The Paradox: Growth and Complexity
While Durkheim might be right about the independence of size and complexity, it seems that they do, in fact, often co-exist – especially in contemporary 21st Century organizations. While the modern organization could often remain simple in structure and operations, while growing very large, the postmodern organization of the 21st Century often cannot afford this luxury. It is to this challenge that I am about to turn. Before doing so, it is important to note that growth and complexity at a very deep level, are often related to one another in a paradoxical manner (which we will discover is the case with many other dimensions and dynamics of postmodern life in the 21st Century that I will be considering in the other sets of essays concerning Leading Into the Future).
The paradox resides in the tendency of entities to cluster together – the strange attractor phenomenon which I have already identified. This would seem to provide a unifying core for the newly clustered entity being formed as a strange attractor. Yet, it is precisely where we find that growth has occurred when there is conflict, competing interest and the inevitable movement toward specialization of functions. The center is threatened by this loss of coherence—and leadership must emerge to ensure that the center will hold. Thus, the very forces that pull entities together as a new whole will later create the conditions of growth in size that often pull these entities apart. I now specifically shift our attention to this paradoxical dynamic.
Differentiation and Integration
As they grow larger and older, organizations have required an increasing proportion of resources devoted to integrative services that are needed to keep the organization from falling apart as a result of increasing specialization and differentiation of functions (Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967). A smaller proportion of resources is available for the direct services that are to be provided by modern organizations, thereby reducing their efficiency and ultimately their effectiveness. As we enter the postmodern era, it appears that the integrative services being offered—even if they are very extensive—often are insufficient to hold the organization together. Even with more attention being given to organizational culture and to creating a strong feeling of solidarity, organizations increasingly are experienced as fragmented, chaotic and inconsistent. A central question in most contemporary organizations is thus posed. Can the center hold? An administrator with whom I have worked offers the following observation:
[My organization’s] strategy over the last four years seems to resemble a living organism more that it does a corporate entity. There seems to be very little planning or forethought for the organization structure. The structure that exists today at [my company] seems to be more the result of reacting against unforeseen circumstances like an animal out in the wild.
