Organizing For Change Integrating Architectural Thinking In Other Fields Michael Shamiyeh Editor Dom Research Laboratory Editor

Organizing For Change Integrating Architectural
Thinking In Other Fields Michael Shamiyeh Editor
Dom Research Laboratory Editor download
https://ebookbell.com/product/organizing-for-change-integrating-
architectural-thinking-in-other-fields-michael-shamiyeh-editor-
dom-research-laboratory-editor-51927440
Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.
Organizing For Change Integrating Architectural Thinking In Other
Fields 1st Edition Michael Shamiyeh
https://ebookbell.com/product/organizing-for-change-integrating-
architectural-thinking-in-other-fields-1st-edition-michael-
shamiyeh-2441676
Affordable Housing Preservation In Washington Dc A Framework For Local
Funding Collaborative Governance And Community Organizing For Change
Kathryn Howell
https://ebookbell.com/product/affordable-housing-preservation-in-
washington-dc-a-framework-for-local-funding-collaborative-governance-
and-community-organizing-for-change-kathryn-howell-43862520
Organizing For Social Change Midwest Academy Manual For Activists 3rd
Edition Kimberley A Bobo
https://ebookbell.com/product/organizing-for-social-change-midwest-
academy-manual-for-activists-3rd-edition-kimberley-a-bobo-1642978
Against Racism Organizing For Social Change In Latin America Mnica
Moreno Figueroa Editor
https://ebookbell.com/product/against-racism-organizing-for-social-
change-in-latin-america-mnica-moreno-figueroa-editor-42801830

Grassroots Coalitions And State Policy Change Organizing For Immigrant
Health Care 1st Edition Margaret A Post
https://ebookbell.com/product/grassroots-coalitions-and-state-policy-
change-organizing-for-immigrant-health-care-1st-edition-margaret-a-
post-51238416
People Power Change Organizing For Democratic Renewal Marshall Ganz
Recorded Books
https://ebookbell.com/product/people-power-change-organizing-for-
democratic-renewal-marshall-ganz-recorded-books-59248046
Anarchic Agreements A Field Guide To Collective Organizing Ruth Kinna
https://ebookbell.com/product/anarchic-agreements-a-field-guide-to-
collective-organizing-ruth-kinna-50307394
Collective Action For Social Change An Introduction To Community
Organizing Aaron Schutz
https://ebookbell.com/product/collective-action-for-social-change-an-
introduction-to-community-organizing-aaron-schutz-2224812
Collective Action For Social Change An Introduction To Community
Organizing 1st Edition Aaron Schutz
https://ebookbell.com/product/collective-action-for-social-change-an-
introduction-to-community-organizing-1st-edition-aaron-schutz-5332518

MICHAEL SHAMIYEH <
and DOM Research Laboratory (Ed.)
ORGANIZING
FOR /
C
H
A
N
G
E
PROFESSION Integrating architectural
thinking in other ﬁelds
Birkhäuser – Publishers for Architecture
Basel | Boston | Berlin

Editor
Michael Shamiyeh
Copy Editing
Kelly Klingler
Design
Reklamebüro Linz/Austria
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the
Library of Congress, Washington D.C., USA
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibli-
othek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the
Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; Detailed bibliographic data is
available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, spe-
cifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illust-
rations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms
or in other ways, and storage in data banks. For any kind of
use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained.
© 2007 Birkhäuser – Publishers for Architecture,
P.O.Box 133, CH-4010 Basel, Switzerland
Part of Springer Science+Business Media
Printed on acid-free paper produced from
chlorine-free pulp. TCF ∞
Printed in Germany
ISBN-10: 3-7643-7809-3
ISBN-13: 978-3-7643-7809-7
Despite intensive research efforts it was not possible to identify the copyright
holders in all cases. Justifiable claims will be honoured within the parameters
of customary agreements.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2

Michael Shamiyeh
Architect in practice and head of Design-Organisation-Media
Research Laboratory. Graduated with distinction as an archi-
tect from the Technical University of Vienna and has a Master
in Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of
Design. He has done extensive research work in Jerusalem
and Berlin. Together with the cultural theorist Thomas Duschl-
bauer he is co-founder of the interdisciplinary Bureau for
Architecture, Urbanism and Culture (BAU|KULTUR) that
seeks to define new relationships – as much theoretical as
practical – between a contemporary architectural produc-
tion and a contemporary cultural situation. Thus, the firm is
concerned with realising projects at home and abroad, tea-
ching, consulting and investigation of cultural phenomena.
Design Organisation Media Research Laboratory (DOM)
DOM is based at The University of Arts and Industrial Design
and run in close collaboration with the Ars Electronica Cen-
ter, Linz. Point of departure for DOM is the assumption that
contemporary societal and technical changes have led to
new conclusions in the field of urbanism, architecture and
design. As a sort of independent Think Tank DOM attempts
to help organisations to innovate, to define early relevant
topics, to show the need for action, and to formulate a set of
future actions. For this purpose DOM closely operates with
other institutions and experts at home and abroad, and orga-
nises international conferences and workshops.
In presenting the results of investigations in a clear and un-
derstandable way DOM intends to bring in lasting impulses
and fundamentals for (public) debate.
3

5
TABLE OF CONTENTS <
2 <
6 <
8 <
12 <
16 <
18 <
34 <
50 <
54 <
58 <
70 <
84 <
90 <
98 <
114 <
116 <
124 <
Imprint <
Acknowledgement <
Foreword <
Speakers <
BUSINESS MEETS DESIGN
Introduction < Robert Bauer
Peter Senge < Adaptive Environments Emerge and Digitization Takes Command
Robert Bauer < Organizations as Orientation Systems – Some Remarks on
the Aesthetic Dimension of Organizational Design
INTERACT OR DIE
Introduction < Ole Bouman
Scott Lash < Paris/Shanghai
Michael Kieslinger < Designing the Flow of People and Organisations
Scott Lash < Intensive Media: Modernity and Algorithm
Marko Ahtisaari < Blogging over Las Vegas
Ole Bouman < A new Brief for Architecture
Thomas Duschlbauer/Michael Shamiyeh < AMO Experience
DESIGNING COMMUNICATIONS
Introduction < Thomas Duschlbauer
Norbert Bolz < The Design of Communication
Thomas Duschlbauer < Everlasting Change
Afterword < see reverse part

Organizing for Change is the third book on a series of DOM
conferences that began with an idea in 2002 to establish
architecture as the host of a cross-cultural and multi-
disciplinary discussion of architecture and contemporary
culture. It was never spoken publicly but primary intention
of organizing those conferences was to start a process of
rethinking the legitimacy of architecture and to discover
another kind of architecture. Accordingly, the objective of
those conferences was a) to investigate on different levels
some of the effects of Western societies and market eco-
nomy on architecture and on the architects in particular, b)
to question how architects justify their creative activities
to society, and c) to identify possibilities to actively apply
core competencies of our profession in other areas of life.
In preparing the book on the subject of the 3rd Conference
I got the strong conviction that we have made a substantial
step in this process – a step which would not been possible
without the great participation and support of a multitude of
institutions, sponsors, hosts, and of course, ambitious archi-
tects, designers, theorists, historians, artists, philosophers,
cultural theorists, economists and many others, who shared
their work and ideas in discussions and books like this one,
giving content and meaning to the project. Many thanks to
all of you! Without your engagement and tireless support,
neither DOM nor the conferences, and subsequently this
book, would exist.
In particular I would like to mention my mentor and indefa-
tigable rector of the University of Arts and Industrial Design,
Reinhard Kannonier, who has to be thanked for his long
lasting trust and support in this challenging endeavor. I also
thank Gerfried Stocker, director of the collaborating Ars
Electronica Center, who from the first day on helped to make
DOM happen and supported it with his crew.
A great dept of gratitude I owe to my colleague and cultural
theorist Thomas Duschlbauer as well as Christian Pressl-
mayer, who – coming from the field of economics – helped
me to get deeper insights on system thinking and organiza-
tional theories. Due to their commitment, intelligence and
knowledge of this subject, they had a great impact on the
development and success of DOM3.
The extraordinarily ambitious crew of AEC, in particular Kat-
rin Emler, Ellen Fethke, Elisabeth Sachsenhofer, and Manu-
ela Pfaffenberger assumed the fiscal responsibilities for the
conferences and provided valuable expertise in managing
them. Furthermore, I wish thank the following staff members
of the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz as well as
of the AEC for their great support: Gregor Traugott for main-
taining each year’s website; Siglinde Lang for her support in
press and communications agendas; Karl Schmidinger and
Magnus Hofmüller for their technical support and last but
not least Irene Roselstorfer, who assisted me in the produc-
tion of this book.
Ulrike Ruh of Birkhaeuser Publishers deserves special
thanks as she has helped again to bring the discussed sub-
ject to the attention of an international audience by publi-
shing this book. Claus Zerenko, director of Reklamebüro, and
his staff members successfully managed the book’s layout
for the third time with great conviction. Mel Greenwald, a
reliable contributor to DOM since the first days, translated
again most of the German written articles.
Above all, one is constantly mindful of the generous con-
fidence displayed by the State Secretary for the Arts and
Media of the Federal Chancellery of Austria and the govern-
ments of the Province of Upper Austrian and the City of Linz
who, since the beginning of DOM, have provided grants to
help support the conferences and subsequently this publica-
tion. Lastly, the greatest contribution, the one for which I am
most grateful, is the unwavering support of all the authors
whose work appears in the following pages. Without their
extraordinary commitment and energy, the project would not
be as exciting and interesting as it is now.
Michael Shamiyeh
7
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT <

9
FOREWORD <
In the ‘90s, it became abundantly clear that globalization
was triggering substantial changes in the field of
architecture too. Previous DOM conferences sought to
elaborate on them on a number of levels with the aim of
yielding insights applicable to architecture as practiced in
this day and age. The “Organizing for Change” conference
constituted an effort to come to terms with this wide-
ranging transformation. After all, at this point, particularly
acute powers of comprehension are hardly called for to
recognize the breathtaking speed with which the framework
conditions
– AND ESPECIALLY THOSE THAT
IMPACT ARCHITECTURE –
are changing under the influence of the manic cycles of the
market economy and intensifying mediatization.
The following focal-point issues were discussed in this
connection:
First off, that it simply takes too long to bring an architectural
project from conception to fruition. As is patently obvious,
the realization process of a major piece of construction now
lasts several years. In stark contrast to this, however, there
are hardly any political or economic factors that, after having
served as the bases of architectural decisions, have not
changed – and radically so – over this same length of time.
In other words, we are confronted today by the paradox that
the slowness of architecture has been left in the dust by the
changes that all political or economic initiatives have been
undergoing. The bottom line: architecture is in a certain
sense too slow to be able to effectively participate in what is
going on around it.
What’s more – and this is indirectly connected with the
first point – it is increasingly clear that the static character
of architecture is sharply at odds with rapid changes and
developments in the market economy. No sooner is a
building completed than it is outed as already obsolete. Thus,
one can nowadays proceed under the assumption that the
design of cities goes hand in hand with the design of their
decay. Also (digital) media’s penetration into and saturation
of every aspect of our lives – together with the dissolution of
physical boundaries that is associated with this phenomenon
– massively calls into question one of architecture’s most
elemental concepts: namely, either to bring people together
physically or to physically separate them.
Isn’t it typical that just as architecture’s legitimation seems
to be on the wane, the term “architecture” has become
one of the most frequently employed metaphors for the
organizational structures of all aspects of life? Consider, for
example, buzzwords like systems architecture, corporate
organizational architecture, etc. Whereas architects deal
solely with the design of physical structures, the rest of the
world speaks of architecture as if it were a medium in which
the essence of all types of organizations and structures
manifests itself.
Paradoxically, we architects cannot participate in
this process. The reason for this is apparently simple
to explain: All that we have ever learned has been to
translate the organizational formulations that we have
come up with – for instance, the organization of functions
– into physical-material forms. This means that the most
fundamentally definitive values of our discipline have made
it incumbent upon us to react in the form of an architectural
structure instead of inquiring into the extent to which
the organizational structures that we create might also
be feasible in some other form or even applicable to and
utilizable in other spheres of life.
THIS SEEMS TO BE PRECISELY
THE PROBLEM OF ARCHITECTURE
THESE DAYS.
Therefore, it is up to us to assess the extent to which
architectural thinking can also be applied to other areas in
order to thereby perhaps succeed in making the transition
from an architecture of form to the architecture of
organization.
The following specialized fields and issues occupied the
focal point of our analyses:
Business Meets Design
Stirrings of great interest in design are evident throughout
the US economy at present, whereby what is at the
core of this interest is not so much the realization that
dawned in the 1990s that design plays not an insignificant

10
role in net value added to the economy as a whole but
rather the recognition that our world – and our business
enterprises and organizations in particular – should not
be regarded as something static but as a living system.
The rapid transformation process that has been taking
place worldwide thus necessitates that we pursue lifelong
learning in order to adapt to and successfully deal with
constantly emerging changes. In fact, many managers have
come to regard the way that designers go about their tasks
– PROCEEDING IN A MODE THAT
IS CREATIVE AND PRAGMATIC IN
EQUAL MEASURE –
as a very promising approach to effectively confronting a
wide variety of problems. According to this view, planning
and strategic processes should be reformulated as design
processes and managers converted from administrators to
business designers.
Interact Or Die
The rules governing the way things work in the media
nowadays and the associated intensification of the
mediatization of all aspects of our lives raises the issue
of how to adequately design the flows and activities of
human beings and organizations. Since time immemorial,
architecture – due to its material presence – has either
brought elements together or separated them from each
other. But now that media have fundamentally modified
the very concepts of fusion and partition, the question
that increasingly insinuates itself into the spotlight of our
attention is whether or not architecture must, in response,
revise its own core values and essential concepts.
Then, the issue would no longer be the accommodation
or implementation of programs and how these might be
experienced, but rather the design of flexible organizations,
and thus no longer design concentrating on form but the
design of processes.
Designing Communication
The EU’s wish to establish itself more solidly in the
perception of its citizens as well as to achieve increased
visibility as the center of change and the accompanying
commissioning of architect Rem Koolhaas/ AMO to design
a new graphical language, a new symbolic vocabulary
for the EU constitutes a striking illustration of how the
architect’s sphere of activity can undergo a substantial
shift nowadays. For many Europeans, the EU exists solely
as abstract flows of funds and streams of data, as a market
and a media-based reality, which is why it is thoroughly
justifiable to speak of the Union’s identity problem. The
vision of a future Europe that Rem Koolhaas/ AMO came up
with revealed architecture’s great potential in this context:
the capacity to offer intelligent strategic approaches and, in
doing so, to design a cultural concept.
Positions of Neo-realism
Architecture has always had to do with the design and
organization of physical spaces. Even if steadfastly
upholding architecture’s most fundamental values prevents
the discovery of another type of architecture – since, after
all, if everything is architecture or architectural, then we
can expand our sphere of activities without any restrictions
whatsoever – erecting physical structures will nevertheless
remain an essential aspect of the architectural domain. The
question that then arises is, on one hand, how the architect
operatively faces the problem of the metamorphosis of
reality and on the other hand, how the constructed reality
permits or even furthers the emergence of changes.
Numerous models of operative activity are under
discussion, ranging from total rejection of a particular
assignment
– IN THIS MODEL, THE PROJECT
REMAINS UNREALIZED BUT RE-
MAINS DISCURSIVELY IN PLAY AND
THEREBY LEADS TO CHANGES –
and reprogramming all the way to the organization of
unsolicited interventions or “event structures” in space and
time.
Considering architecture in the context of the massive
changes currently taking place reveals that our profession
is more reactionary and conservative than the rest of
the world might suspect. Accordingly, the challenge that

