Emerging Assumptions About Organization Design, Knowledge and Action

Abstract

Participants in the Organizational Design Community’s 2013 Annual Conference faced the challenge of “making organization design knowledge actionable.” This essay summarizes the opinions and insights participants shared during the conference. I reflect on these ideas, connect them to recent scholarly thinking about organization design, and conclude that seeking to make design knowledge actionable is nudging the community away from an assumption set based upon linearity and equilibrium, and toward a new set of assumptions based on emergence, self-organization, and non-linearity.

Keywords: organization design, actionable knowledge, design thinking, evolutionary experimentation, non-linearity, emergence