This paper is an invitation to enter a new era of organizational design – the age of “conscious cooperative design.” It is a call to abandon modern theories, processes and models of organization design that are based upon mechanistic, rational, objective assumptions and to embrace a new genre of organizations designed as if life matters.
Having served the industrial age and enabled progress in the areas of transportation, healthcare and communication among others, organizations designed upon mechanistic assumptions have reached the end of their usefulness. They are transforming, some consciously and cooperatively; others violently and at the expense of human, financial and environmental well being.
As scholars and practitioners of organization design and development we need not concern ourselves with questions of how to over throw the old systems. Their demise is in process. We must, however, gather together to imagine, innovate and invent new processes and structures for designing human organizations and communities – consciously – based upon relational, cooperative, life giving, values and principles.
Developing cooperative design intelligence and applying it to create organizations which by design render cooperation inevitable is the most urgent and essential challenge of our time. It is a life sustaining imperative; and it is possible, according to evolutionary biologist and World Business Academy Fellow, Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris,
“Our worldwide economic system, our transportation and communications technology, our information revolution, have bound us into a body of humanity that is now being pushed for the sake of its survival to evolve from competition to cooperation among nations and with our environment…We are capable of rega ...