11
architects today ought to – or perhaps even have to – face
involves questioning the definitions of our profession. It is
essential to ask which skills or what bodies of knowledge
are – or could be – inherent to architecture; how we could
go about legitimating ourselves to society on the basis of
these capabilities and insights; and which possibilities exist
to apply these skills and this knowledge in other areas too.
THIS BOOK REPRESENTS THE
EFFORT TO CONTRIBUTE TO THIS
IN A WAY THAT IS INTERESTING
AND INTERDISCIPLINARY.
As dictated by the theme itself, this volume has been
intentionally divided into two interrelated domains
that deliver insightful reflections of one another. The
PROFESSION section focuses on the change or even
transformation of the profession into other fields; the
SPACE section sheds light on operative and architectural
strategies, and elaborates on concrete findings and
insights that have emerged from dealing with change.
Thus, depending on the reader’s interest, each section
constitutes a discrete entity that can be read independently
of the other.
Michael Shamiyeh

13
SPEAKERS <
Marko Ahtisaari < Marko Ahtisaari is Director of Design Strategy at Nokia, a
world leader in mobile communications. Prior to this role Ahtisaari worked in the
Insight & Foresight, Corporate Strategy unit at Nokia where he was responsible
for identifying and driving new growth opportunities based on user experience.
Born in Helsinki, Finland and raised on three continents in Helsinki, Dar es
Salaam and New York, Ahtisaari studied economics, philosophy and music
at Columbia University in the City of New York where he went on to become
a popular lecturer. Prior to joining Nokia, Ahtisaari built and lead the mobile
practice at startup design consultancy Satama Interactive. He is a founder and
chairman of the board of Aula, a network of technologists, designers, artists,
entrepreneurs, researchers and civil society actors with the goal of creating
innovations for a better mobile life. Ahtisaari is a recognized thought leader on
the future of user experience and mobile culture. In the in-between moments he
continues to compose ambient music for public and private spaces.
Robert Bauer < Robert M. Bauer is Associate Professor of Organizational Design
at Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Currently he is a Visiting Professor
at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. His
research aims at a better understanding of different ways of knowing, including,
but not limited to, formal and every day language statements. He explores the
consequences of different epistemological modes for organizational design
and behavior as well as for the philosophy of organization science. He is also a
registered psychotherapist and has worked extensively as an executive coach
and management consultant.
Norbert Bolz < Norbert Bolz was born in 1953 in Ludwigshafen, Germany. After
graduating from the Max-Plank-Secondary School, he studied Philosophy,
Religion as well as German and English language and literature studies in
Mannheim, Heidelberg and Berlin. He wrote his dissertation on the aesthetics
of Theodore Adorno under the religious philosopher Jacob Taubes and remained
his assistant until Taubes death. He wrote his postdoctoral on „The Philosophical
Extremism between the World Wars“. From 1992–2002 he was University
Professor for Communications Theory at the GH Essen University, Institute
for Art and Design. Since 2002 Professor at the Technical University in Berlin,
Institute for Language and Communication in the ﬁeld of Media Science.
Ole Bouman < Ole Bouman is editor of Archis International and www.archis.
org. He is event designer, writer and curator in architecture, art and design.
Recent booksinclude Time Wars, 2003, a revaluation of the time dimension in
our society. He was curator of Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, 2000. He is head of the
current series of “rsvp events” in collaboration with AMO, to be held in 9 global
cities.

14
Thomas Duschlbauer < Associate Member of Faculty of Goldsmith College,
London; cultural theorist and lecturer at the FH Hagenberg. Graduated in Science
of Communication and Politics at the University of Vienna. Several research
stays in the USA (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University)
and U.K. (University of Birmingham and Open University at Milton Keynes).
Furthermore, he graduated with a Ph.D. on the socio-cultural implications of new
media from the University of Vienna and as a Master in Arts in Cultural Studies
at the University of London. He participated in several congresses and published
in scholarly magazines. 2001 he published „Medien und Kultur im Zeitalter der X-
Kommunikation“ (Braumüller Vlg., Vienna). Together with Michael Shamiyeh he is
co-founder of the Bureau for Architecture, Urbanism and Culture (BAU|KULTUR).
Michael Kieslinger < Michael Kieslinger is founder and CEO of Fluidtime Ltd., a
company focusing on the communication of dynamic time information. He was
Associate Professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy from 2001
until 2004 responsible for the Service Design unit. From 1995-98 he worked for a
research group based at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden
developing interactive music systems. He received his MA in Computer Related
Design at the Royal College of Art, London, UK, 2000 and earned his first degree in
Computer Music from the Academy of Music, Vienna, Austria.
Scott Lash < Born in Chicago, Lash took a Bsc in psychology from the University
of Michigan and MA in sociology from Northwestern University. He received his
PhD from the London School of Economics (1980). Lash began his teaching career
at Lancaster University. In 1998 he moved to London to take up his present position
as Director for the Centre for Cultural Studies and Profressor of Sociology at
Goldsmiths College, London University. He is (co-)author of The End of Organized
Capitalism, Sociologiy of postmodernism, Reflexive Modernization, Economies
of Signs and Space, Another Modernity, A Different Rationality and Critique of
Information. His books have been translated into 10 languages.
Peter Senge < Peter M. Senge is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. He is also founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning
(SoL), a global community of corporations, researchers, and consultants dedicated
to the „interdependent development of people and their institutions.“ He is the
author of the widely acclaimed book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice
of The Learning Organization (1990) and, with colleagues Charlotte Roberts, Rick
Ross, Bryan Smith and Art Kleiner, co-author of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook:
Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization (1994) and a fieldbook
The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning
Organizations (March, 1999), also co-authored by George Roth. In September 2000,
a fieldbook on education was published, the award winning Schools That Learn:

15
A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares
About Education, co-authored with Nelda Cambron-McCabe, Timothy Lucas,
Bryan Smith, Janis Dutton, and Art Kleiner. The new book, Presence: Human
Purpose and the Field of the Future, co-authored with Claus Otto Scharmer,
Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers, has been published by the Society for
Organizational Learning in March 2004
The Fifth Discipline hit a nerve deep within the business and education
community by introducing the theory of learning organizations. Since its
publication, more than a million copies have been sold world-wide. In 1997,
Harvard Business Review identified it as one of the seminal management books
of the past 75 years.
The Journal of Business Strategy (September/October 1999) named Dr. Senge as
one of the 24 people who had the greatest influence on business strategy over
the last 100 years. The Financial Times (2000) named him as one of the world’s
“top management gurus.” Business Week (October 2001) rated Peter as one of
The Top (ten) Management Gurus.
Michael Shamiyeh < Architect in practice and head of Design-Organisation-
Media Research Laboratory. Graduated with distinction as an architect from the
Technical University of Vienna and has a Master in Architecture from Harvard
University Graduate School of Design. He has done extensive research work in
Jerusalem and Berlin. Together with the cultural theorist Thomas Duschlbauer
he is co-founder of the interdisciplinary Bureau for Architecture, Urbanism
and Culture (BAU|KULTUR) that seeks to define new relationships – as much
theoretical as practical – between a contemporary architectural production and
a contemporary cultural situation. Thus, the firm is concerned with realising
projects at home and abroad, teaching, consulting and investigation of cultural
phenomena.

We are currently witnessing a great outpouring of interest in
design on the part of corporate executives. This is not simply
a matter of the apparently strong increase in design’s share
of value added to the economy as a whole, or of predictions
that careers in design will be a driving force behind future
economic growth, rather this has just as much to do with
designers’ creative, artistic and pragmatic approaches to the
world, from which managers could learn quite a lot.
IN THE FUTURE, MEN AND
WOMEN RUNNING BUSINESSES
WILL BE CONFRONTED WITH
AN EVER WIDER RANGE OF
PROBLEMS THAT WILL DEMAND
INCREASINGLY RAPID SOLUTIONS.
TO KEEP UP WITH SUCH
DEVELOPMENTS, THEY WILL
HAVE TO TURN PLANNING AND
STRATEGIC PROCESSES INTO
DESIGN PROCESSES.
Instead of being business administrators, managers have
to become business designers. When renowned economist
Alfred Chandler recommended that modern corporate
executives adopt “structure follows strategy” as their guiding
principle, hardly anyone was aware of its origins. In retrospect,
though it could hardly have been more appropriate. After all,
the motto that has been omnipresent in the field of strategic
management for over 40 years paraphrases what is arguably
the most important principle of design: form follows function!
As we can see from the example of Canada’s leading college
of business administration, the University of Toronto’s Rotman
School of Management, prominent educational facilities
are already at work building bridges between design and
management. This dynamic institution – which, under the
leadership of Dean Roger Martin, has vaulted from 65th to
21st place on the list of the world’s best B-schools in only five
years – has secured the copyright to Business DesignTM and
is already collaborating with the Ontario College of Art and
Design to offer the first courses in which future designers and
managers are receiving joint instruction.
Top-flight design firms like IDEO in Palo Alto, California are
delivering real-life examples of what managers ought to be
learning from the design process.
• Designers are borrowing methods from anthropology in
order to conduct “field studies” of future users and to see
the world through those users’ eyes.
• Designers take advantage of the possibilities of
brainstorming in a team setting. During lengthy sessions,
all kinds of ideas – no matter how seemingly absurd –
are tossed out and kicked around. They automatically
become community property that any participant is entitled
to modify.
• As experts in visualization, designers place great stock in
the powers of the imagination and in imagineering. And
they “think with their pens,” meaning that they can use
drawing techniques to create images that were still
inchoate concepts in their minds before they got them
down on paper.
• Design processes are based on intensive prototyping – i.e.
on working with initially primitive three-dimensional models
that, in countless rounds of trial and error, are continuously
improved in accordance with the motto “He who fails the
quickest is first to succeed.”
In stark contrast to these points, the processes that lead
up to strategic management decisions are still extremely
hierarchic: too far removed from future “users” and more
strongly characterized by power and diplomacy than by
the desire to jointly do creative designing. Decisions are all
too often dominated by pre-determined factors. Developing
conceptions of what could be usually gets short shrift. And
last but not least, planning is still a too-highly-centralized
affair that relies on unwieldy committees instead of one
that concentrates right from the outset on pilot projects that
make faster learning cycles possible. A deep philosophical
crisis has been the prelude to “management as design.”
Scholarship on management has been oriented for far too
long on a worldview engendered by the natural sciences in
the 19th century, which posited an objective world that just
is the way it is, a world whose eternal laws are ultimately
revealed by science and can be neatly attired in mathematical
formulas. But this does not resemble the real world of
business executives in the least – that world is manufactured;
it originates only as an outcome of action and reaction, in a
dialog and it changes quickly. Managers are not independent
observers rather hopefully they are right in the middle of
things. What they need is a burning desire to actively shape
their world and good judgment based just as much on
analytical thinking as they are on the ability to empathize on
aesthetic capacities.
ROBERT BAUER <

19
PETER M. SENGE <
CONTEMPORARY THEORIES OF
CHANGE SEEMED, PARADOXICALLY,
NEITHER NARROW ENOUGH
NOR BROAD ENOUGH.
The changes in which we will be called upon to participate in the
future will be both deeply personal and inherently systemic.
The deeper dimensions of transformational change represent a
largely unexplored territory both in current management research
and in our understanding of leadership in general.
Creating Desired Futures in a Global Society

21
neuroanatomy is tuned to respond to sudden, dramatic
changes in our environment: clap your hands loudly and
watch it react. We focus on immediate needs and problems,
and are trapped by the illusion that what is most tangible
is most real. We’ve been conditioned for thousands of
years to identify with our family, our tribe, and our local
social structures. A future that asks us to overcome this
conditioning and identify with all of humankind looks
alien indeed. On the other hand, in some ways we’ve long
understood our place in the world. Early in our history, we
learned that if we depleted our topsoil or our local fishery,
we paid a price. Today, we call it sustainability (see sidebar,
“Improving the Triple Bottom Line”). However, we’ve never
before lived in a world in which one’s actions, through
global business, can have their primary consequence on the
other side of the world.
NOR HAVE WE EVER BEEN
SO DEPENDENT ON THE
ACTIONS OF OTHERS.
In the late 1980s a US emergency preparedness study
estimated that the typical pound of food that an American
consumed traveled an average of 1,500 miles, often
from outside the US. In the years since, the developed
economies’ reliance on the developing world for essential
goods and services has only increased.
The challenges of living in such an alien, interconnected
world are both practical and deeply personal.
Ultimately they lead us to reflect on who we are individually,
who we are in our local networks of colleagues, and what
we’re committed to. Such understanding is essential to
being effective in our work as managers, teachers, parents,
and citizens.
There’s nothing more elemental to the work of leaders than
creating results. But it’s no longer possible to create positive
results in isolation. With organizations, economies, and
entire societies increasingly interconnected, our actions
affect (and are affected by) others, often literally a world
away. It’s impossible, in today’s world, to think about how
to have an impact in our workplace without also asking
ourselves a deeper question: What does it means to live in a
global society?
This question was brought home to me by Mieko Nishimizu,
one of the most gifted executives at the World Bank. Shortly
after attending the SoL Executive Champions’ Workshop in
August 2002, she addressed business and political leaders
observing the 50th anniversary of Japan’s membership
in the post-World War II Bretton Woods Agreements.
Speaking with candor unusual for such an affair, she
described what it meant for her, after growing up with
many material benefits, to come to grips with poverty. For
example, she told of meeting an Indian woman who had to
walk four hours each day to gather fresh water. As they
walked together, the woman told her, “This is not life. This
is only keeping a body alive.” For Mieko, such conditions
– which are a reality for an increasing number of people in
most of the developing world 1<
– cannot be separated from
the forces shaping an increasingly global society:
The future appears alien to us. It differs from the past, most
notably in that the earth itself is a relevant unit with which
to frame and measure that future. Discriminating issues that
shape the future are all fundamentally global. We belong
to one inescapable network of mutuality – mutuality of
ecosystems; mutuality of freer movement of information,
ideas, people, and goods and services; and mutuality of
peace and security.
WE ARE TIED, INDEED, IN A
SINGLE FABRIC OF DESTINY
ON PLANET EARTH.
Policies and actions that attempt to tear a nation from this
cloth will inevitably fail.2<
Few of our institutions are prepared for a truly global
society. Indeed, it appears that much of the preparation
nature has invested in us – our physiological, cognitive,
psychological, and cultural evolution – is failing us. Our
1< Despite pledges by the G7 nations to cut the incidence of global
poverty by half, the only region to see significant decline is East Asia,
with a 12-percent reduction since 1990. In Africa, South Asia, and Latin
America the number of people living on less than $1 per day grew by
about 80 million from 1990–1998. Worldwide, the number of people living
on less than $1 per day remained static at about 2.7 billion throughout
the 1990s, and the number living on less than $2 per day grew from
2.7 billion to 2.8 billion, according to Oxfam. http://www.oxfam.org/
eng/pdfs/pp000721_G7_missing_ the_target.pdf. 2< For the full text
of Mieko Nishimizu’s address, see “Looking Back, Leaping Forward,”
Reflections, Vol. 4, No. 4. http://www.reflections.solonline.org.

