Page 192 - The Resilient Organization

Postcard No. 2 from Hanover, New Hampshire 179

IMPLICATIONS FOR RESILIENT ORGANIZING

The Dean campaign contains important ideas as to how organizational
designers can make their organizations more like an evolutionary play-
ground and less like an ideal form, a master designer’s one shot at an
efficient, intelligent design. More by camping in a tent than living in a
palace [a famous phrase used by Hedberg, Nystrom, and Starbuck (1976)
to convey the promise of self-organizing], Dean for America transformed
from being an insignificant campaign to a formidable one (before its
coming to an end, as most campaigns do). Yet this evolution was not a fore-
sight that Howard Dean possessed as a stretched goal or aspiration early in
the campaign—it was the unfolding capacity of the (open) organization to
accomplish more than was ever hoped for initially. In other words, the
campaign’s potential was discovered rather than “designed.”
The campaign was constantly shaped with the assistance of participants
who were unpaid and geographically distant from the national head-
quarters and who were independent operators not accountable to the offi-
cial campaign organization. Parallel structures and informal organizations
blossomed. Such proliferation allowed competing visions and aspirations
for the campaign to be entertained (also expressed in the overall goal of
“Taking our country back”). Such open organizing thus escapes the trap of
having to conform to one preconceived vision of the future—a state that
Postrel (1998) has called the “enemy of the future” because it circumvents
the processes of competition and experimentation in favor of preconcep-
tions and prejudices. Let visions, not just strategies and organizational
structures, also compete!
Open, participatory conceptions of organizing offer a way to escape the
kind of dull-execution mentality that results from the top management
team’s setting the strategy while everyone else is called on simply to execute
and meet the preset target goals (Bossidy, Charam, & Burck, 2002).
Instead, through instances like the Dean campaign, organized activities
become experimental playgrounds where the management task is creating
the architectures of contribution so that the potential contributions of many
participants are actualized and assembled into a joint effort rather than dis-
sipated. Such an approach does not guarantee that the desired outcomes
will be achieved (nor does any other kind of organizing by the way), but it