Decoupling
Everywhere and whenever an organisational process is decoupled (“You can do this and will only concern yourself with this!”), complexity is reduced, but at the same time complexity is created for the whole organisation. It is important to understand from the beginning that the guiding process networking is also paradoxical.
Example: An organisation reacts to the complexity of the environment (including new countries where sales are to be made), by dividing the hitherto single sales team into country-specific teams. In doing so they might decouple the members from the respective teams, decouple sales- and marketing strategies and decouple the timely positioning of sales drives! By doing this the respective teams can more specifically take care of the countries concerned, don’t have to grapple with questions which are irrelevant, or don’t need to speak so many languages. However, at the same time it creates a new internal complexity for the entire organisation! Now though the different country teams have to be coordinated, networked, controlled and supported with resources. Therefore, organisations can be examined about whether and how the uncoupling strategies (specialisation) are a suitable response to the environment and how the necessary networking (standards, centralisation, formalisation) is introduced. Whether one of the chosen forms from the past still fits the actual necessities must, when the environment changes significantly, be examined on a regular basis.