22
Creating Desired Results
Adam Kahane,3<
a SoL member and gifted facilitator who
specializes in cross-sector dialogue and scenario building,
says that three types of increasing complexity are at the
root of organizations’ and societies’ toughest problems:
• dynamic complexity: cause and effect distant in time
and space
• social complexity: diverse stakeholders with different
agendas and worldviews
• generative complexity: emergent realities wherein
solutions from the past no longer fit.
In the face of such complexity, the very concept of “problem
solving” can be an impediment. It can lead us to think of
fixing something that is broken. It can lead to imposing
solutions from the past. And, it can lead to seeing reality as
the adversary rather than the ally. But, none of these arises
necessarily if we see problem solving as part of a larger
process of creating what we truly want. Realizing desired
results in a global society – or in any context – requires both
learning and leadership, but above all it involves collective
creating. In fact, I see learning, leading, and creating as
three ways to talk about the same basic phenomenon.
Effective leadership, for instance, draws on the belief that
we have positive choices and can overcome fear to bring
about a better future together. Learning – whether learning
to manage a department, speak a language, or raise a child
– is about creating new capacities to bring new outcomes
into reality, especially outcomes we genuinely care about.
That is also
THE ROOT DEFINITION
OF “CREATE” – TO BRING
INTO EXISTENCE.
Creating is not a mystical state that we simply fall into; it is
a discipline that can be understood and developed. Robert
Fritz,4<
a musician, filmmaker, organizational consultant
(and in many ways my mentor in the study of creating as a
discipline), has articulated three principles that can help
leaders of all sorts more effectively create desired outcomes.
3< Adam Kahane’s new book, The Victory of the Open Heart: Solving
Tough Problems Through Talking and Listening, will be available in
2004. His work in developing capacity for groups to function in the midst
of this complexity appears in “How to Change the World: Lessons for
Entrepreneurs from Activists,” Reflections, Vol. 2, No. 3. An earlier
discussion of the first two types of complexity can be found in G. Roth
and P. Senge, “From Theory to Practice: Research Territory, Processes
and Structure at an Organizational Learning Center,” Journal of
Organizational Change Management, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1996).
4< For more on the work of Robert Fritz, see http://www.robertfritz.
com. See also “A Lesson From the Arts,” Reflections, Vol. 2, No.
4. http://www.reflections.solonline.org. See also Your Life As Art
(Newfane, VT: Newfane Press, 2002).

23
Improving the Triple Bottom Line
There’s little you can say with certainty about the future
of the global economy. But one thing is certain: it can’t
continue as it is. The planet’s resources, its natural
systems, and at least one-third of its population, living in
desperate poverty, simply won’t allow it.
HOW CAN LEADERS RESPOND
TO THIS REALITY?
What can we do to shift from mere regulatory compliance
and incremental process improvements to real innovation –
to environmentally intelligent products and services,
developed and marketed in responsible ways? The SoL
Sustainability Consortium, a learning community of
organizations, has developed some practical answers to
these 5<
questions. The consortium applies the disciplines
of systems thinking and organizational learning to better
understand how companies can be profitable while
nurturing local communities and natural systems – the so-
called “triple bottom line.” Early on, consortium members,
including BP, Shell, Ford, Nike, United Technologies, Harley
Davidson, and Visteon, decided they needed a simple,
operational definition of sustainability. They came up with
the following picture that distinguishes present industrial
systems from natural systems.
While individual companies can reduce waste, like the
Xerox copier team, modern products contain huge amounts
of toxic substances that no single company can eliminate
entirely. Many believe that this toxic load is the prime
source of the rising incidence of cancer and other diseases
in industrialized countries, as well as the destruction
of ecological systems. To address these problems,
environmentalists have advocated “materials pooling”
– working collaboratively and systematically across
complex value chains to identify and eliminate sources
of waste and toxicity. 6<
But actually building such cross-
organizational learning communities requires trust, shared
vision, and shared understanding of larger systems. This
is what members of the SoL Sustainability Consortium are
attempting to do today, with working groups focused on
reducing and, ideally, entirely eliminating toxins and waste
in a broad array of industrial and consumer products. But
what they really are doing is learning to build sustainability-
learning communities.7<
A sustainable industrial system strives to transform all
sources of waste and toxicity into “technical” or “biological
nutrients” that can be reused indefinitely without harm to
living systems.8<
If your primary role is to fix problems rather than create
something new and meaningful, it’s hard to maintain a sense
of purpose. Michael Goodman
5< P. Senge and G. Carstedt. “Innovating Our Way to the Next Industrial
Revolution: Building Sustainable Enterprises,” Sloan Management
Review, Winter 2001, Volume 42, Number 2, pp. 24–38. http://mit-smr.
com/past/2001/smr4222.html. 6< Ibid.
7< For more information on the Sustainability Consortium,
see http://www.solonline.org/public_pages/comm_
SustainabilityConsortiumCore/
8< W. McDonough and M. Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the
Way We Make Things (New York: North Point Press, 2002).

24
between vision and reality is the essence of the creative
arts. Artists get no credit for brilliant ideas unless they can
bring them into reality.
THIS “BRINGING OF
VISION TO REALITY”
is also the essence of great social, political, or business
leadership. However, because this tension between vision
and reality can be uncomfortable, creative tension be-
comes emotional tension and we often seek ways around it.
One way to lessen the emotional tension is simply to reduce
our true vision, to give up our dreams and aim for only
“realistic goals.” While this might reduce our discomfort, it
also reduces creative energy. The second way is even more
troubling: we do not tell the truth about current reality. Just
as the dynamics of compromise – lowering our vision – are
common in human affairs, so too are the dynamics of denial.
But to the extent that we misrepresent current reality, we
lose the capacity to change that reality. The energy of the
creative process is released not just by holding true to a
vision, but also by telling the truth about what is.
3. Understanding your constraints frees you to create.
One thing that distinguishes the master from the novice is
an appreciation of the constraints of his or her medium. Or,
as Fritz put it, “No painter paints on an infinite canvas.”
John Elter, a former vice president at Xerox, used this
principle to great effect. Early in a multiyear, product-
development process to create the company’s first fully
digital copiers, Elter took his team on a two-day wilderness
expedition in the New Mexico desert.9<
On the way back,
they happened to walk by a dump – at the bottom of which
they discovered a Xerox copier. It was a revelation. They
returned to work with a new vision for the product and their
entire enterprise: “Zero to landfill, for our children.”
Says Elter, “Most of the constraints engineering teams deal
with are management claptrap. All the managers make them
up: The product has got to grow revenue by this amount.
It’s got to achieve these cost targets.” However, says
Elter, after their epiphany in the desert, “We discovered
our real constraint – that nothing from this product should
ever go into a landfill.” The product they designed was
ultimately 94 percent re-manufacturable and 98 percent
recyclable, and met or exceeded all its sales targets. The
team created a great product – perhaps saving the company
from bankruptcy or takeover – by redefining the constraints
they worked against. As Elter and his team showed, as
we go forward, the constraints that can enable creativity
will come from appreciating the environmental and social
realities of an increasingly interdependent world. Nature
produces no waste. Why should business be different? But,
by and large, we fail to see these constraints because we
fail to see the interdependence out of which they arise.
1. Creating is different from problem solving.
The fundamental difference between creating and problem
solving is simple. In problem solving we seek to make
something we do not like go away. In creating, we seek
to make what we truly care about exist. Few distinctions
are more basic. Of course, most of us, in both professional
and private life, spend far more time problem solving and
reacting to circumstances than focusing our energies on
creating what we really value.
Indeed, we can get so caught up in reacting to problems that
it is easy to forget what we actually want. Organizations
must do both – resolve day-to-day problems and generate
new results. But if your primary role is to fix problems,
individually or collectively, rather than create something
new and meaningful, it’s hard to maintain a sense of
purpose. And without a deep sense of purpose, it’s
difficult to harness the energy, passion, commitment, and
perseverance needed to thrive in challenging times.
If you wonder which is primary in your work, simply ask
yourself or your team, “What are we trying to accomplish
today?” Usually teams will describe a set of problems
they’re trying to manage. Then, ask what they could
accomplish by eliminating those problems. Typically, they’ll
describe yet another set of problems that could then be
tackled – for instance, preventing a service breakdown
if only they first could solve their interpersonal conflicts.
What often is forgotten is the more basic question:
WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO CREATE?
Without a compelling answer to this question, it is hard
to know why all the problem solving actually matters.
Problem solving becomes the busywork of organizations
in which people have forgotten their purpose and vision.
Reconnecting with that purpose always starts with asking
questions like: Why are we here? What are we trying to
create that will make the world a better place? And, who
would miss us if we were gone? (By the way, if you are in
a business, “our investors” is never an answer to the last
question – investors will always find another company
where they can earn an adequate return on their capital.)
2. The creative process is animated by the gap between
vision and reality.
When we picture something we want to create, we’re
imaging a vision of the future, which also evokes the implicit
difference from what currently exists.
EVERY CREATIVE ARTIST
UNDERSTANDS THIS PRINCIPLE.
Fritz calls it “structural tension,” and says it can be resolved
by taking action to achieve our vision. Closing the gap

25
9< See John Elter, et al. “The LAKES Story,” Reﬂections, Vol. 1, No. 4.
http://www.reﬂections.solonline.org.

26
Furthermore, the effects of CO2
in the atmosphere are long
lasting – temperatures would continue to rise for years even
if the CO2
concentration leveled off today. Yet, presented
with two scenarios based on these data, no more than 38
percent of the students correctly predicted what would
happen. The principles at work, say Sterman and Booth
Sweeney, are “as simple as filling a bathtub: humanity is
injecting CO2
into the atmosphere at about twice the rate it
is drained out. Stabilizing the concentration of CO2
requires
substantial cuts in emissions.” The authors call for better
science reporting, noting that “even the simplest systems
concepts help.” They conclude, “The sooner people
understand these dynamics, the sooner they will call for
leaders who reject do-nothing, wait-and-see policies and
who will turn down the tap – before the tub overflows.”
This is the natural state of the human world, separation
without separateness.While most Americans believe global
warming is real, they feel little sense of urgency to do
anything about it.
Feeling the Heat
Researchers John Sterman and Linda Booth Sweeney
wondered why, despite overwhelming scientific evidence,
so many Americans are complacent about the threat of
global warming. Their study points up the trouble people
have seeing connections among related forces, and thus
framing good solutions.10<
Sterman and Booth Sweeney described the dynamics of
global warming to MBA students at Harvard, Stanford, 11<
and MIT, using data from the 2001 report of the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).The
findings themselves are not in dispute. As shown in Figure
1, the flow of COemissions resulting from human activity
increased steadily from 1850–1950, and precipitously
since 1950. As a result, the total concentration of CO has
increased some 30 percent in the last 150 years – to the
highest concentrations of the last 420,000 years (see
Figure 2). Average global temperatures are trending in the
same direction, as shown in Figure 3. IPCC concludes that
“most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is
attributable to human activities.”
NOT SHOWN IS THE RATE AT
WHICH CO2 IS REMOVED FROM
THE ATMOSPHERE – WHICH
HAPPENS, OF COURSE, WHEN
GREEN PLANTS CONSUME
CO2 AND RETURN OXYGEN.
This is vital information for projecting future CO2
levels.
By best estimates today, the outflow of CO2, which has
declined due to deforestation, is about one-half the
emissions. Therefore, emissions would have to decline by
50 percent just to stabilize the current stock of CO2
in the
atmosphere – well beyond what the Kyoto protocols would
accomplish, even if all countries of the world adopted them.
So, anything less than a 50-percent decline in emissions
will result in a continuing rise in CO2
levels for many years.
10< See Sterman, John D. and Booth Sweeney, Linda. “Cloudy Skies:
Assessing Public Understanding of Global Warming,” System
Dynamics Review, Vol. 18, No. 2, 2002. http://web.mit.edu/jsterman/
www/cloudy_skies.html. See also the presentation at SoL Research
Greenhouse III in 2002, at http:// www.solonline.org/repository/
download/Sterman_Greenhouse3.pdf_1.pdf?item_id=364437.
11< See http://www.ipcc.ch.

