“A corporation is a legal entity that is separate and distinct from its owners. Corporations enjoy most of the rights and responsibilities that individuals possess: they can enter contracts, lend and borrow money, sue and be sued, hire employees, own assets and pay taxes. Some refer to it as a “legal person”. ~ Investopedia
What is an organisation?
Today, we tend to attribute many human characteristics to organisations over and above those anticipated when the concept of the limited liability company was first created by law. We talk about corporate responsibility, identity, culture, reputation, behaviour, and even corporate conscience. Yet where, in an organisation, do these features reside?
Is the Chief Executive? The Board of Directors? Or the staff? Is it somewhere in the policies and procedures? The expectations of the organisations clients?
And does it actually matter?
Perhaps the more important question is: who or what is responsible when an organisation goes ‘bad’?
Legal persons… versus actual persons
When little humans are born, society tends to place the burden of responsibility for ensuring that person grows up to be a ‘good’ person squarely at the feet of its parents. We expect these parents – collectively or separately – to put some effort into ensuring that young John or Jane learns manners, and builds healthy self-esteem, gains an understanding of appropriate risk-taking, can self-regulate emotions and behaviour, can defer gratification to set and achieve long-term goals, treats people kindly, and knows how to look after themselves.
It isn’t generally necessary for a human child to learn all the laws of the country they live in, because general rules of thumb – like do unto others as you would have them do unto you – are sufficient to keep us on the right path.
In an organisation, this isn’t the case. If there was a founder – a philanthropist or entrepreneur – who kicked the whole thing off, chances are that in the beginning, the organisation carries many of the characteristics of that person.
But as it grows, merges or acquires, or in the case of government agencies, is crafted by parliament, committee or decree, the link between stated purpose and observable traits becomes increasingly tenuous. Our organisations gain a life of their own, with seemingly invisible, organic instructions guiding them.
Studying the ‘mind’ of an organisation
Just as scientists continue to marvel and ponder the way the ‘mind’ and ‘awareness’ spring unbidden from a mass of interconnected neurons with chemical potential in the human brain, our organisations become more than the sum of their parts.
So how, then, should we make sense of the organisation?
Of its potential for good… and bad?
Of how it treats the people within it… and the people outside it?
Of how it passes its ‘genetic’ information from year to year even though the individuals from which it is made come and go?
Of what it values… and what it neglects to value?
Let’s start exactly where we began. Let’s examine the organisation as if it were a person – not just legally, but in other ways too. While many of its inner mysteries may remain unsolved, perhaps we will come to love its character a little more if we approach its peculiarities like we would a new acquaintance. Perhaps we can see its quirks and foibles intriguing and worthy of our curiosity.
Because our organisations are significant in their own right. They influence our lives in uncountable ways – seen and unseen.
And just like the cells in our own bodies would struggle to make sense of the ‘whole’ we sometimes struggle to see the ‘organisational forest’ for the ’employee trees’.
Perhaps in doing so, we will catch a glimpse of something beyond our current understanding. That we may be able to identify within the collection of individual humans we call an organisation, something resembling a conscience. That these ‘things’ that we have created indeed have minds of their own.
Or as Frankenstein’s monster said:
“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand”. ~ Mary Shelly