Organisational Organisms

The idea of treating an organisation as if it were an individual - with emotions, intelligence, personality and so forth is not new. I know that Douglas Hofstader touched on this (or more than touched) in his book "The Eternal Golden Braid". This analogy could be carried further; although it correlation may become a little stretched.

The idea of a organisational 'physiology' was one that I have been exploring; mostly to see how far the thought could be carried.
Consider that any group of people operates within a particular environment and that environment includes a number of other groups of greater or lesser similarity. There is competition and co-operation between the organisation and a Darwinian like process works to ensure the survival of the fittest. None of this is new and in fact it forms the basis of various economic theories.
But what if we take the thought and consider it in a less metaphorical way.

Any organism requires sustenance to survive, usually in multiple different forms. It requires some way to interact with its environment and hence some way to detect it; senses in other words. Generally organisms create waste products and have mechanisms for re-production.

For an organisation, at the naive level, money is its sustenance - but that is like claiming that living things are dependent on carbohyrates. They power the entity but there are considerably more complex interactions involved - chemical for organisms and financial for organisations. The financial aspects are no more the reason for an organisation's existence than chemical reactions are the reason for an organism. I include enterprises such as banks in this, they use money in the same way bees use honey, but only a relatively small amount is used to keep it running.

The basic element of the organisational organism is the people. They are the cells in the body and ideally should all be working for the good of the whole, but in reality they tend to be working to maintain themselves within the larger group. They are sustained by the flow of nourishment (commonly money, but perhaps other intangibles for non-profit organisations) which is made easier to obtain by being part of the group than being independent. In return they provide something that is useful to the group and are often clustered in teams with related purpose. Occasionally one of these groups develops a pathology or cancer which threatens the whole but usually they operate in co-ordination.
As usual the larger the organisation/organism the more difficult it is to have each part operate in harmony. A nervous system/communication is required to co-ordinate operations and perhaps a central decision making unit. In this analogy, general operations represent reflex actions - perhaps referring back to middle management as autonomic nervous system while governance level management represents the co-ordinating and decision making sections of the central nervous system.

Shifting to another area (and still pushing the limits out of the metaphor), all organisms need some way to sense their environment and detect areas of high nutrient density. Customer feedback, competitor analysis, and market surveys represent a sense of smell for our corporate entity. It detects residual pieces of what has been around. Hearing and sight are much more immediate senses and I can't think of any specific analogues in the corporate world. Much of the recent work in IT with "Big Data" can be considered as developing more sensitive smell, with the same fault of detecting things that are not there or no longer relevant.

There are probably a number of correlations that can be made, but one that I think might prove particularly intriguing is the possibility of psychoanalysing an  organisation. I suspect that this would only be meaningful for really large, complex groups - such as a nation. A small team is more likely to act, and re-act, like a simple organism. But the psychology behind the interaction of countries could be really interesting. Maybe something for another post sometime...