Organisms and organisations are systems that usually have purposes of their own. However, the parts of an organism (i.e., hearts, lungs, brain) do not have purposes of their own, but the parts of an organisation do … An organisation with purposeful parts almost inevitably generates internal conflict … An organisation is a system whose major deficiencies arise from the ways its parts interact, not from their actions taken separately.
From Dr Deming
To improve output, production, sales, profit, quality, or any other important factor, every part of the organization had to improve.
From Adapt - why success always starts with failure
A central point of the corporation, as a legal structure, is that it is supposed to be a safe space in which to fail. Limited liability companies were developed to encourage people to experiment, to innovate, to adapt - safe in the knowledge that if their venture collapsed, it would merely be the abstract legal entity that was ruined, not them personally.
From Quality Software Management: Vol 1. Systems Thinking
The quickest and surest way to classify organisations into similar patterns is by the way people think and communicate.
From Quality Software Management: Vol 2. First Order Measurement
One of the most sensitive measures of the cultural pattern of any organization is how quickly it finds and removes problems.
From Quality Software Management: Vol 4. Anticipating Change
Organization inhibits reorganization (Minot's Law).
From Implementing Lean Software Development
The mark of an excellent organization is not that they are without problems; it is that they are without systemic problems.
From Patterns of Software
My overall bias is that technology science, engineering and company organization are all secondary to the people and human concerns in the endeavor.
From Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies
Organizational lines exists for control and decision-making. They don't usually exist to accelerate work throughput.
From Understanding the Professional Programmer
Rules are not made to be broken, but neither are they made to be not broken. Rules are made so that the organization operates more efficiently.
From Consilience
Complexity theory can be defined as the search for algorithms used in nature that display common features across many levels of organisation.
From Principles of Product Development Flow
The Marines, and all other elite organisations, maintain continuity in their organisational units.
From The End of Certainty
Once we have dissipative structures we can speak of self-organization.
Order can only be maintained by self-organization.
From Complexity and postmodernism - understanding complex systems
A self-organising system will try to balance itself and a critical point between rigid order and chaos.
From The Tao of Business
Taoism believes in a kind of self-organizing system, that there are patterns to the world and its affairs, and that it is best to let these patterns operate without interference.
From Smart Swarm
Unlike our systems, which are tuned for efficiency, the termites' systems have been tuned for robustness, which they demonstrate by building mounds that are constantly self-healing.
From Linked
The theory of phase transition told us loud and clear that the road from disorder to order is maintained by the powerful forces of self-organization.
From Thinking in Systems - A Primer
This capacity of a system to make its own structure more complex is called self-organization.
From Leverage Points
The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience. A system that can evolve can survive almost any change, by changing itself.
From Simple and Useable
Simple organization is about what feels good as you're using the software, not what looks logical in a plan.
From Beating the System
Implicit assumptions lead to behaviours that are carried out automatically, without thought, and these behaviours constitute an organisation's or a society's culture.
Most assumptions made in and about organisations usually go unquestioned, and their validity is taken to be self-evident, despite Ambrose Bierce's (1967,289) admonition that "self-evident" means evident to oneself and no one else. "Obvious" does not mean "requiring no proof" but "no proof is desired."
From Pair Programming Illuminated
Widespread use of pair programming involves a cultural shift in values of the organization - away from individual and toward team recognition and goals.
From Peopleware
Most organizations don't set out consciously to kill teams. They just act that way.
From A little book of f-LAWS
The best organisations aim to remove the expectation of compliance and eliminate the fear of getting things wrong.
Organizations fail more often because of what they have not done than because of what they have done.
