Camping on Seesaws: Prescriptions for a Self-Designing Organization

Bo L. T. Hedberg, Paul C. Nystrom, and William H. Starbuck This article prescribes how an organization can be designed to meet social and technological changes and to reap advantage from them. Long-term viability maximizes in a self-designing organization, in which those who perform activities take primary responsibility for learning and for inventing new methods, and in which nonparticipant designers restrict themselves to a catalytic role. Such an organization is formed by putting together processes, the generators of behaviors. Although the complex interactions among processes make designers' forecasts unreliable, serious future problems can be avoided by keeping processes dynamically balanced. The desired balance can be caricatured with six aphorisms: