Metasystemic Re-Engineering

Abstract

In the last decades organizational transformation has become a fundamental strategy for survival. It is a multi dimensional change of relationship patterns among executives, professionals, clients, and providers that define their organizational setting. The main difficulty lies in the persistence of the emotional, experiential, and cognitive “understanding” of the roles people play in the organisation and the dimensions that intervene in the assessments regarding action and strategy. This consideration centres the transformation effort on people. The main question to be answered is what it takes to shift people to work efficiently in a different organizational setting, and how to characterize and prepare for this setting. This article summarises a methodological proposition for organizational transformation centred on the distinction of the “observer” developed by Maturana and Varela (The tree of knowledge) that shows that our biological condition does not allow for an objective perception of reality. This fact brings forth the notion that as a result of culture and personal trajectory each human being has its own perception of the world in which he lives. The characterization of this “uniqueness” is captured by the notion of the human being as an embodied “observer” characterized by a set of distinctions that specifies the dimensions of its perceptions and blindness. An organizational transformation is the process of developing a new “managerial observer.” The fundamental methodological proposition is that an organizational transformation process is possible if, and only if, there is a transformation of the “organizational observer” shared by the community of workers and managers as distinctions in action.