The organisation I am working for at the moment is under considerable pressure to restructure. Now I've been through lots of restructures in the past, and few if any restructures have achieved what they were supposed to. One of the reasons for this, in my opinion, is the failure to recognise the realities of how people work.

Structure provides the skeleton an organisation requires to meet its goals and support its people, or least that is what it is supposed to do. Formal structures are planned, deliberate attempts to establish ordered relationships between the component parts of the organisation. They are supposed to:

• define tasks and job roles, thus determining the division of labour;
• establish management patterns, thereby controlling how work is planned, organised and directed; and
• determine the relationship and communication patterns between component parts of the organisation, thus limiting individual variation.

Maybe I'm being cynical here, but it seems to me the thing that is considered least in a restructure is the existing relationships and communication patterns. The underlying assumption in a restructure initiative is that the organisation is a passive instrument for attaining hierarchically made goals - structure precedes action. Yet we all know the existing relationships and communication patterns in an organisation are mostly informal, have been established over time; and above all are spontaneous, emotional and dynamic.

We must recognise that without people the organisation simply does not exist. Organisations are the product of human creativity: they are socially constructed phenomena where the actions of individuals and groups shape the organisation and its nature. Informal structures solve problems that the formal structure cannot solve, or may be slow in solving. Even the most cursory examination of any organisation reveals homeostasis is the exception rather than the norm. Often whole sub-systems - holons - exist independently of the total organisation. Why then do we so often ignore the informal structures, when we decide to reorganise? People matter!

Regards, Graham