Risk-taking
To shape the future one needs decisions about what future one is expecting or desiring and how one wishes to react to this expected or desired future. Organisations must therefore make plans and arrangements so that, with the help of the (always) scarce resources, those products or services can be produced which will make them successful in the future. Each of these decisions is risky, as, on the one hand one does not know the future, and on the other hand one cannot think about and consider every single possible scenario and what consequences these decisions will have regarding risk to other parts of the organisation. Can the development department know (or does it want to know) how its technical decisions will affect sales, production, or the legal department?
The necessary complexity alone forces them to limit perspectives, to throw out future scenarios, to back only one horse, to allow possibilities to pass by and to tolerate risk-bearing ventures. If one really knew what effects one’s decisions might have and what chances one rejects or overlooks, one would possibly decide nothing anymore. This is why an organisation needs internal boundaries for communication channels and obligations, as well as attentiveness towards an unknown future. It is unable to handle risk at the same time as making dangerous cuts to resources and trusting in the future. For this, every decision within an organisation will be a shared one.
It follows that every organisation can be examined for which routines, patterns and processes they have developed for the selection of probable futures, how and where it rationally plans, maintains or discards robust plans, which alternative plans it holds onto or not, and where to relinquish, explicitly or implicitly, plans, perceptions and introductions of attractive or dangerous developments.