Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

Chapter 1.4 Structure and Procedures
The author of this manual had never faced more ‘secret’ things in organizations than their
structures. While the formal construction of an organization is usually known (though not always),
nobody knows how the components actually interrelate and interact. The charts of administrative
subordination never give a correct picture even of subordination itself. The real balance of power
and influence may be very different. Sometimes the charts reflect what bosses think about who
should report to whom; sometimes even this is not the point.
For many years my younger fellow consultants and I did an obligatory job in any organization
before we designed an intervention for it. This job was describing structures. It required
considerable time, but always justified itself. Our consultants usually conducted a lot of interviews,
discussing with each member of the organization (or several representatives of each position if
there were too many formally in the same positions) what he or she was responsible for, and what
his/her boss was responsible for, and what his/her subordinates, if any, were responsible for. We
asked them to answer how it actually is, not what is written in any formal instructions (which were
often totally irrelevant and useless). Of course, the answers were never the same - sometimes to
the extent that not a single point coincided between what the boss was thinking about
responsibilities and powers of a subordinate and what the subordinate thought about their own
responsibilities and powers. So, we used to draw two structures for any organization – the one that
we’ve called ‘a view from the top’, and another one called ‘a view from the bottom’. Comparison of
these two pictures always gave us very fruitful ideas, and allowed us to go straight to the most
tangled and vulnerable things that should be sorted out first.
43