Organizational Management: A Biological Perspective

Here’s a through, Why do we use these biological adjectives like well-”BEING” and “Health” to describe our commercial/professional entities, and why does it completely makes sense.

Ever noticed that Organization and Organism have one Prefix in common, and that is “ORGAN”: the word which when googled is essentially described as:-

And the suffix -ization mean

So if you do your math, Organization would mean:

And this brings up an Idea that we humans, no matter how creative we may think we are, have to find a way to mimic nature to come up with an Ground Breaking Idea.

Its called Bio-mimicry and Technology has been doing this for very long time.

Falling to Bio-mimicry gives you a wheel that you don't have to reinvent. It gives you a straightforward guiding principle that you can use to strategically organize the whole engagement to self sustain.

Through my years of managing engagements I’ve been able to formulate a Theory,

In short it’s that:

The whole organization is like a body of an Organism.

The Departments that you setup are the Organs with the specialized functions. Each Department may have its own level of complexity.

And the Employees are the individual cells.

Now if you expand on this simplistic structure to see the possibilities of your existential experiences, here’s what you’d need to take care of

1. The Postnatal nurturing requires extended care from the parent authority, sleepless nights that the entrepreneurs like any new parent are quite familiar with.
2. The monitoring and training through the naive times to ensure safety.
3. And as the Organization grows, investing in exercises and nutrition to develop a good Immune System, which is the Governance that irradiate the cancerous cells and avoid cancer growth within the organization. Those instances where a particular cell starts acting wired and affects other cells as well, hampering the functioning of the overall Organ or Department.
4. The Proper specialization and optimization of each organ to ensure that a meaningful symbiotic relationship forms between them that’s mutually nurturing.

These are just a few examples of the agenda that comes up when you look at an organization as an organism.

You understand the vastness of the area of focus and monitoring that needs to go into, But more importantly it gives you a guiding principle towards the kind of areas that you’d want to focus on to maintain the health.

For Example,

It cant be just providing for nutrition but the proper kind of nutrition for the whole organization to the single cell, the employee like monitory, knowledge and skill-set, mental toughness, purpose, etc.

It cant be just about creating of departments but also validating the support it provides to the other department and weather the specialization is focused or dispersed.

You can look at creating specific organ systems within the organization, such as

1. The Nervous system, whose primary focus should be to ideate around survival and growth.
2. The Immune System, whose primary focus is to govern and identify internal misalignment, shortfalls, issues, work on getting them removed.
3. The Digestive system, this is where the muscles are build and power is generated. The Production line of any organization is the Digestive system.
4. The Skeletal System, this is where the Finances and Infrastructure is handled. If this breaks, you’d need external support to move around or you’d be bed ridden depending on the level of damage.

Now I could go on but you get the idea. And if you design your engagement/organization with this thought process, you don't need to be a management guru to come up with a winning strategy.

Just think about the stuffs you need to do to stay healthy and you’ll figure out the solution.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this, so do comment and let me know your point of view and if you can relate to this idea.