User:Orgbio

Orgbio is short for Organizational Biology. This is the study of organizations apply biological principles to facilitate understanding.

Why biology? Because we create organizations in our own image and constructs. We are biological beings, therefore, is it surprising that our organizations are biological in nature?

Orgbio is divided into a Micro and Macro level. Micro is concerned with the workings within the organization and Macro the organization in the context of the environment. Micro is divided into two concepts, Mass and Agility. Simply put, Mass is anything you can drop on your foot. Agility is the effective (or not so much) application of Mass to achieve organizational objectives.

Agility flows to mass. For example, a corporate policy at one point was the potential and ability of the person writing it. Once written, it immediately becomes mass. Like implicit knowledge, agility can never be measured; if measured it is mass.

Mass can be thought of as a continuum flowing from productive through neutral to unproductive or destructive. Organisms are continuingly pruning and shedding their cellular structures, so do organizations. Processes, machinery, policy, customer lists all have a defined life span that must be expelled from the organization if it hopes to remain successful.

In the end, that is reason for considering and studying organizational biology - so as to assess the viability of an organization in a static environment and the potential it has to successfully react to change.