Get Oriented to Work in Organisations

You already know that work is important and necessary to thrive as a person.

But you may not be fully aware that you have a capability to do work largely independent of your skills, expertise, knowledge, emotional intelligence or even IQ as measured. Using this work-capability properly contributes mightily to your well-being.

Your capability to do things and get others to back you or follow your lead develops through your life. By appreciating the trajectory that you are on, you can see where you are and where you may one day reach.

And then there is something else: the domain of work-responsibility in society within which you feel most natural. Opportunities here have expanded massively over the past century but there is a bottom-line in all work that is economic.

As it turns out, economics is not the be-all and end-all. There are other bottom lines to be considered.

Are they problematic?
Yes they are!

For organizations: while the tyranny of manual labour is now passing, there is still immense difficulty in finding gratifying and remunerative employment within a properly organised environment.

For societies: while arbitrary interference and the daily use of violence to settle disputes has lessened, corruption, crime and social alienation are widely present in all classes of most large societies. Governments generally function in an inefficient, corrupt and oppressive way.

The reason is simple: we humans have not evolved to work in large impersonal organizations or in large cities and societies. So our instincts and intuition do not reliably guide their design and management. (But that does not mean instincts and intuition are unimportant.)

Organizational and communal processes, being nothing but human activity and relationships, are subject to the demons of power and egotism. These interfere with success. THEEFrameworks take such phenomena into account without expecting unrealistic self-restraint or impeccable virtue.

If you look out for what is explained here, then you can pilot your life and avoid the rockier reefs that bedevil careers. If you are in a top position, then you can certainly make a better world happen for your people and improve your organization and community.

Work is about a responsibility for altering reality to some lesser or greater extent.

To alter reality we must perceive reality, think about reality, engage with reality, and test reality, so as to learn. Above all, we must handle other people who have entirely different views about reality and what is realistic i.e. important, relevant, possible, desired, feasible, viable &c.

While it is easy to say that all work depends on dealing directly with reality, there is a big problem in practice. We do not know reality. No-one does.

Our use of language enables us to make sense of reality in social terms, based on what we experience and come to know. The way we «make sense» affects how we think, relate and act. So we construct a reality via our use of language-PH'5. This is hardly a scientific construction, but it has to be good enough. It has to be or you give up—or you are fired for failing. You then feel compelled to find different work where your construction of reality is good enough for you to succeed.

This means that work (as responsibility) can only be understood through the framework for using language-PH'5 as explained when we examine its essence.

However, using language for the specific purpose of altering reality with others (i.e. working, managing) places a much greater strain on us than using language simply to communicate or express ourselves.

There are vast differences in work required by a great society. In each of society's main domains of work-responsibility, organisation and management look very different.

The usual mental association with «different» work is to compare engineers to nurses to salesmen; or retailing to mining to construction. When we think of an organization and its management, we usually have such examples in mind. However, there exists other work which is not primarily about economic calculation and not obviously comparable. Examples include the work to raise a family, scholarly inquiry, religious celebration, artistic creation, and the judiciary.
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The work to procreate and belong occurs and is organised and managed within a family. Family-type work—to rear children, handle illness and misfortune, support relatives—is different but needed for personal comfort and for society.

Scientific and scholarly work is organised and managed via disciplines. The discipline must ensure the quality production of knowledge. Its hierarchical organisation has little in common with the management hierarchy of a conventional organization.

Work must be done to ensure communities are cohesive and can deal with issues that concern their members. The responsibility for organising and managing society's institutions requires full-time effort from politicians, judges, movement activists and others.

There are seven different domains of responsibility within which people work and where distinctive hierarchical forms of organisation and management are required.

The Frameworks to follow will therefore:

► examine the nature of these domains;
► show how these domains interact;
► clarify different requisite organisational forms;
► identify the nature of work and capabilities required;
► consider how to manage those people accordingly.

• The Nature of Work.

• Domains of Responsibility within a Complex Society.

• How Work in Each Domain is Organised.

  There will be several Frameworks in each domain: types of work, handling progressive complexity, organising management &c.

• The most studied domain is that of formal organizations, organised on an economic basis and oriented to producing tangible goods and services.

  Although the Frameworks will be formulated precisely, they do not offer recipes. Almost nothing is more complicated than organising work-responsibility requisitely. So the Framework must be applied intelligently with careful analysis of particular work situations.