28
AN INCREASINGLY
INTERDEPENDENT WORLD
MEANS THAT SYSTEMS
THINKING MUST BECOME AN
EDUCATIONAL PRIORITY.
Ted Sizer, former dean of the Harvard School of Education
and founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, writes, “It
is not hyperbole to say that the growing gap between the
complexities we face and our capacity to come to a shared
understanding of that complexity poses an unprecedented
challenge to our future…. Even older students have little…
understanding of the world’s undeniable complexity.” 12<
But the motivation for radical innovation in education
will remain limited so long as the urgency of issues like
global warming remains limited or absent. We are stuck
in a “Catch 22”: systemic imbalances fail to compel our
attention because we simply do not see them in the same
way we see more immediate and local problems. And, we
fail to see the systemic issues because we define urgency
by what is immediate. We are victims of a self-reinforcing
crisis of perception – a crisis of our own making. If it
persists, we doom ourselves to continued passivity. Only
catastrophe will compel action, which, given the growing
social divide that distributes problems like global warming
unevenly between rich and poor, is likely to manifest as
social and political disruption – not unlike what we are
already seeing around the world. My view is that nothing
short of a profound shift in the Western, materialistic
worldview is likely to dislodge this crisis of perception.
How can diverse people from around the world come to a
fuller sense of the whole – that is, the social, economic,
and ecological systems we share? Perhaps that will begin
when, together, we start to appreciate the exquisite web
of interconnectedness that enables life in the universe,
wherever we stand, and the role of our own consciousness
in that web.
Missing the Connections
To redress the imbalances in our global society, whether
of income distribution, development of civil society, or
destruction of living systems, we must see the connections
that permeate natural and social systems. But for most
of us, the noise of modern societies obscures those
connections and thus inhibits action – starting with our
own thinking. For example, recent research by MIT’s John
Sterman shows why vague concerns about global warming
don’t necessarily translate into political action (see sidebar,
“Feeling the Heat”).
Sterman was struck by a curious disconnect in public
opinion: polls show that while most Americans believe
global warming is real, they feel little sense of urgency to
do anything about it. To test his hypothesis that “much of
this complacency arises from poor systems thinking skills,”
Sterman and his colleague Linda Booth Sweeney designed a
thought experiment. They created two different scenarios,
based on the known stock of CO2
in the atmosphere and the
flow of new CO2
emissions, and asked graduate students
from three elite universities to predict the likely outcome of
each scenario.
NEARLY TWO-THIRDS OF
THESE STUDENTS FAILED TO
RECOGNIZE THE LOGICALLY
CORRECT TREND (WHICH IS
CONTINUED GLOBAL WARMING).
Their poor performance was based not on a lack of
technical understanding, but on the failure to see the
relationships between stocks (the current level of CO2
) and
flows (the rate of new CO2
emissions). If the rate of new CO2
emissions is higher than the rate at which CO2
is removed
from the atmosphere, the overall level of CO2
will continue
to increase, and with it, the likelihood of global warming.
If people are confused by such basic interrelationships,
it is little wonder that it becomes easy for politicians and
citizens alike to pretend either that such problems do not
exist or that someone else will deal with them. Sterman,
Booth Sweeney and a growing number of educators around
the world believe these failings reflect a massive neglect of
systems education.
12< T. Sizer, P. Senge, and L. Booth Sweeney. “Systems Schooling
for School Systems,” working paper, Harvard Graduate School of
Education, 2003. See also, P. Senge, et al. Schools That Learn: A Fifth
Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares
About Education (New York: Doubleday/Currency, 2001).

29
Of Parts and Wholes
Our normal way of thinking cheats us. It leads us to think
of wholes as made up of many parts, the way a car is
made up of wheels, a chassis, and a drive train. In this way
of thinking, the whole is assembled from the parts and
depends upon them to work effectively. If a part is broken,
it must be repaired or replaced. This is a very logical way of
thinking about machines. But living systems are different.
Unlike machines, living systems, such as your body or a
tree, create themselves. They are not mere assemblages
of their parts but are continually growing and changing
along with their elements. Almost 200 years ago, Goethe,
the German writer and scientist, argued that this meant we
had to think very differently about wholes and parts. For
Goethe, the whole was something dynamic and living that
continually comes into being “in concrete manifestations.”i<
A part, in turn, was a manifestation of the whole, rather
than just a component of it. Neither exists without the other.
The whole exists through continually manifesting in the
parts, and the parts exist as embodiments of the whole.
i< According to physicist and philosopher of science Henri Bortoft, The
Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way Towards a Science of Conscious
Participation in Nature (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1996. ii< Amy
Edmondson, A Fuller Explanation, 56-59 (Birkhaeuser, Boston, 1987) and
Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics: the Geometry of Thinking
(NY: Macmillan, 1976).
THE INVENTOR BUCKMINSTER
FULLER WAS FOND OF HOLDING
UP HIS HAND AND ASKING
PEOPLE, “WHAT IS THIS?”
INVARIABLY, THEY WOULD
RESPOND, “IT’S A HAND.” HE
WOULD THEN POINT OUT THAT
THE CELLS THAT MADE UP THAT
HAND WERE CONTINUALLY DYING
AND REGENERATING THEMSELVES.
What seems tangible is continually changing: in fact, a hand
is completely re-created within a year or so. So when we
see a hand – or an entire body or any living system – as a
static “thing,” we are mistaken.
“What you see is not a hand,” Fuller would say.
“It’s a ‘pattern integrity’, the universe’s capability to create
hands.” ii<
For Fuller, this “pattern integrity” was the whole
of which each particular hand is a “concrete manifestation.”

30
Making the Connections
In recent years, thought leaders from many scientific
disciplines have begun to construct a picture of an
interdependent universe far richer than almost any of us
might imagine, catalyzed initially by findings in quantum
physics. In his 1951 book, Quantum Theory, physicist David
Bohm proposed a hypothesis based on the mathematics
of quantum theory: if you separate an atomic particle and
the two elements of the particle go to opposite ends of the
universe, then altering the spin of one element will change
instantaneously the spin of the other. Bohm posed this
conceptual challenge because he believed that quantum
theory revealed the “unbroken wholeness of the universe,”
contradicting our culture’s dominant Newtonian view of
separation and causality arising from one thing acting on
another. Bohm’s supposition was later taken up by physicist
J. S. Bell.
BELL FURTHER DEVELOPED
THE THEORY AND
DEMONSTRATED EMPIRICALLY
THAT BOHM WAS RIGHT:
a change in spin of a single particle could be observed
immediately, across a very large distance, in a separate
particle previously connected to the first. Physicists call
it “Bell’s Theorem” or the “Principle of Non-Locality,”
and its repeated empirical corroboration has been called
“one of the most shocking events in twentieth-century
science.” 13<
Physicists are quick to caution that, while
non-locality operates at the subatomic scale, whether such
interdependence exists at more “macro” scales remains to
be demonstrated – leaving many questions regarding the
relevance of this phenomenon for humans and the social
world. An astonishing recent project, in a different context,
suggests that new answers may be coming.
A team of engineers, physicists, and psychologists has been
studying the output of 37 random-number generators in 17
countries, to see whether there is a level of connectedness
operating at the human level, and not just at the subatomic
level of Bohm’s prediction. These machines, used for
scientific research, are isolated from every known form of
human or natural interference, such as electromagnetic
or telecommunications waves. Yet, on the morning of
September 11, 2001 the random-number generators behaved
in very nonrandom ways, inexplicably showing the influence
of some non-ordinary disturbance, presumably human in
origin (see sidebar, “A Non-Random Occurrence”).
Interestingly, pioneers like Bohm and Albert Einstein never
had much doubt that the implications of quantum theory
extended into the domain of human awareness and social
harmony. “The most important thing going forward,” said
Bohm in 1980, “is to break the boundaries between people
13< D. Radin. The Conscious Universe (San Francisco: Harper, 1997):
278.
14< J. Jaworski. Personal communication, 1980. See also J. Jaworski.
Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (San Francisco: Berrett-
Koehler Publishers, 1996).
15< A. Kahane. The Victory of the Open Heart: Solving Tough Problems
Through Talking and Listening (San Francisco, Forthcoming 2004).
16< Radin, D. “Global Consciousness Project Analysis for September 11,
2001,” at http://noosphere.princeton.edu.
17< R.D. Nelson, D. Radin, R. Shoup, and P.A. Bancel. “Correlations
of Continuous Random Data with Major World Events,” p. 10, article
(currently in review) available at http://noosphere.princeton.edu.
so we can operate as a single intelligence. Bell’s theorem
implies that this is the natural state of the human world,
separation without separateness.
The task is to find ways to break these boundaries, so we can
be in our natural state.” 14<
Einstein, Bohm’s colleague at
Princeton, spoke of a similar aspiration:
“The human being experiences himself, his thoughts and
feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of
optical delusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a kind
of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires, and to
our affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must
be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of
compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of
nature in its beauty.”
What does this mean practically? For Bohm, it meant
dedicating much of the last 10 years of his life to
understanding the potential of dialogue to foster deep
personal and collective awareness of connectedness.
Sadly, he did not live to see the growing evidence of its
application. Kahane talks about one such application in
South Africa in the early 1990s. With the apartheid regime
coming to an end, people who had been killing one another
were struggling to form a democratic government. Says
Kahane, “A popular joke at the time said that, faced with
the country’s daunting challenges, South Africans had two
options: a practical option and a miraculous option.” The
practical option was that everyone would “go down on their
knees and pray for a band of angels to come down from
heaven and fix things for us.” The miraculous option was
that people would “talk with one another until we found
a way forward together.” 15<
Fortunately, South Africans
opted for the miraculous option – talking with one another
and discovering their interconnectedness to their common
homeland, to their future, and to one another.
MANY BUSINESSES ARE
RECOGNIZING THAT TRADITIONAL,
TOP-DOWN CONTROL
BECOMES LESS VIABLE AS
INTERDEPENDENCE GROWS.

31
A Non-Random Occurrence
Random-number generators – devices used to generate
sequences of random numbers used in scientiﬁc
and industrial research – must be insu-lated from
external forces, such as electromagnetic radiation,
telecommunication signals, and every known form of human
or physical inter-ference, or they cannot perform their
function.
Since 1998, within the Global Consciousness Project (a
social version of J. S. Bell’s quantum physics experiment),
an interdisciplinary team of scientists has been monitoring
more than three dozen random-number generators around
the world to track possible effects from unexpected
sources.16<
What they found on September 11, 2001 was
unexpected indeed.
Something went amiss with the random-number generators
in the world, individually and collectively, at exactly the
time of the terrorist attacks. Beginning a few hours before
and continuing for two days after the attack, the data
showed unexpected deviations in the output of individual
devices, and an unprecedented correlation among different
devices across the network. The researchers estimate the
probability of what was observed at less than one in one
thousand. They conclude that “it is unlikely that (known)
environmental factors could cause the correlations we
observe….” Barring demonstration to the contrary, “we
are obliged to confront the possibility that the measured
correlations may be directly associated with some (as yet
poorly understood) aspect of consciousness attendant to
global events.” 17<

32
Applying Wisdom of the Past
The challenges we face can seem overwhelming. But
humans have innate capacities, beyond our social
conditioning, to develop a more holistic awareness of
our relationship to the world. The connection between
human consciousness and the material world has been a
foundational idea in many of the oldest societies in history.
It is now reentering the mainstream of Western culture due,
in part, to new scientific theories that are more holistic.
AFTER ALL, SCIENCE IS THE
RELIGION OF THIS AGE, AND THE
SOURCE TO WHICH WE LOOK
FOR THE MOST AUTHORITATIVE
INTERPRETATIONS OF REALITY.
Business leaders, teachers, and other professionals also
are drawing from the wisdom of the past, and from their
own experience, to create more inclusive and integrated
ways of living and working. This encompasses diverse
global movements, from holistic health, to restorative
justice, to learner-centered learning in schools.
Many businesses are recognizing that traditional, top-
down control becomes less viable as interdependence
grows. Increasingly, businesses are striving for fewer
layers of management and encouraging more “self-
organizing” – operating with minimum imposition from the
top, and continually bringing change from the periphery to
the center.
BUT WE ARE AT THE VERY
OUTSET OF THIS JOURNEY,
and the immense stresses on traditional institutions
of all sorts are causing some institutions to become
more hierarchical and rigid. While it is fashionable to
claim the spread of democracy around the world as a
victory of Western ideals, in fact, many experience the
opposite: the imposition of a new world order, driven
predominantly by authoritarian institutions unresponsive
to broad constituencies whose lives they are altering.
Yet, older notions of self-organizing and self-governing
exist throughout the world – in native and indigenous
cultures, for example – wherever human beings have tried
to understand nature deeply enough to live according
to its guidelines. Perhaps the scientific era is about to
move to another phase – and the democratic era, as well.
I suggest that we don’t understand democracy well. Like
Western reductionistic science, the present “Washington
consensus” view of democracy is but one prototype, with
great strengths but also great limitations.
Most people in the US think of democracy as a kind of
bequest, like an old suit of clothes.
18< SoL provides opportunities for executives to engage in this
type of frank conversation. As a specific illustration, please refer to
an invitation from a group of SoL executive members to the larger
community called “the Marblehead letter.” For the full text of “the
Marblehead letter,” see http://www.solonline.org/repository/
item?item_id=163561. The initial economic sponsors of the global SoL
network met in June 2001 to review the results of the first three years
of organizing work and to provide input on SoL’s potential contribution
to issues of importance for firms and societies. The group, meeting
in Marblehead, Massachusetts, identified a small set of issues
fundamental to creating positive futures in an interdependent world,
and invites the SoL community into ongoing dialogue on these topics:
The social divide: the ever-widening gap between those who
participate in the increasingly interdependent global economy and
those who do not.
- Redefining growth: economic growth based on ever-increasing
material use and discard is inconsistent with a finite world.
- Variety and inclusiveness: developing inclusion as a core competence
in increasingly multicultural organizations.
- Attracting talented people and realizing their potential: developing
commitment in a world of “free agents” and “volunteer” talent.
- The role of the corporation: extending the traditional role of
the corporation, especially the global corporation, to be more
commensurate with its impact.
- The system seeing itself: the challenges of coordination and
coherence in social systems.
But what if it is actually something we’re still learning and
creating? What if, to create a more desirable global future,
we must rediscover and more effectively apply the lessons
we claim to know so well? In his 1871 essay “Democratic
Vistas,” Walt Whitman wrote:
We have frequently printed the word democracy. Yet I
cannot too often repeat that this is a word the real gist of
which still sleeps quite un-awakened....
It is a great word whose history, I suppose, remains
unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted. It is,
in some sort, younger brother of another great, and often
used word, “nature,” whose history also waits unwritten.
Were he alive today, I believe Whitman would be writing
not about American democracy, but about global society,
and its as-yet-unwritten links to nature. When executives
in global companies talk candidly, their real concern
usually is not the cost of capital or return on sales; it is the
social and political stability of the world they will leave
behind. 18<
They, too, see the future as an alien place. If it is
to become more hospitable, it is up to us to create it so.

35
ROBERT M. BAUER <
Organizations as Orientation Systems – Some Remarks on the Aesthetic Dimension of Organizational Design
Instrumental rationality, the deﬁning element of economic action,
dominates economic and, more speciﬁcally, managerial reasoning.
YET, INSTRUMENTAL RATIONALITY
ALONE CAN NEITHER EXPLAIN NOR
INFORM ECONOMIC PRACTICE.
Instead, it needs to be complemented – i.e. supported and challenged
– by other ways of knowing such as aesthetic judgement. Indeed an
aesthetic dimension is inherent in managerial practice and, therefore,
leadership and organizational design rely on aesthetic judgement.

