Many thanks, Harold, for your response to my earlier comment.

However, to clarify, I'm not advocating a new organizational design. I'm simply describing what is already happening - today - in all 'organizations'. This is the case whether these are governed by command and control, led by enthusiasts of empowered self-management, or if they happen to be formally structured in any of other ways that you advocate.

Formal organizational designs (structures, strategies, systems, processes etc) inevitably both enable and constrain everyday local interactions; but the latter are affected much more powerfully by the informal, 'shadow-side' dynamics of organizational life. It's here, in the give-and-take of everyday conversations and interactions, that people make sense of these formal 'designs'; of managers’ stated intentions; and of emerging events. And it’s also here, in the light of their specific, local circumstances, that they decide how they will act.

Organizational outcomes then emerge from the population-wide interplay of these ‘local’ (i.e. one-to-one and small-group) conversational interactions. This is inherently a complex social process, in which overall outcomes are unpredictable and uncontrollable by any individual (or group of individuals) – irrespective of how thoroughly they might have assessed the situation before acting.

So complexity isn't a function of design. It's a natural dynamic of people interacting together (whether they formally reside at Board level; have jobs at the ‘work face’; or, from a conventional standpoint, have nothing to do with the organization at all, but interact informally with those who do).

Too often we talk about 'organizations' as if they are 'things' that exist - and act - independently of people's day-to-day interactions. In reality, as Ralph Stacey would say, nothing exists outside these local conversational interactions, other than more interactions. And these conversations show no respect for the formally defined 'organizational boundaries'.

Cheers, Chris