A Systems-Theoretic Approach to Organizational Design and Analysis

Abstract

A significant challenge for large organizations lies in organizational design, particularly for public sector bureaucracies and the largest of industry’s private firms. Organizations tend to turn to organizational design improvements when facing effectiveness and efficiency issues. Unfortunately, these large organizations struggle with organizational design because of the sheer size and complexity of their organization which results in a fragmented and often times faulty approach to improving their organization. Organizations, at their core, are a special type of system or a set of components that operate or work together to achieve some common purpose. Organizations are purely social systems in that their elements are not technical or engineered.

Systems Theory provides a lens through which these types of social systems can be studied. Just like in engineered systems, an organization's emergent behavior is determined by its internal elements' complex interactions. Traditional organizational design and analysis methods focus on optimizing these internal elements in the hopes of re-integrating optimized elements in pursuit of organizational-level optimal behavior. Just like in traditional systems engineering, component-level optimization does not yield system-level optimal behavior.

This thesis codifies a systems-theoretic approach to organizational design and analysis using the language of Systems Theory and the semantics of Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes. By extending traditional Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), a tool for hazard analysis used primarily for engineered systems, this work refines STPA’s concepts and terminology to be more accessible for analyzing social systems. Building off this extension, this thesis leverages a contemporary Department of Defense reorganization effort as a case study, illustrating Systems-Theoretic Organizational Design and Analysis (STAODA) as a tool to assess organizational design options.