36
labor-market efficiency, benchmarking, cultural norms for
standards of living, philosophical considerations of justice,
and analyses of data on workers’ health. Nothing, however,
satisfied our professor. He just continued demanding that
someone give the correct answer. Eventually, we were
relieved from our misery. “The rhythm, gentlemen!” he
declared (although one third of the class were women),
“The rhythm! Watch an experienced workman producing
the required number of pieces per hour. If the movement is
flowing smoothly and economically, the required number
is fine. However, if the movement is hasty and jagged, or
on the contrary sluggish, unnecessarily complicated or
pausing, then the number needs to be adjusted.”
His answer left me baffled and dazzled. The famous
business professor had just shared his believe that making
quick and informed judgements about critical, controversial
managerial issues requires an aesthetic view. He had
learnt to look at the world of factory workers through the
eyes of dancers and choreographers. None of us students,
on the other hand, would have dared to even imagine this
approach. We were deeply entrenched in thinking about
business and management in terms of numbers, markets
and some abstract political principles of justice.
1. The nature of organizational design: shaping human
experience
Instrumental rationality is central to the economic paradigm
that currently dominates organization studies. This market-
centered perspective the firm views as a nexus of contracts
through which economic actors trade more or less specific
goods and services, thereby maximizing their wealth. In
order to unveil the aesthetic dimension of organizations
and managerial practice I will propose an alternative view,
namely organizations as orientation systems.
This perspective views organizations as structural
arrangements comprising elements as different as incentive
systems, chains of command, corporate strategies and
visions, job profiles, report systems and control devices,
formal and informal codes of conduct, technical equipment,
facilities and so forth. The orientation systems perspective
perceives these various elements as woven together
As used here, the (technical) term ‘aesthetic’ has three
integral aspects: sensing, evaluation and principles.
Consistent with its original meaning – Greek ‘aisthesis’
means sensory perception – ‘aesthetic’ refers to a specific
epistemological mode employing visual, tactual, auditory,
olfactory and proprioceptive experience. Unlike in the
vernacular, ‘aesthetic’ in aesthetic theory refers to both
positive and negative evaluations: the sensory information
can be perceived as exciting, pleasing, beautiful,
harmonious, amusing, or as boring, disgusting, ugly,
disharmonious, disturbing and so on.
ALL OF THESE ARE
AESTHETIC CATEGORIES.
In addition, aesthetic judgement is governed by a specific
type of rules, by principles rather than laws (of nature).
First, these rules cannot be fully denoted (i.e., explicitly
spelt out); hence, they require additional exemplification
(i.e., demonstration through samples).1<
Second, these rules
are applied rather than obeyed. Aesthetic creation relies on
a critical balance between conventional rule-following and
exceptional rule-breaking.
I first encountered the aesthetic approach to management
– long before I would be able to name it in a lecture on
incentive systems, which I attended as a student of
business administration. In the midst of elaborating on
piece-work systems, the professor suddenly paused and
then asked the class: How do you decide if the number
of pieces required is set rightly? The professor was an
authority in this field, frequently called as an expert witness
when courts had to settle labor disputes, in particular when
deciding if a certain piece-work system was exploitative
or fair. In addition, we perceived him as quite intimidating.
He had a reputation as an authoritarian character with
debatable interpersonal skills, yet possessed the most
brilliant intellect to which we had been exposed. It took a
while until the first student dared to propose an answer,
and the professor didn’t even bother to point out why it was
wrong. He just demanded that someone else answered
the question: How do you decide if the number of pieces
a worker (or group) is required to produce is just? We
tried various approaches, including considerations of

37
– thereby establishing the organization – for the purpose
of guiding the perceptions and actions of the individuals
working ‘in’ the organization. Organizations shape what
individuals pay attention to or ignore, what they care
about, desire, despise, or fear, what they ﬁght for or let
go of. Organizations are epistemological devices guiding
individual perception, sensemaking, valuing and, most of all,
choice and action.
THEY PROVIDE ORIENTATION
FOR HOW INDIVIDUALS
EXPERIENCE LIFE AT WORK.
As a result of this orientation, individuals’ knowing and
doing become interlinked and converge into larger patterns.
Through the orientation provided by the organization,
innumerable individual acts of perception and judgement
jointly give rise to a (more or less) coherent stream of
activity. It is this pattern that provides the grounds for
referring to an organization as an agent doing something
(e.g., embarking on a certain strategy, exploiting workers,
taking over a competitor etc.).
For example, consider the epistemological effects of
functional division of labor. Organization theory has
known since the late 1950s that functional departments
(e.g., procurement, production, marketing, sales, human
resources, or accounting) develop different epistemological
habits.2<
‘Sales’, for instance, typically focuses on the
organization’s environment, on customers and competitors,
at the expense of ‘internal affairs’.
It is primarily future oriented, and speed is critical, though
precision might get compromised (‘Quick and dirty’ is
a viable option in ‘sales’ and a struck deal involving
compromise is usually favored over a potential perfect one).
‘Accounting’, on the other hand, is typically governed by
contrasting epistemological habits.
1< Goodman (1976).
2< E.g. Lawrence and Lorsch (1967), Dearborne and Simon (1958), Quinn
and Rohrbaugh (1981).

38
It focuses on the company, as opposed to its environment,
and primarily pays attention to what has already happened
(in the past). If necessary, speed gets compromised to
achieve the expected flawless precision. Functional
departments evolve as cultural microcosms differing with
regard to rules, values, behaviors, and personal experience.
Consciously or not, through daily interaction individuals in
each department reassure each other of the rightness of
their respective worldview, which in turn tends to become
reified and taken for granted – no longer perceived as a
worldview, but as the world.
ORGANIZATIONS AS
EPISTEMOLOGICAL TOOLS
EXERCISE SIGNIFICANT
POWER OVER INDIVIDUAL AND
COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE.
Each functional department deeply entrenches itself in its
own specific epistemology, which has proven successful in
dealing with the group’s immediate task. In consequence,
interdepartmental coordination may only be achieved at
the cost of involving third parties: that is, departments with
‘intermediate’ epistemological habits that understand both
sides and are perceived as taking a balanced stance.3<
To hint at another example, the working of organizations as
orientation systems is particularly manifest in performance
measurement and incentive systems. Far from being
unobtrusive, performance measures do not just reflect
reality but instead intervene in it powerfully by signaling
what is important and what is not. Employees, in turn, tend
to produce what is measured and rewarded, and sacrifice
the rest. (“Beware of your wishes; they might come true.”)
Performance measures do not primarily communicate
– bottom-up – truth about performance; much rather they
communicate – top-down – what has been chosen as a
priority. Designing performance-measurement systems
means designing orientation systems – intervening into
human experience and shaping what people think, feel, and
do, by influencing what matters and what does not, what is
experienced as important and what is not.
Although organizations guide the senses, feelings,
thoughts, intuitions, and most notably actions of humans
in powerful and often unconscious ways, we must not see

39
humans as mere passive victims subjected to organizational
designs that imprinting experience and actions on them. On
the contrary, organizations provide hints and clues, pointers
and landmarks that trigger and inform the member’s
creation of their personal experience, which is a highly
active process with far more degrees of freedom than
conventional wisdom would assume.
In this respect, organizations function like artistic artifacts.
For instance, watching a well-made movie strongly affects
what one senses, feels and thinks; at its best, it can be
an experience so enriching that one feels no longer quite
the same person as before. However, although it can
powerfully intervene into one’s experience, a movie is
by no means a remote control determining the viewer’s
sensations, emotions and thoughts. On the contrary, a
director’s mastery lies in the ability to draw the audience
into co creating the experience. A viewer ‘agrees’ to
ﬁll in massive gaps between scenes, to imagine what is
not shown but hinted at, and, at best, to transcend the
movie by experiencing oneself creating the experience.
An artifact is a piece of art if and only if it succeeds in
involving the observer into a process of sense-making that
simultaneously creates and reveals the artistic nature
of the artifact – a principle exempliﬁed, for instance, by
Malewitsch’s legendary ‘Black Square’, a black square on
white square ground.4<
2. The essence of organizational design: from the edge of
chaos to the principles of consonance
The challenge in organizational design – how to design
organizations that effectively shape personal experience
– is twofold: namely, how to trigger and fuel the creation of
experience, and how to lead this process of creation into
certain directions. The particular problem for organizational
designers lies in the antagonistic relationship of these two
challenges.
Over-directive organizational designs specify with low
ambiguity and in great detail what to focus on, how to make
sense of events and which action to take. They provide
strong guidance but little stimulation and drive. They are
boring, thus leading to physical and mental absence rather
than commitment and effort. Early assembly lines and large
administrative bureaucracies provide examples of over-
directive organizational designs that guide too closely and
therefore sedate rather than activate individuals. Even
worse, they may lead individuals to turn their creativity
and energy against the organization (e.g., sabotage).
Under-directive organizational designs, however, leave the
organization’s members with many open questions.
TO A CERTAIN EXTENT, MISSING,
AMBIVALENT OR CONTRADICTORY
INSTRUCTIONS CAN TRIGGER
DESIRABLE PROBLEM-SOLVING
AND SEARCH BEHAVIORS.
The organization becomes somewhat uncomfortable, but
highly activating and energizing. Although they usually
stimulate high levels of individual activity, under-directive
organizational designs commonly fail to integrate the
individuals’ efforts into a consistent patterned activity set.
In other words, lack of orientation makes the organization
probably ineffective, despite everyone being indeed busy. In
addition, extreme organizational under-direction can cause
such uncertainty and chaos that it no longer increases
activation but leads into paralysis instead.
To summarize, masterful organizational design triggers
and guides individual sense-making and action through
maintaining a critical balance between the presence and
absence of instructive constraints, between providing
meaning and exposing to noise, between determinacy and
openness, between order and chaos.
This kind of dynamic equilibrium has been studied most
thoroughly in complexity science. Through computer
simulations, complexity theorists, most notably at the Santa
Fe Institute, have shown that complex systems rely on a
critical balance between mutual dependence and autonomy
of their components and display behaviors that lie at the
intersection of order and disorder. Complexity emerges at
the edge of chaos.5<
3< Lawrence and Lorsch (1967).
4< ‘Black Square’ (1915), oil on canvas, 79,5 x 79,5 cm.
5< Kauffman (1993), Langton (1990).

40
at aesthetics as the missing link that could join everyday
practice with design principles such as, most prominently,
the critical balance between order and chaos. Consistency
theorists’ descriptions of their findings and reasoning
suggest that understanding organizational design requires
both analytical thinking and aesthetic judgement. They have
characterized organizations as both ‘logical configurations’ 11<
and ‘Gestalts’ 12<
(a term from the psychology of sensory
and, in particular, visual perception).13<
Organizational
consistency has been defined as “the degree to which an
organization’s elements are orchestrated and connected by
a single theme”.14<
The formation of configuration, the actual
task of organizational design, is seen as both “strongly
underpinned by provinces of meaning and interpretive
schemes”15<
and governed by “principles of consonance”.16<
These terms emphasize two epistemological modes
involved in organizational design: first, the intellectual mode
of logic and argument that dominates current organization
theory; and second, the aesthetic mode of sensory
perception that, until recently, has received insufficient
attention in organization theory.17<
THE REFERRAL TO SENSORY
PERCEPTION AND TO VARIOUS
FORMS OF ARTISTIC CREATION IS
NOT MERELY A LOOSE METAPHOR.
By contrast, the twofold problem of organizational design is
most accurately and beautifully captured in Miller’s notion
of orchestrating and connecting through a (dominant)
theme – a term referring to the topic and content of
written or spoken language as well as to a melody or, more
specifically, the ‘Leitmotiv’ in musical works.
For instance, the rules of harmony, the basic tool for
composers, are not concerned with maximizing consonance
(which could simply be achieved by, say, everybody in an
orchestra playing the same note). Instead, they inform the
creation of a critical balance between consonance and
dissonance, between musical order and chaos. Composers
guide the listeners’ attention and shape the listeners’
experience. They get listeners to form expectations,
which they subsequently meet or frustrate by creating a
critical balance in the listeners providing them with enough
orientation for ‘getting a sense’ of what is going on, yet also
surprising them. The rules of harmony help composers to
stimulate and guide individual sense-making without losing
their audience to boredom stemming from simplicity or to
overload resulting from chaos.
This collinearity between organizational design and
aesthetic/artistic creation – how both aim at shaping human
experience – also sheds light on why it has been difficult for
organization science to grasp the problem of organizational
design. Like the rules of harmony, rules in organizational
design fall under the reign of plausibility rather than
(absolute) truth. They are powerful guidelines, yet different
The computer program is the most unambiguous (i.e.
explicit) form of knowledge making computer simulation
the approach par excellence to complexity science. Yet, for
the same reason computer simulation is also a simplistic
approach to the complex; it depicts only the orderable
aspects of the balance of order and chaos.
Within organization science, consistency theory is the
branch that has most clearly addressed the critical balance
underlying organizational design. Consistency theorists
maintain that an organization cannot provide orientation
unless its various elements are aligned.6<
Without
consistency among its design parameters an organization
sends contradictory messages to its members and fails
to integrate their decisions and actions into a coherent
pattern. However, a totally streamlined company, where
everything and everybody is perfectly aligned, would be a
poor alternative. In such an organization, devoid of conflict
and disagreement, members do not confront or challenge
each other from alternative perspectives. In addition,
provided with next to complete, unambiguous information
about what to focus on, how to make sense of events and
which action to take, individuals tend to adopt mechanical
rule-following behavior rather than paying attention to
specifics and discrepancies. Though some individuals
may feel comfortable about total guidance, others find it
confining and eventually dehumanizing. From a consistency
perspective, good organizational design involves finding
a middle ground between a lack of consistency and an
overdose thereof. The latter can be highly successful
initially, but its success is short-lived because over-aligned
companies suffer an inability to learn.7<
In essence,
maintaining this critical balance – between consistency,
consensus, clarity, guidance and constraints on the one
hand and inconsistency, disagreement, ambiguity, openness
and freedom – is to balance order and chaos.
CONSISTENCY THEORY HAS
ATTEMPTED TO CAPTURE THIS
CRITICAL BALANCE IN TWO
DIFFERENT WAYS: TYPOLOGIES
AND TAXONOMIES.
Typologies describe and prescribe archetypical
organizational forms that sufficiently balance various
organizational aspects of order and chaos.8<
Typologies
succeed in offering design principles: however, they fail to
address the diversity of organizational forms.9<
Taxonomies,
by contrast, present empirically derived types of
organizations by showing that certain organizational-design
features tend to coincide (i.e., form statistical clusters).10<
Taxonomies, however, have failed to explain why most
organizations rely on certain combinations of design
features. Consistency theory is thus left struggling with the
gap between empirical findings and relevant concepts.
Addressing this gap, consistency theorists have hinted

41
from Newtonian laws of nature, which can be refuted, in
principle, by a single disconfirming incident. By contrast,
the rules of harmony and of organizational design are meant
to be applied by composers and managers, respectively.
More specifically, in aligning form and matter, they call
for a critical balance between generally following and
occasionally breaking the rules.18<
Because specifying rules
for breaking the rules leads into infinite regress,19<
the rules
underlying aesthetics necessarily remain partly implicit;
they can only be expressed through (explicitly) denoting and
(implicitly) exemplifying.
FOR THE SAME REASON
THEY CAN NEVER BE
COMPLETE, BUT INSTEAD
REMAIN IN PROGRESSION.
Art works and organizations are embedded in social
contexts and, therefore, evolve as society evolves. The
rules of harmony, for instance, are context dependent
in the sense that they vary between (regional) cultures
and historical periods (of ‘the same culture’). In Baroque
music, for example, dissonant chords were forbidden,
with the exception only of the dominant seventh chord
if immediately followed by the chord that sets the key of
the piece (e.g., the C major chord in a piece written in C
major). Hence, Baroque rules of harmony allow just one
possibility for some dissonance and that experience of
dissonance had to be ‘cured’ immediately by the greatest
amount of consonance possible. Over the course of musical
history, however, dissonance has gained territory. For
instance, in the late nineteenth century Richard Wagner
exposed his audience to sequences of dissonant chords.
6< E.g. Burns and Stalker (1961), Khandwalla (1973), Miller and Friesen
(1977, 1984), Miles and Snow (1978), Mintzberg (1979), Greenwood
and Hinings (1993). 7< Miller (1993), Miller and Cheng (1996). 8< E.g.
Burns and Stalker (1961), Miles and Snow (1978), Mintzberg (1979).
9< Typologies that distinguish more than basically two generic
organizational forms do not pass empirical tests. Doty, Glick and Huber
(1993), for instance, find empirical support for the typology proposed
by Miles and Snow (1978), which is a variation of the distinction
between organic and mechanistic organizations (Burns and Stalker
1961). However, they find no support for Mintzberg’s typology (1979)
that distinguishes between five archetypical forms. 10< E.g. Miller
and Friesen (1977, 1984). 11< Mintzberg (1979). 12< Miller (1981). 13<
Ehrenfels (1890), Wertheimer (1912, 1923). 14< Miller (1996). 15< Hinings
and Greenwood (1988). See Gadamer (1960) for a treatise on the
intimate link between interpretive reasoning and aesthetic judgement.
16< SIAR (1973). 17< Bauer (2003). 18< For an extensive analysis of the
mutual dependency of rule following and rule violation in organizations
see Ortmann (2003). 19< Gödel (1931), Turing (1936).

