The Orgtology Blog

Strategic thinking is the art of keeping an organisation relevant. For Org to survive it needs strategic thinkers within its executive team. They are the guardians of relevance. Therefore, they must understand the flow of strategy well. The structure of strategy begins as a flow. Purpose is the foundation of any organisation. Without it, Org cannot...

Efficiency is the corner stone for any operation. Without it, Org will not survive. In nature, efficiency defines the cycle of life. Resources are never infinite. Therefore, the goal is always to decrease energy whilst increasing the result. To watch the incredible power of an ant or the precision of a honeybee will show the efficiency in nature. O...

Understanding is the foundation of change. Before we can improve, we must understand. REET stands for Relationships, Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Threats. The main purpose of REET is to understand the reality of a team or organisation. From such understanding one can make informed decisions regarding change and maintenance. I have been using REET...

One of the aims of a model is to create a simplistic understanding of something. An architect will create a model to visualise an end-result. A mathematician could create a model to ease calculations for others. For organisations, we create a business model to show how we do our business. Stewart and Zhao (2000) see a business model as a statement ...

The first phase of any strategic process must always be to know who we are and then to decide what we want to do with that. The strategic process thus begins with an understanding of purpose and intent. E.g., there are many boxers in the world and they all participate in a sport that hold the same rules. They thus operate on a similar algorithm. Th...

To succeed, any organisation must thrive in a fast changing and dynamic world. The effect of this is that strategy must be intelligent and dynamic. It might be that much of what you know about strategy is obsolete. Research shows that old ways of creating corporate strategy will not sustain the growth and change that many organisations need. Orgtol...

On first acquaintance, orgtology might seem like a new name for old shoes. This is not the case, since orgtology has specific assumptions about organisation. These differ significantly from traditional organisational thinking. Executives who use orgtology as management tool, find it impossible to revert to traditional methods. Below is a podcast in...

The purpose of organisational design is to create order. Yet too much order will drive predictability, which might blind us to a fast-changing world. To change, Org must be creative. Organisational culture will decide how much uniqueness we allow within Org. We need uniqueness for abstract thinking. It keeps us relevant. In so, we need order to eff...

To create an organogram from an orgtology perspective differs from traditional methods. Here our task is to first understand the flow of activity before we add resources and authority. We must at all times ensure efficiency. Not only regarding resources, but also in terms of process flow. We cannot assume that people who hold similar &nbs...

The process construct is a blueprint for running the operations of Org. A project construct defines the plans that we make to change Org. The former ensures performance whilst the latter secures relevance. Process and project constructs must therefore give an integrated solution to the performance and relevance of Org. We cannot understand these co...

I am Caucasian, male, 52 years old, and speak with an Afrikaans accent. It is my fixed identity. Physically I cannot be anything else than that. Yet mentally I can be an incredible variety of that. My body is an algorithm. It restricts me. My mind is abstract. It frees me. Jointly, they become an expression of who and what I am. As humans we expres...

Without Organisations we would be primitive. It is through Org that we can control things and people. Religion, politics, philosophy, ideology, culture, business, and government… These are all organisations. Even language is an organised expression. Org gives humanity its collective consciousness and holds its intelligence beyond physical form. In ...

Orgtology begins through Hypothesis 2x. In this we assume that anything needs receptive and projective parts to exist. E.g., Org uses a strategy to stay relevant and operations to perform. Strategy is disruptive because it creates change. It is therefore projective. Operations must receive this change, make sense of it, and then hold it. It is ther...

The 4-Window Map (4WM) is an orgamatics tool. I designed it in 2006 as a tool that can deal with complex problems in a simple way. Currently, Orgtologists use it to grasp and resolve organisational problems. In orgamatics, most organisational problems relate to EOP, which stands for Exposure, Opportunities, and Process. The post "The EOP Analy...