How do you Manage to Shift the Focus to Relationships?

You need a change of perspective. Don’t see organizations as self-contained constructs, but rather as open, breathing, and constantly reshaping, dynamic structures whose elements have a regulating effect through their relationships to one another. If you look beyond the narrower boundaries, you can better grasp and exploit the potential that natural regulatory systems hold.

In doing so, you should include the development of relationships over time, i.e. the dynamic relations between things, people, organizations, in your considerations. Indeed, relational structures evolve through their activities and the repercussions on them.

If complementary relationships and ambivalent states occur, you can find the solution in “not-only-but-also” approaches.

It is not in simplifying, but in knowingly leaving interrelationships in their complexity that the real source of added value lies. At the interfaces between disciplines and ways of thinking there is enormous potential for something new; this is where value can emerge, and it can emerge directly from this diversity and indeterminacy. To tap this source, it is not primarily capital, land and machines that are required, but intellectual and social skills. If you want to deal with this new diversity and indeterminacy, what is needed above all is mutual understanding through enriching communication, especially at the interfaces. The organizational structure plays a critical role in this. In order to achieve this change of perspective, the change must be managed.

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