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This article describes two different and contrasting contexts or ways of viewing or thinking about people and life. Since they depict clearly different or even opposing views and vary on many key dimensions, I think of these different views as different paradigms. The word "paradigm" comes from the Greek "paradeigma". It was originally a scientific term. Paradigm today refers to a model representing a theory, an organized set of perceptions, a set of assumptions, or a frame of reference. In a more general sense it is the way we "see", "hear", and "touch" the world not in terms of the physical senses of sight, hearing or touch, but in terms of perceiving, understanding, and interpreting. Paradigms are, in a way, a world of their own, a world view 1!.
This article is about breaking out of old models or organizing people to work and creating new paradigms. It is about discovering flexible new ways of "seeing" the world--"seeing" in the sense of perceiving, understanding, interpreting and organizing with people to achieving a common purpose. We are talking about creating an expansive atmosphere in which we can honestly share what we are experiencing and make principled decisions. This article is about transforming our organizations' simple binary screens of "black and white", "yes or no", "1 or 2" to full Technicolor, or human potential currently harnessed by binary thinking. Building new organizational forms (paradigms) or comprehensive change out of the permanence of the current structures constitutes both a current challenge and a reality. I am an advocate of the open organization--an approach to studying and organizing work which provides simultaneously for standardization and for the capacity and energy needed for change. It is an approach which provides leaders and others concerned with cultural change with easily accessible windows through which they may view the workings of their organizations, their vendors and their customers.
OPEN ORGANIZATIONS
Three characteristics, integrated wholeness, internal responsiveness, and external responsiveness, may be used to describe an entire organization and its subsystems. The open organizational model 2! examines these characteristics at individual, group, and organizational levels. It also indicates the interchange among them.
At the individual level:
* Integrated wholeness relates to self-concept which is organized by personal values.
* Internal responsiveness refers to...