“The Bigger Picture”—Some of the VSM’s Key Messages

Abstract

This chapter intends to refocus the reader on some of the key messages of the VSM as a takeaway without explicitly referring to or using its specific conceptual language. As such it attempts to paint a new picture of organizations different from the organizational chart. Instead of “hierarchies”, it proposes to use the term “organizational depth” and offers a new way to draw organizational charts. Many leadership and management approaches today focus on the individual and personality. This chapter invites to consider also the role of structures on the performance, behaviors, and interrelationships of people. It also reminds us that the VSM’s insistence of recursively embedded metasystems does not allow us to view organizations from a pure efficiency and an automation-driven perspective alone. The viability of the organization transcends a too mechanistic perspective and requires approaches more suitable to the metasystemic dimension of organizations. Finally, this chapter compares the VSM with the most common organizational images and approaches such as the organizational chart, process, and network perspective and evaluates their respective contribution and value to understanding and designing organizational structures.

In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things, you have long taken for granted.

(Bertrand Russell, Philosopher)