Monthly Archives: August 2010


Are you changing your Organizational Design? Build your Japanese Park

The unicist ontology for organizational design provides the structure of the organizational process to be used when a business starts or a big change is being implemented.

By just implementing the first step of the Unicist Organizational Design you will know how big the change is.

Steps of the Organizational Process

1) Japanese Park: The first step to define the limits of the environment is letting things work in a natural way.

This demonstrates the functionality of the context and allows defining the possibilities of what needs to be designed. When the values shown by the environment are extremely far away from what is needed the organizational process cannot be implemented.

2) It is necessary to clarify the benefits of the parts involved in a working process. Both the organizational benefit and the personal benefits need to be approached in a “hypothetical” way. This step establishes the expectations of the parts involved.

3) The responsibilities of the parts need to be defined within the limits of the capacity of the individuals to assume them. When it is necessary to develop “maximal strategies” one must consider the capacity of managing risks, of managing uncertainty and the frustration capacity of the participants. The design has to be based on the capacity of individuals to assume the responsibility.

4) The methodology of the work processes defines the logic that needs to be used. This methodology needs to be known before the individuals begin to generate benefits for the organization and for themselves. These methodologies need to be adequate to the level of the participants.

5) The confirmation of the benefits implies that the individuals know the benefits that need to be produced for the organization and for them. The “Minimum Strategies” can only be designed after this has become transparent.

6) Manage the possibility of minimizing costs to ensure the minimum strategy. The objective of this step is to confirm that the costs are within the limits of a minimum strategy.

7) Define the use value of the organization in its unit without considering the different subsystems or individuals that integrate it. It has to be defined what it is that the organization needs to achieve and how this objective will be fulfilled.

8) Define the methods to be used in the organization and how the use of the methods will be measured. The methods need to include the quality assurance and / or quality control system.

9) The cost of the solution that is being designed needs to be confirmed. This implies redefining alternatives that allow cost reductions that do not modify the structure of the organization. This necessarily drives to redefining the previously defined stages seeking for cost reductions.

10) Making the pilot tests. Both destructive and non-destructive pilot tests need to be used. The first test has to be the destructive test in order to be aware of the limits of the validity of the solution.

Japanese Park – The first step

By just observing how the system is spontaneously managed you will know the distance between what happens today and the necessary functionality. This distance defines the size of the change to be implemented.

If the distance is small, just continue with the steps of the organizational design. If the distance is big, a valid change management technology is needed.

If a big change technology is needed, but left aside, the possibility of making a successful change is inhibited.

Diana Belohlavek
VP Knowledge Management
& Communication


Process Engineering: Hunting versus Farming

The nature of hunting businesses requires a freedom oriented approach while the farming business requires a security oriented approach.

While the hunter seeks for new boundaries to reach a maximal strategy, the farmer guarantees the production of the minimum strategy for survival.

The natural organization is just a homeostasis integrating the needs defined by the type of business and the type of a company.

The operational type of a company is defined by the integration of enterprising and entrepreneurial attitudes and the type of business depends on the integration of hunting and farming components.

It is necessary to define the trade-off between entrepreneurial and enterprising attitudes consistent with the farming or hunting nature of a business.

Farming and Hunting roles are integrated within a company but should not be mixed. Asking farmers to hunt is as ineffective as asking hunters to develop farming activities.
Choose the right people for the right places.

Access Google Books

Diana Belohlavek

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm.
https://www.unicist.net/engineering/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/turi.pdf