of the organization. It is decisions that constitute and reflect the nature of the organization.
At a simple level, this concept is easy to recognize. One can easily recall the divergent thinker at work or in a social club (perhaps it was you). While this person represented a differing opinion than the norm, he or she likely did not influence the organization’s direction, and was probably marginalized to boot. Yet, the decisions in the organization probably reflected certain characteristics recognizable as belonging to that organization whether that divergent thinking was a part of it or not.
The characteristics of an organization’s decisions (and of the organization itself) are easy to discern simply by listening to its members at the water cooler or in the bar after work. This is not the stuff of mission statements and corporate websites, but rather the honest opinions people express in their more forthcoming moments.
