A substantial achievement in today’s society is that people are no longer entirely imprisoned within their social field. If you were a farmer in the 12th century, you were also a serf, were not permitted to trade, would only have limited access to courts, would follow the faith of your Lord, were not able to …
Organisations, like all systems, cannot react or process everything. They must reduce the complexity of the world. For example: Siemens does not study the South of France Dairy Newspaper because this imparts information which Siemens can safely ignore. To reduce external complexity, organisations must produce internal complexity so that they can structure a self-selected task …
Organisations are built around conflicts. Otherwise they would be neither required nor effective. Organisations coordinate the behaviour of many different stakeholders. There are many of them, because few would be able to deliver, on their own, the performance an organisation can achieve. However, there are not only many, but also different stakeholders who have different …
Rationality has been and still is, in many respects, the fundamental paradigm of our culture. Equally, the modern world has created evolutive innovations which cause rational procedures (analysis, planning, regulating, controlling, goal setting, strategies, risk assessments, inspections) to become ever more problematic. The actual keyword for this is ‘VUCA’ world: Volatility-Uncertainty-Complexity-Ambiguity! Rationality easily leads to …
In hierarchically shaped organisations – and these are the most frequent – the top of the hierarchy, with its decisions, usually delivers the decision premises for those below it. The problem is as simple as it is daunting: But nor do those at the ‘top‘ know any better what they decide, what is decided, with …
Because of the open structure of time, every system must make decision. As humans we all recognise this: We must constantly explain what we want to do in future (“Where do I want to apply?”) and what meaning we give to past events (“Were my BWL studies good for me?”). There are endless possibilities of …
One of the central occupations of an organisation is to coordinate many stakeholders. Of course, if some sewed shirts while others were building cars, something would go wrong. To achieve this performance, organisations utilise something which is named by H. Simon and Niklas Luhmann as decision premises. Decision premises lay down the scope for decisions, …
In his system theory, Niklas Luhmann has placed the concept of sense dimensions very centrally. We take up this concept here and can see a connection between the guiding distinctions of organisations and the objective, social and time dimensions. With the help of its decisions about the guiding processes the organisation creates its stability. This …
Time-philosophical thought processes never escape the potential for confusion. Film makers and writers make use of this when, for example, they play with the idea of time journeys in which the past is altered in order to prevent a terrible occurrence in the present, which however only exists because the past was the way it …
Complex situations can always be characterised by the fact that they contain paradoxes. This means, they always have more than one correct solution. As organisations usually work on complex situations continuously, this has consequences on three levels: Objective level: Organisations must make decisions between equivalent objective alternatives. One can recognise every real decision by the …