42
But what Wagner aficionados experience as a climax of
Occidental culture would have been pure cacophony to
Händel’s contemporaries: in turn, some Wagnerians would
not hesitate to apply the some judgement to the even
more dissonant works of twentieth-century Avantgarde
music. But this irreversible progression of art forms is
not expected to culminate in an ultimate work of art.
Similarly, the rules governing organizational design can be
expected to progress over time without ever leading to an
ultimate organizational form. Aesthetics is central to the
organizations-as-orientation-systems perspective, from
which I shall now briefly recount current developments in
organizational design and speculate about what might be
seen in the near and not so near future.
3. Contemporary organizational design: from
disaggregating structures to synchronizing rhythms
In the early 1990s, the world of modern organizations had
a deja vu. Once again, car manufacturers, competing in
the market for the single most expensive item in private
consumption, were in turmoil. One particular company had
deployed a superior production system that eventually
would revolutionize not only the automotive industry, but
also all industrial production of goods and services. Like
Ford in the early 1900s, Toyota in the 1990s had made a
quantum leap forward:
CUSTOMERS RECEIVED
HIGHER QUALITY AT LOWER
PRICES AND WERE OFFERED A
GREATER VARIETY OF MODELS
TO CHOOSE FROM WHILE
PROFIT MARGINS WENT UP.
In the case of both Ford and Toyota, the major productivity
gains were derived from a strong will to improve every
detail rather than from a single ingenious idea. Yet, the
innumerable minor innovations that together resulted in
enormous improvement were connected in each case by a
main theme: ‘standardization’ at Ford, ‘inter-organizational
networks’ at Toyota.
Toyota pioneered the disaggregation of the global firm
or, in other words, the decay of the vertically integrated
enterprise. As a consequence, the automotive industry was
radically transformed. The number of Original Equipment
Manufacturers (OEM) went down rapidly; suppliers gained
importance taking over increasing shares of developing
and manufacturing cars, while OEM’s focused more
on marketing and distribution. In two decades, Toyota
evolved from a small firm producing technically inferior
copies of Western cars to the second largest, and by far
the most profitable, car manufacturer. Large integrated
firms became extinct in the automotive industry and cars,
initially produced by a single company, became the product

43
of an inter-organizational network comprised of hundreds
of intimately linked firms. Other industries – computers,
consumer electronics, apparel, and food processing being
the early ones – followed. Although each industry has
its own specifics, it is probably fair to say that the inter-
organizational network has emerged as the dominant
organizational form for producing complex goods and
delivering complex services.
From an organizations-as-orientation-systems perspective,
the replacement of large integrated corporations by
assemblies of smaller organizations comes as no surprise.
LARGE INTEGRATED
ORGANIZATIONS ARE IN AN
INFERIOR POSITION REGARDING
THE AESTHETIC CHALLENGES
OF ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN.
True, size results in market power and puts large firms
at an advantage, but size also tends to coincide with
heterogeneity of activity sets. A firm pursuing diverse
activities lacks a coherent task. It faces a problem similar
to that of a film-maker aiming to make one movie catering
to several different audiences: an acceptable solution
may be possible, but most likely compromises on many
audience-specific criteria for quality and probably cannot
arrive at a distinct artistic language. By contrast, small
organizations must be highly selective about what they
do and, consequently, can be specific about how they do
it. An organization focusing on a single coherent activity
set can deploy all the elements of organizational design in
such a fashion that they jointly provide optimal stimulation
and guidance for the individual workers. Coherent activity
sets provide the basis for consistent organizational
designs and consequently for motivating, meaningful work
experiences. However, a large firm pursuing incoherent
activity sets faces two unfavorable alternatives: either
providing as many specific organizational designs as there
are distinct tasks, thereby rendering the organization as a
whole incomprehensible and unmanageable; or imposing an
overall, unspecific design on everyone, thereby imposing
compromised working conditions on most if not all of its
members.
From a work-centered perspective – organizations seen
as epistemological devices that shape work experience
– the disaggregation of the global corporation is an
important step forward in organizational design. Large
integrated organizations as orientation systems are prone
to mediocrity, lack distinct activity profiles and thus fail to
necessitate and facilitate their members’ co-creation of
specific, captivating work experiences. For the most part,
they are being replaced by numerous, generally smaller
firms that manage to develop a pronounced style of what
and how they do. These firms reflect an ‘aesthetic’ approach
to (re-) focusing domains and outsourcing non-core
activities as an alternative to merely reducing (fixed) costs,
which often deprives firms of necessary slack and erodes
core capabilities. Instead, (re-) focusing and outsourcing
are used to create clearly focused work-centered
organizations – devoted to productivity and creativity in
work processes and to significance work experience. The
proposition that firms pursuing clearly focused activity sets
more probably maintain distinctive organizational designs
that function as powerful orientation systems,20<
can be
read as an instantiation of Leopold Kohr’s famous formula
‘SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL’.
However ‘small’ here refers to clarity of focus rather than
just size, and ‘beautiful’ rather than merely indicating
sensory pleasure denotes – pars pro toto – aesthetic
capability, which is the power to shape experience.
The literature commonly attributes the disaggregation of
the global corporation to two main causes. First, improved
infrastructures for transporting physical entities and
symbols (i.e. telecommunications) have helped overcoming
spatial barriers. Second, efficiency gains in financial
markets mean that corporate owners can manage their
risk better by holding portfolios of equity shares in several
companies than by diversifying whatever company they
own. However, the organizations-as-orientation-systems
perspective suggests that the aesthetic dimension of
organizational design is driving the disaggregation. As
geographical barriers are losing their power and owners
protect their interests through markets (rather than
organizational forms) organizational design becomes
less constrained. Consequently, the ‘logic of work’ – the
technical requirements of work processes and the aesthetic
principles of work experience – becomes more prominent in
contemporary organizational design.
ENHANCED FIRM-SPECIFICITY
IS COMPLEMENTED BY A TREND
TOWARDS MORE SPECIFIC
LINKS BETWEEN FIRMS.
These linked trends have pushed the division of labor to
a new level: the joint creation of integrated and often
complex products or services by sets of highly specialized
and specifically connected organizations. Admittedly,
specialized firms with specific organizational designs
predate the disaggregation of the global corporation;
however, those firms catered to others through arms-length
20< For a detailed analysis see Bauer (2003).

44
market transactions. Markets, highly unspecific interfaces,
work best for non-specific transactions between many
anonymous trade partners (exchanging standardized
information). Hence, next-to-perfect markets are mirror
images of large integrated corporations.
THEY ALLOW FOR SPECIALIZED
FIRMS WITH CONSISTENT
ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN, BUT
REQUIRE GENERIC OUTPUT THAT
CAN BE TRADED EFFICIENTLY.
Big hierarchies, on the other hand, can require their
subsystems (subsidiaries, departments etc.) to produce
specific output, but are limited as to how specifically
they can organize each activity. By contrast, the new
organizational forms pioneered in automotive industries
are specific in the senses of both products and services
customized for certain partners and of organizational
designs specifically complementing activity sets.
The disaggregation of the global corporation is still under
way, gaining momentum from a massive wave of global
(out)sourcing triggered by China and India joining the world
economy. In addition, it is fueled by a trend towards self-
employment intimately tied to growing individualism and,
more critically viewed, eroding social bonds in Western
societies. As a result of this change in labor relationships,
the disaggregation of the large integrated firm reaches
its ultimate limit – the firm comprised of one individual.
While there is much debate about the extent to which
people choose to become free agents 21<
or are forced into
self-employment,22<
there is growing evidence that firms,
particularly the small and smallest ones, are employed ‘like
artists’. Temporary engagements (‘projects’), permanent
pressure for high technical quality and distinctively
innovative performance, and an uneven distribution of
income leaving the majority with very little to live off – the
usual situation of actors, musicians, writers, filmmakers
etc. – are becoming standard working conditions for
increasingly more businesses.23<
Although the two realms significantly differ, creating
works of art and producing industrial goods and services
converge remarkably. As public funding declines, artists
are increasingly required to participate in market contests.

45
In addition, artists, like scientists, are no longer expected
to be geniuses, but instead to function as professionals
– ‘creative workers’, like ‘knowledge workers’.24<
As a
result, art is losing much of its sacred aura. Firms, on the
other hand, are concerned with problems that lie at the core
of artistic success. They need to develop a distinct style
– a specific approach to what they do and how they do it
(and communicate it) – and retain creativity – the ability to
permanently reinvent in order to escape obsolescence and
commoditization.
The disaggregation of the global firm underscores both
the aesthetic dimension and the plurality inherent in
organizational design. Companies of various shapes and
sizes, each with its own rather distinct style, are linked into
fine-grained networks spanning the globe. These networks
are enabled by specific bilateral links between firms – links
that emerge from combinations of coordinating mechanisms
25<
and allow firms to collectively transcend the limitations
to which they individually subscribe to by restricting
themselves to coherent activity sets.
THE DEPTH AND PRECISION THAT
FIRMS GAIN FROM ENHANCED
SPECIFICITY COME AT THE COST
OF SIMPLIFICATION DUE TO MORE
HOMOGENOUS ACTIVITY SETS.
By connecting with each other, these firms establish inter-
organizational networks that enable them to overcome
firm-level simplification and to create highly complex and
neatly integrated goods and services. Like postmodern art
at its best, these sets of specifically-linked specific firms
deliver coherent creations emerging from combination,
hybridization and occasional amalgamation of various
distinct styles.
Finally, this trend in organizational design, which first
received attention under the ‘just-in-time’ label, has
implications for processes within and across firm
boundaries. In automotive industries, for instance, it has
become common for suppliers to share the same plant and
engage in a joint process of car assembly, instead of merely
delivering auto parts ‘in time’. Rapidly innovating firms in
high-velocity industries rely on projects to an extent that
renders the concept of departments virtually insignificant.
What distinguishes successful project based firms from
their less successful competitors is the ability to develop
an ‘internal clock’ through synchronizing and overlapping
projects.26<
They succeed in creating a continuous flow of
knowledge and people across projects, thereby lowering
employee uncertainty and enhancing utilization of capacity.
In short, these firms are integrated through rhythm rather
than through structure; by finding their own rhythm they
occupy a middle ground between (reactive, external)
adaptability and (proactive, internal) initiative.27<
Similarly, firms around the globe can be expected to relate
to one another by intensifying existing inter-organizational
activity patterns and by developing new ones.
THESE PATTERNS REFLECT
DYNAMICS OF DEMAND AND
SUPPLY AS WELL AS RHYTHMS
OF NATURE AND WORK.
(E.g., operations in time zones separated by eight hours
of time difference make it possible to shift (digital)
work around the globe in three day shifts per day.) The
disaggregation of the global firm will result not only in firms
with distinct organizational designs dispersed around the
globe but also, eventually, in rhythms pulsating through a
global mosaic of organizational designs – global pulse(s)
underneath layers of differentiated local ‘beats’ elaborating
on the basic metre. Organizational design, as stated at
the outset, is intimately tied to the rhythm of work. This
rhythm is becoming increasingly global and demands
that contemporary organizational design enables firms
to resonate with the global pulse, yet maintain their own
momentum.
21< E.g. Florida 2002, Pink 2001. 22< E.g. Sennett 1998. 23< E.g. Rothauer
2005. 24< Brodbeck (1999), McRobbie (2002, 2004). 25< In particular,
these inter-organizational network ties combine universal standards
(e.g., market price), local standardization (e.g., industry standards
and bilaterally agreed custom definitions) and unique agreements
(e.g., ad-hoc inter-organizational coordination primarily relying on
oral cross-organizational and cross-disciplinary communication). For
further details Bauer (2003). 26< Brown and Eisenhardt (1998). 27< In
large software firms it is considered normal that up to 30% of potential
members of project teams are ‘between’ projects (Jittandra 19xx).

46
Coda
Despite growing attention, the study of organizational and
managerial aesthetics is still in its infancy. The twentieth
century was the century of language, of propositional
knowledge captured in natural and formal language, of
thinking and of thinking about thinking. Only recently have
alternative ways of knowing, most prominently sensing
and feeling, become the focus of significant, growing
research efforts. The collinearity between artistic creation,
and leadership and organizational design now provides a
foundation for aesthetic analyses of organizations. It has
also given rise to a renaissance of the artist as a role model
for managers and self-employed agents of various kinds.
However, the proliferation of the ‘artist’ model for economic
actors has its problems.
FIRST, THE NATURE OF ARTISTIC
WORK APPEARS IN FLUX.
Some artists see art as a profession and, accordingly,
define themselves as ‘creative workers’; others see
it primarily as an intrinsically driven process, more
pronounced, as a ‘way to survive’. Hence, it is not clear as to
what extent professions with disruptive workflow and high
pressure for innovation can accurately be described and
explained as artistic or quasi-artistic, and to what extent
the ‘artist’ metaphor euphemistically disguises the ugly face
of unemployment and forced self-employment.28<
Second, to keep organization and management theory
from reverting to naive conceptions of agency it is critical
to emphasize that artists do not create ex nihilo. They
require an audience co-creating the artistic experience and
therefore rely on criteria underlying aesthetic judgement
that are beyond their control. As Kant showed, these
criteria are essentially collective, reflecting epistemological
habits shared within the community. The role of artists
as a vanguard of society is less to actively shape the
epistemological habits – i.e. the cultural identity – of the
community than to heighten awareness of epistemological
changes as society evolves. Accordingly, artists describe
the process of creation as equally relying on receptive
capabilities and on the will to shape. Hence, an aesthetic
perspective should not provide grounds for simplistic
conceptions of agency, such as great-man theories of
leadership and organizational design.
Finally, the aesthetic realm is shaped by fundamental
tensions such as ‘innovative versus conservative’ or
‘pluralistic versus totalistic’. As for the first, psychological
studies show beauty as a proxy for memory, in the sense
that what is familiar – even if there is no conscious
recognition – is more likely to be found beautiful.29<
Recognizing this conservative tendency in aesthetic
judgement is particularly important because many existing
accounts of the relevance of aesthetics for management
emphasize innovation. As for the second, aesthetics is a
realm of genuine plurality, because aesthetic judgement
varies substantially between (sub-) cultures in the sense
both of historical periods and of geographical regions.
However, these differences do not account for ‘better’ or
’worse’ on any general scale beyond culture. Devotion to a
particular style can easily turn into disregard of any other
style; the prevalent idea of ‘perfection’, which presupposes
and embraces one specific, partial ideal is inherently
totalistic. Given the tension between the plural and the
total in aesthetics, condemning managerial aesthetics as
a potentially fascist instrument of totalitarian domination,
as Critical theory tends to, falls as short as welcoming
managerial aesthetics in a Postmodernist fashion as a
natural remedy for intolerance.30<
AESTHETIC JUDGEMENT CAN
NEITHER SUBSTITUTE FOR
ANALYTICAL THINKING NOR
FOR ETHICAL DELIBERATION.
It has a potential to correct shortcomings of intellectual
and emotional knowledge and, in turn, needs to be
complemented by other ways of knowing. Aesthetic
accounts of management and organization, as advocated
in this article, represent a step towards ‘epistemological
pluralism’ – a meta-theoretical stance, according to which
human knowledge relies on various mutually irreducible
epistemological modes that inform each other.

47
28< E.g. Leadbeater and Oakley (1999), Rothauer (2005). 29< Kunst-
Wilson and Zajonc (1980). 30< E.g. Vattimo 1981, 1989; see also Vattimo
1998 for a cautioning if not correction of the hopes expressed in his
earlier writings.

48
References
Bauer, Robert (2003): Effizienz und Effektivität in Netzwerk-
Organisationen: unterwegs zu einer epistemologischen
Theorie der Organisation; in: Weiskopf 2003, pp. 227-257.
Brodbeck, Karl-Heinz (1999): Entscheidung zur Kreativität;
Darmstadt: Primus.
Brown, Shona and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt (1998):
Competing on the Edge; Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business
School Press.
Burns, Tom and George M. Stalker (1961): The Management
of Innovation; London: Tarvistock.
Dearborne, DeWitt C. and Herbert A. Simon (1958):
Selective Perception: A Note on the Departmental
Identification of Executives; Sociometry, 21, pp. 140-144.
Doty, Harold D., William H. Glick and George P. Huber (1993):
Fit, Equifinality and Organizational Effective¬ness: A Test
of Two Configurational Theories; Academy of Management
Journal, 36, pp. 1196-1250.
Ehrenfels, Christian von (1890): Über „Gestaltqualitäten“;
Vierteljahresschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie,
14/3, pp. 249-292.
Florida, Richard (2002): The Rise of the Creative Class; New
York: Basic.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1960): Wahrheit und Methode;
Tübingen: Mohr, 2 Bände; hier: 6. Auflage 1990.
Gödel, Kurt (1931): Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze
der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, I;
Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik, 38, pp. 173-198.
Goodman, Nelson (1976): Languages of Art; Indianapolis:
Hackett.
Greenwood, Roystone and C.R. Hinings (1993):
Understanding Strategic Change: The Contribution of
Archetyps; Academy of Management Journal, 36/5, pp.
1052-1081.
Hinings, C.R. (Bob) and Royston Greenwood (1988): The
Dynamics of Strategic Change; Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Huber, J., Eds. (2002): Singularitäten - Allianzen; Wien -
New York: Springer.
Kauffman, Stewart A. (1993): The Origins of Order; New
York: Oxford.

49
Khandwalla, Pradip N. (1973): Viable and Effective
Organizational Designs of Firms; Academy of Management
Journal, 16/3, pp. 1278-1313.
Kunstverein München, Eds. (2004): Atelier Europa;
München.
Kunst-Wilson, William Raft and Robert B. Zajonc (1980):
Affective Discrimination of Stimuli that Cannot Be
Recognised; Science, 207, pp. 557-558.
Langton, Christoper G. (1990): Computation at the Edge
of Chaos: Phase Transitions and Emergent Computation;
Physica D, 42, pp. 12-37.
Lawrence, Paul R. and Jay W. Lorsch (1967): Organization
and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration;
Boston: Graduate School of Business Administration
Harvard University.
Leadbeater, Charles and Kate Oakley (1999): The
Independents. Britains New Cultural Entrepreneurs;
London: Demos.
Magris, C. / W. Kaempfer, Eds. (1981): Problemi del
nichilismo; Roma: Shakespeare.
McRobbie, Angela:
(2002): Jeder ist kreativ. Künstler als Pioniere der New
Economy?; in: Huber 2002, pp. 37-60.
(2004): Kreatives London – kreatives Berlin. Anmerkungen
zum Erwerb des Lebensunterhalts in der neuen
kulturellen Ökonomie; in: Kunstverein München,
München 2004, pp. 22-33.
Miles, Raymond E. and Charles C. Snow (1978):
Organizational Strategy, Structure and Process; New York
- Tokyo - Hamburg: McGraw-Hill.
Miller, Danny:
(1981): Toward a new contingency approach: The search for
gestalts; Journal of Management Studies,
18, pp. 1-26.
(1993): The Architecture of Simplicity; Academy of
Management Review, 18/1, pp. 116-138.
(1996): Configurations Revisited; Strategic Management
Journal, 17/7, pp. 505-512.
Miller, Danny and Ming-Jer Chen (1996): The simplicity of
competitive repertoires: An empirical analysis; Strategic
Management Journal, 17, pp. 419-439.
Miller, Danny and Peter Friesen (1977): Strategy Making in
Context: Ten Empirical Archtypes; Journal of Management
Studies, 14, pp. 259-280.
(1984): Organizations - A Quantum View; Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall.
Mintzberg, Henry (1979): The Structuring of Organizations;
Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Ortmann, Günther (2003): Regel und Ausnahme; Frankfurt
a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Pink, Daniel (2001): Free Agent Nation; New York: Time
Warner.
Quinn, Robert E. and John Rohrbaugh (1981): A Competing
Values Approach to Organizational Effectiveness;
Productivity Review, 5, pp. 122-140.
Rothauer, Doris (2005): Kunst und Kapital; Wien: WUV.
Sennett, Richard (1998): The Corrosion of Character: The
Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism;
New York: Norton.
SIAR, Scandinavian Instituts for Adminstrative Research
Group of Sweden (1973): Management Survey of UNICEF;
Report, Stockholm.
Turing, Allen M. (1936): On Computable Numbers, with an
Application to the Entscheidungsproblem; Proceedings of
the London Mathematical Society, 2/42, pp. 230-265.
Vattimo, Gianni:
(1981): Apologia de nichilismo; in: Magris / Kaempfer 1981.
(1985): La fine della modernita; Milano: Garzanti.
(1989): La società transparente; Mailand: Garzanti.
(1998): Die Grenzen der Wirklichkeitsauflösung; in: Vattimo /
Welsch 1998, pp. 15-26.
Vattimo, G. / W. Welsch, Eds. (1998): Medien-Welten
Wirklichkeiten; München: Fink.
Weiskopf, R., Eds. (2003): Menschenregierungskünste;
Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag.
Wertheimer, Max:
(1912): Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen von Bewe-
gung; Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 61, pp. 161-265.
(1923): Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt;
Psychologische Forschung, 4, pp. 301-350.

Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Ivory
Workers of the Middle Ages

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The Ivory Workers of the Middle Ages
Author: Anna Maria Elizabeth Cust
Release date: January 22, 2019 [eBook #58752]
Language: English
Credits: Produced by deaurider, Paul Marshall and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE IVORY
WORKERS OF THE MIDDLE AGES ***

HANDBOOKS OF THE GREAT
CRAFTSMEN.
Illustrated Monographs, Biographical and Critical, on the Great
Craftsmen
and Workers of Ancient and Modern Times.
Edited by G. C. Williamson, Litt.D.
Imperial 16mo, with numerous Illustrations,
5s. net each.
First Volumes of the Series
THE PAVEMENT MASTERS OF SIENA.
By R. H. Hobart Cust, M.A.
PETER VISCHER.
By Cecil Headlam, B.A.

THE IVORY WORKERS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
By A. M. Cust.
Others to follow.
LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.

DOSSETTER PHOTO. [BRITISH MUSEUM
1. LEAF OF A DIPTYCH
Byzantine, fifth century
[See p. 55.]

THE IVORY WORKERS
OF THE
MIDDLE AGES
BY
A. M. CUST
LONDON
GEORGE BELL AND SONS
1902

CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
TO MY DEAR FATHER
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.

PREFACE
This little book can do no more than humbly touch the
fringe of a large subject; but if it leads the reader to a
further study of this beautiful craft, it will have amply
fulfilled its duty.
I must express my deep obligation to the magnificent
volume on ivories by M. Emile Molinier, whose masterly
arrangement of a very fragmentary and scattered subject
is a model of lucidity; and also to Dr. Hans Graeven,
whose scholarly researches and excellent photographs are
indispensable for a real study of the craft.
A. M. Cust.
December, 1901.

CONTENTS
PAGE
List of Illustrations xiii
Bibliography xvii
CHAPTER I.
Consular and other Secular Diptychs 1
CHAPTER II.
Latin and Byzantine Ivories 37
I. Latin and Latino-Byzantine and
the Early Byzantine Ivories 37
II. Byzantine Caskets 75
III. The Byzantine Renaissance 84
CHAPTER III.
Lombardic, Anglo-Saxon, Carlovingian
and German Ivories 96
I. Lombard Ivory Carvings 96
II. Anglo-Saxon Ivory Carvings 99
III. The Carlovingian Renaissance 106
IV. German Ivory Carving in the time
of the Ottos 118
CHAPTER IV.
Romanesque and Gothic Ivories 129
List of Diptychs
157
List of Places where Important Examples
of Ivories can be found 165
Index 167

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIG. PAGE
1. An Angel. Leaf of a Diptych.
Fifth century. Byzantine
British Museum, London Frontispiece
2. Second Leaf of the Diptych of Probianus,
Vice-Prefect of Rome. End of fourth century
Berlin Library 8
3. First Leaf of the Diptych of Probus,
Consul at Rome, 406 A.D.
Duomo, Aosta 9
4. First Leaf of the Diptych of Orestes,
Consul at Rome, 530 A.D.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London 14
5. Leaf of the Diptych of Amalasuntha(?)
Sixth Century. Italian
Bargello, Florence 30
6. Adam in the Terrestrial Paradise, and Scenes
from the Life of St. Paul.
Leaves of a Diptych. Fifth century. Italian
7 &
8.
Two Plaques, The Crucifixion and Christ leaving
the Prætorium.
Fifth century. Italian
British Museum 46, 47
9. Pyx with the Scene of Christ healing the Paralytic.
Sixth century. Italo-Byzantine
Musée de Cluny, Paris 51
10. Cover of a Book of the Gospels

(from S. Michele di Murano). Sixth century.
Italo-Byzantine
Ravenna Museum 53
11.
Cover of a Book of the Gospels, with three scenes
from
the Nativity (from Metz Cathedral).
Sixth century. Italo-Byzantine
Bibliothèque nationale, Paris 57
12. Front of the Ivory Throne of St. Maximian,
with St. John Baptist and the Four Evangelists.
Sixth century. Byzantine
Duomo, Ravenna 59
13. A Panel from the same Throne, Bringing Joseph’s
Coat to Jacob.
Sixth century. Byzantine
Duomo, Ravenna 63
14. Oliphant. Ninth to tenth century.
Oriental Byzantine
15. Veroli Casket. Byzantine
16.
Front of a Casket, with scenes from the life of
David.
Ninth century. Byzantine
Museo Kircheriano, Rome 81
17. Harbaville Triptych.
Tenth century. Byzantine
Louvre, Paris 87
18. Plaque with the Ascension of Christ.
Eleventh century. Byzantine
19. Christ enthroned.
Eleventh century. Byzantine

Trivulzio Collection, Milan 91
20. Christ crowning the Emperor Romanus and the
Empress Eudoxia.
Eleventh century. Byzantine.
Cabinet des Médailles, Bibliothèque nationale,
Paris
93
21. The Adoration of the Magi.
Eleventh century. Anglo-Saxon
22. The XXVIIth Psalm represented in scenic form.
Ninth century. Carlovingian
Zürich Museum 109
23. Cover of a Book of the Gospels.
Abbey of St. Gall, Switzerland 113
24. The Crucifixion and Allegorical Figures.
25. Panel of the Crucifixion, from a book cover.
Tenth century. German
John Rylands Library, Manchester 123
26. Ceremonial Comb.
Eleventh century. English
British Museum, London 127
27. A Bishop’s Crozier.
Fourteenth century. French
28. The Coronation of the Virgin.
Thirteenth century. French
Louvre, Paris 137
29. The Virgin and Child.

30. The Descent from the Cross.
Louvre, Paris 141
31. A Polyptych, with the Virgin and Child
and various scenes from the Nativity.
32. First Leaf of a Diptych.
Mayer Coll., Liverpool Museum 145
33. Plaque from a Casket Representing Dancers.
34.
A Mirror Case, with the Elopement of Guinivere
and Lancelot.
Mayer Coll., Liverpool Museum 149
35. Panel from a Casket.
36. Triptych made for Bishop Grandison of Exeter.
1327-1369. English
British Museum, London 153
37. Triptych.
Early fifteenth century. Italian

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Antoniewicz.
Romanische Forschungen.
G. Böhne, Leipsic.
Barbier de Montault, Xavier.
Le symbolisme du bélier sur les crosses d’ivoire au moyen
âge.
Revue de l’Art Chrétien. 1883, p. 157.
Darcel, Alfred.
Collection Basilewsky. Catalogue raisonné. 2 vols. Fol.
Paris, 1874.
Spitzer, Frédéric. La Collection Spitzer.
Les Ivoires. Notice de M. Alf. Darcel.
Paris, 1890.
Garucci. Storia dell’ arte cristiana. Vol. 6.
Prato, 1872-80.
Gatty, Charles T. Catalogue of Mediæval and Later Antiquities
contained in the Mayer Museum.
Gilbert & Walmsley. Liverpool, 1883.
Goodyear, W. H. Roman and Mediæval Art.
Flood & Vincent, Chatauqua Press.
Gori, Ant. Francesco. Thesaurus Veterum Diptychorum
Consularium et Ecclesiasticorum. 3 vols.
Florence, 1759.
Graeven, Hans. “Entstellte Consular Diptychon.”
Mitth. Arch. Instituts. Rom. 1892, p. 204.
“Ein Reliquienkästchen aus Pirano.” Jahrbuch der
Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten
Kaiserhauses, Wien. Vol. XX. 1899.
“Der Wiener-Genesis und byzantinische Elfenbeinwerke.”
Do. Vol. XXI. 1900.

