Abstract
The term self-organization has been successfully used for years in management literature, driven by agile organizational concepts in which self-organization plays an outstanding role. Here, self-organization sometimes stands for autonomous teams, time management, agile forms of organization, or new work, to name just a few. Only in the rarest of cases the statement “The whole is more than the sum of its parts” is in the foreground. And this is exactly how we want to understand self-organization. We use the term self-organization as it has been increasingly used in the natural and social sciences since about the mid-1970s. We regard self-organization as a universal principle that creates something new in evolutionary terms and whose basic concepts are applied in nature, in the psychological and social realms, and in technology. Thus, we have a common basic concept that can be applied to individual human beings, teams, organizations, societies, and even to technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics and their interaction with humans. It helps us to understand, shape, and lead the development and transformation of individuals, teams, organizations, and societies. We outline the characteristics of a project as a teal temporary organization.
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Oswald, A. (2022). The Whole—More than the Sum of Its Parts! Self-Organization—The Universal Principle!. In: Ding, R., Wagner, R., Bodea, CN. (eds) Research on Project, Programme and Portfolio Management. Lecture Notes in Management and Industrial Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86248-0_2
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