The actions of people are developed in organizational settings or are linked to them. To such an extent that Peter Drucker (1) argues that: " Society in all developed countries has become a society of organizations in which most, if not all, social tasks are done by and in an organization ".
This leads us to reflect on the specific implications that this phenomenon acquires in our daily lives and to analyze what challenges it poses to us and what competencies it requires us to act effectively in these organizational areas. To address the analysis of these questions, it seems pertinent to begin by inquiring about what particular type of social system is an organization.
Throughout the last decades the organizational phenomenon has been analyzed from different conceptual approaches, giving rise to the emergence of a varied range of theories about the nature of organizations. Different mechanical or biological metaphors have even been used in order to account for the subject of study approached (2). Thus, organizations were analyzed as if they were machines, living organisms, brains, or flows of change and transformation. Each of these theories invites us to observe the complex and paradoxical world of organizations from a particular point of view.
What is significant about these theories is not that they are true or false, but rather that through the interpretation they provide us, they condition our way of “seeing” and thinking and, therefore, also our ability to act and transform. For example, when we analyze organizations as if they were machines designed to achieve certain objectives, we think of their components as parts that have to function smoothly and orderly, and we try to organize and manage them from a mechanistic logic.
Another perspective of analysis of organizations, especially effective in addressing the problem of knowledge work management, is the one that highlights its communicational dimension and proposes observing the organizations focusing on the networks of conversations that constitute it.
From this perspective we maintain that every organization can be seen as a conversational system. Like a network of people who, through conversations, generate commitment links. Fernando Flores (3), who was a pioneer in noting this " linguistic character of organizations ", maintains that "what constitutes the company are these networks of conversations" and that is why he suggests " looking at organizations as recurring networks of commitments humans who go through language ”.
When we analyze organizations, we ask ourselves what characterizes them, why we can distinguish them as social subjects and what gives them the character of a unit with the capacity for autonomous behavior.
A possible answer to these questions can be found in this communicational dimension that emerges from its genesis, manifests itself in its daily actions and affects its effectiveness.
If we reflect on how a company is created, how an organization is born, we can see that a conversational process is required for it to be born. For someone to say "we create this company to do such and such a thing", to invite others, to start a set of conversations that will end at a point where it will be said: "today we are constituted as a company. Conversational processes that coordinate actions in a certain sense are those that make it possible for a group of people to declare that they are constituted as an organization. The Mission of a company is a communication act, it is a foundational "declaration".
We can also ask ourselves about the boundaries of an organization. Like any entity distinguishable from its environment, it must be able to determine which are the boundaries that delimit it from what it is not.
We can affirm that those margins that allow an organization to be profiled are also conversational. It is not the walls of your offices or your production plants that establish the limits of what an organization is and what it is not. Its delimitation arises from the statute or social contract that creates it and from the hiring policies that define who are members of the company and who are not. When someone within it, with the authority to do so, says "I hire you" or "I fire you", that person happens to be inside or outside the organization. It is communication, it is the generative power of language that defines the boundaries of the company. It is the conversations that constitute the organization as a unit with the capacity for its own development.
If we examine the structure and work processes in which the particular dynamics of organizational behaviors are manifested, we again recognize that this structure arises from the agreements and commitments that are established through conversations and are reflected in organizational charts, statutes, contracts, methods and procedures.
If we reflect on how the culture of an organization is expressed, we will see that it comes into existence in the narratives that its members make about their history, their behavioral habits, their values, their customs and ways of doing things.
If we want to find out what the work climate of an organization is, we will have to observe what the members of the organization say and remain silent, if they hold conversations of possibility or resignation, motivation or disengagement, fear or of confidence, of optimism or of concern.
That is, if we analyze any type of organization in its most diverse dimensions, we will come to the understanding that if we want to understand the “soul” of an organization, there is no other place that gives us a greater depth of view than observing the type of conversations that they keep in their bosom. This understanding opens the door for us to advance in the analysis of the competencies that require us to act effectively in these conversational networks that enable organizational action.
(1) Drucker Peter, La Sociedad Poscapitalista, Sudamericana, Bs. As., 1993.
(2) Morgan Gareth, Images of the Organization, Alfaomega, Mexico, 1991.
(3) Flores Fernando, Creating organizations for the future, Dolmen / Granica, 1994.