“Antike Vorlagen Byzantinische Elfenbeinreliefs.”
Jahrbuch der K. Preuss. Kunstsammlungen, XVIII. 3.
1897.
Photographs.
Frühchristliche und mittelalterliche Elfenbeinwerke
in photographischer Nachbildung
“Aus Sammlungen in England.” 1898.
“Aus Sammlungen in Italien.” 1900.
Labarte, Jules. Histoire des Arts Industriels au Moyen Age
et à l’Epoque de la Renaissance.
Ve
A. Morel. Paris, 1872.
Maskell, W. Ancient and Mediæval Ivories in the
South Kensington Museum.
London, Chapman and Hall, 1872.
The Introduction is sold separately. Price 1s.
Meyer, Wilhelm (aus Speyer). Zwei Antike Elfenbeintafeln
der k. Staats-Bibliothek in München.
München, Verlag der K. Akademie. 1879.
Molinier, Emile. Histoire Générale des Arts appliqués
à l’Industrie du Ve
à la fin du XVIIIe
Siècle.
Vol I. Ivoires. E. Lévy et Cie
. Paris.
Catalogue des Ivoires. Musée national du Louvre. Paris,
1896.
Oldfield, Edmund. A Catalogue of Specimens of Ancient
Ivory Carvings in various collections.
With Memoir by Sir Digby Wyatt. First edition, 1856.
New edition, without memoir, 1893.
Pulzky, Francis. Catalogue of the Fejéváry Ivories in the
Museum of Joseph Mayer, Esq.
Liverpool, 1856.
Roujon, Molinier et Marcou. Catalogue Illustré Officiel de
l’Exposition Rétrospective de l’Art Français des Origines à
1800.
Paris, 1900.
Scharf, Sir G. Article on “Sculpture” in Waring’s

Art Treasures of the United Kingdom.
Manchester, 1873.
Schlumberger, G. Un Empereur Byzantin au Xe
Siècle.
Nicéphore Phocas. Paris. Didot. 1890.
L’Epopée Byzantine à la fin du Xe
Siècle.
Paris, Hachette et Cie
. 1896.
Stuhlfauth, G. Die altchristliche Elfenbeinplastik.
Leipsig, 1896.
Venturi, Adolfo. Un cofano civile bizantino di Cividale.
Gallerie nazionale italiane. Vol 3. 1897.
Storia dell’ arte italiana. I. Dai primordi dell’ arte
cristiana al tempo di Giustiano.
Hoepli. Milan, 1901.
Vöge, W. Katalog der Berliner Elfenbeinwerke.
(In course of publication.) Berlin, 1900.
“Ein deutscher Schnitzer des X Jahrhunderts.” Jahrbuch
der k. preuss. Kunstsammlungen. Vol. XX. Berlin, 1899.
Westwood, J. O. A Descriptive Catalogue of the
Fictile Ivories in the South Kensington Museum.
With an Account of the Continental Collections
of Classical and Mediæval Ivories.
Chapman and Hall. London, 1876.
Wilpert, Josef. Un Capitolo della Storia di Vestario.
L’Arte. 1898, 1899.

THE IVORY WORKERS OF THE
MIDDLE AGES

CHAPTER I
CONSULAR AND OTHER SECULAR DIPTYCHS
From the earliest dawn of the human race until our time, Ivory
has held a first place as a material for making the pleasing little
luxuries of life, religious or civil. Cave-Man has left behind him
incised sketches of animals, the product of his leisure moments; all
literature tells of the use of it, and the digger’s spade turns up a
series of charming objects, from the ornamental hair combs of a
prehistoric princess, who dazzled the Egyptian court some 7000
years B.C., to the ivory-handled walking-stick of some gouty old
Greek who lived at the outset of this most prosaic era.
To this passion for carved ivory we owe our knowledge of the
continuity of art for many centuries after the break up of the Roman
Empire, and the almost complete cessation of monumental
sculpture. In fact, no such continuous chain has survived in any
other artistic production; and this alone makes the study of the craft
of such intense interest, illustrating as it does the early quickening of
art in a period of great obscurity between the old order and the new.
There is no real break between Classical art and that of the
Middle Ages; the early Christian was the last phase of Roman art,
and the Church handed on with the Christian religion a mass of
Judaic and Latin culture which the barbarian races, having none of
their own, accepted, but through their different nature and
requirements, modified and debased. Thence we see the continuity,
and also the two main causes of the deterioration of Classical art:
first, by the rise of Christianity, which was in its early days
antagonistic to the plastic arts, owing to a haunting horror of
images, inherited from Judaism, and a fear of falling back under the
pagan spell of sensuous beauty: and though later and for a long
period the Church became by far the most munificent and inspiring

patron, the final tendency in the Eastern Empire was to stifle the
true spirit of art by subjecting it to as dogmatic a rigour in design as
in doctrine. Secondly the near presence of the powerful and rapidly
assimilating barbarian, who imitating all things, often ignorant of
their meaning, and incapable of good workmanship, reduced art in
the Western Empire to the lowest ebb.
In Constantinople there lingered a fading shadow of the old
Greek spirit, which, at least, inspired the craftsman to finished
workmanship and a love of elegant form.
In spite of the paralysis caused by the enforcement of a fixed
canon of iconography there were long periods of high artistic
excellence (Figs. 17 and 18). We have an exaggerated idea of the
rigidity of Byzantine art owing to the numerous repetitions by
inferior craftsmen which are found in our museums, and by
confusing the Golden Age, with the period of real deadness which
commenced in the twelfth century, and has lasted to this very day in
the art of the Greek Church. Byzantine art became the technical
school of the younger nations, teaching them craftsmanship and
design, thus enabling them to express their more impulsive religious
emotions and leading them on till they found the full expression of
their genius in the aspiring beauty of Gothic art.
The best period for commencing the study of mediæval ivory-
carving is with the fourth century, A.D., and the great series of
Consular Diptychs which form the backbone of the early history of
the craft and created a type which lasted through the whole
mediæval era.
Theodosius the Great (✝395), divided the Roman Empire
between his two sons. Arcadius ruled the Eastern Empire, his capital
continuing at Constantinople. Honorius, then only eleven years old,
nominally governed the Western. He did not make the Eternal City
his seat of government, in fact the Imperial Court had rarely
returned there since it was deserted by Diocletian. Milan was
considered too exposed to the attacks of the barbarians, so the city
of Ravenna, almost impregnable owing to the surrounding marshes,

was chosen, and remained the capital of the varying rulers of Italy
until the eighth century.
Two Consuls were chosen for the East and West, their names
continuing to give the legal date to the year, according to the ancient
custom. And though every vestige of political power was gone, the
post was the object of much ambition, it being a personal favour of
the Emperor, and conferring on the holder the highest rank. It also
brought great popularity with the people, who still honoured the
name of Consul, full of memories of the great republic, and still more
passionately appreciated the Games in the Circus, which it was the
expensive privilege of the Consul to inaugurate on his accession.
These Games were an occasion for great ostentation, and were
carried out with lavish expenditure. First there was a procession of
all the dignitaries of the city, in which the Consul was the most
important figure; this was greeted on its arrival at the amphitheatre
by the tens of thousands of spectators starting up and clapping their
hands; then all were breathlessly still while the Consul, cynosure of
every eye, flung down into the arena the small white napkin, or
Mappa Circensis, with which he, and he alone, might signal the
commencement of the games.
This was the psychic moment, and the scene has been preserved
for all time on the carved ivory diptychs which were presented by
the Consul to the Senators and other high officials in
commemoration of his office.
The word diptych is derived from the Greek δίπτυχον or “double
folded,” and the diptychs given by the Consuls were an elaborate
form of the ordinary writing-tablets or pugillares, “a thing held in the
fist.” They consisted of two pieces of ivory joined together like a
book by hinges, decorated on the outside and grooved inside to hold
the wax, which was written on by a sharp style. The most important
leaf is the right hand one, or that which comes uppermost when the
book is closed, on it, with a few early exceptions, the Consul’s name
was always inscribed, the second leaf bearing his titles.

These consular diptychs probably contained the Fasti Consulares
or List of Consuls up to the year of the donor.
They were often gilded, the inscriptions being painted in red; and
some were of great size, as the Byzantine Angel in the British
Museum (frontispiece), which measures 16¼ by 5½ in., and is so
large that no known tusk would suffice to cut it. It has been thought
that the ancients possessed some secret for rolling out ivory or
joining it invisibly; but it is more likely that elephants had not been
so much killed down for the sake of their ivory, so larger tusks were
obtainable.
These tablets were so costly that Theodosius decreed in 384 that
they should only be given away by the Consules Ordinarii, or the
Consuls admitted on the 1st of January and who named the year,
and not by those who replaced them or by any other officials; but
this law was soon disregarded, and nine years later we read in a
letter of the noble Roman Symmachus that, in honour of his son’s
elevation to the quæstorship he is sending to the very same
Emperor a diptych set in gold.
This series of diptychs spreads over a period of about 150 years,
from the end of the fourth to the middle of the sixth century. The
sculpture steadily decreasing in value, the earliest examples show
freedom of design and good work, but the last were nothing but
indifferent repetitions of the same subjects, in bad proportion and
worse relief till it became possible to produce a figure such as that of
Orestes (Fig. 4). Soon after Orestes the Emperor Justinian abolished
this ancient office, and, really, he must be held justified if all the
consuls could do was to give bloodthirsty shows to the citizens, and
still more corrupt the standard of art by distributing such despicable
types of art among the provincials.
It is noticeable that all the fifth century diptychs, the earliest and
the best, both consular and otherwise are from the West. By the end
of the century there was a complete collapse, following the further
invasions of the Huns and other barbarians, and the Western Empire
flickered out with the suppression, by Odoacer the Goth, of the last

emperor, grotesquely named Romulus Augustulus, a sort of satire on
his unworthy following of such mighty predecessors.
Orestes, Consul at Rome, 530 (Fig. 4), No. 34,[1] is the only
Western Consul of the sixth century whose diptych has been
preserved; the style is so like that of Constantinople, that it gives
weight to Graeven’s theory that the medallions on it represent
Amalasuntha, daughter of Theodoric the Ostro-Goth, who was then
ruling in the name of her young son Athalric, and who carried on
that short renaissance of the Arts, so artificially introduced from
Constantinople by her father. The busts cannot represent the
reigning Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora, because at that
time he was forty-eight years of age, and they never had a son.
Before passing to the real consular diptychs, it is impossible to
leave unmentioned the splendid tablets of Probianus at Berlin (Fig.
2), No. 50.
We know no more than what the well-cut inscription tells us, that
he was VICARIUS URBIS ROMÆ, or Vice-Prefect of the city of Rome. But,
judging from the style, the good proportions (admitting the
convention which made the person of highest rank the largest), the
dignified faces, and the natural arrangement of the drapery, it must
be of early date, probably towards the end of the fourth century,
about the time of the beautiful tablets of the Nicomachi and the
Symmachi (No. 58), to which it is closely allied by the well-hung
drapery and the surrounding border of delicately cut honeysuckle
pattern.

[BERLIN MUSEUM
2. SECOND LEAF OF THE DIPTYCH
OF PROBIANUS
End of fourth century
The top has a slight gable, as in the early diptych of Probus (Fig.
3), No. 2. Probianus is depicted in the Tribunal, sitting on his high-
backed throne, surrounded by his clerks, who bear piles of writing
tablets, and below, probably outside the cancelli or barrier, which is
to be found in all Roman basilicas, stand the litigants, who appear to
be congratulating him. Outstretched fingers, in early art, meant the

act of speech, and then, as now, congratulatory addresses were
inscribed and presented. On the second leaf we see the address on
his knee, and by a curious convention he is writing with his own
hand the words they acclaim him with, “PROBIANE FLOREAS.”
ALINARI PHOTO.] [AOSTA CATHEDRAL
3. FIRST LEAF OF THE DIPTYCH OF PROBUS

In the first leaf he is delivering judgment, and the two lower
figures wear the toga, showing they are of high rank, and on the
other both he and the litigants are arrayed in the chlamys of
ordinary folk. Below, between the litigants is seen a mysterious
object on a tripod stand, which some say is the clepsydra or water-
clock, and others declare to be the official inkpot. On the right of the
Vice-Prefect is a curious standard-like erection called the vexilla
regalia, on which was painted the portraits of the Emperor and
Empress, and which was never absent from any important
ceremonial.
The diptych first on Molinier’s list covers an antiphonary in the
Treasury of the Basilica at Monza, which contains so many other
interesting antiquities.
Legend tells us that this ivory was sent about the year 600 to the
Lombard queen, Theodolinda, by Pope Gregory the Great in
acknowledgment of her efforts to convert her very barbaric subjects
from the Arian heresy to Catholicism.
Three figures are represented, a bearded soldier and a stately
lady, who has with her a little boy. It is evidently a portrait group,
and has given rise to many questionings; and among the names of
the numerous historical personages connected with it are those of
the general Constantius, his wife, the famous Galla Placidia,
daughter of Theodosius I., and their little son, afterwards Valentinian
III. This would place it towards the end of the first twenty-five years
of the fifth century. This theory is quite possible, historically; but,
judging from the style, the attribution of Molinier is more likely. He
considers that the figures represent another trio who lived a quarter
of a century earlier. The decadence in art was so exceedingly rapid
that it is very doubtful if such good craftsmanship and originality of
design were possible at the later period. Molinier suggests that the
carving represents the great general Stilicho, who though of Vandal
origin, raised himself to a position of great power. He faithfully
served Theodosius I., and the Emperor on his deathbed intrusted to
him the care of his two young sons.

Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.
More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge
connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.
Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and
personal growth every day!
ebookbell.com

Organizing For Change Integrating Architectural Thinking In Other Fields Michael Shamiyeh Editor Dom Research Laboratory Editor

More Related Content

Similar to Organizing For Change Integrating Architectural Thinking In Other Fields Michael Shamiyeh Editor Dom Research Laboratory Editor (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

Organizing For Change Integrating Architectural Thinking In Other Fields Michael Shamiyeh Editor Dom Research Laboratory Editor