Beware of common sense.
W. Edwards Deming

Typically when we think of organizations, we have thought of them as machines to be well run (Harris 1997, Blair & Fotler 1990, Industrial Revolution 1828) We have relied on Newtonian perspectives of organizations to guide our thinking. These perspectives have led to a focus on getting the pieces to fit together, on predicting future outcomes and on controlling behavior of workers to get them to do what we want them to do. The Newtonian perspective is a reductionist perspective that believes that understanding the whole of a system is dependent on understanding the parts. Things must be broken down into their constitutive elements in order to understand them. But you cannot understand the functioning of a body by studying the arm. Clockwork is the dominant metaphor and organization that runs like a clock is the desired condition. The more we explored the machine paradigm the more we came to realize that our complex experiences do not meet our expectations of the machine like systems we have come to define as the ideal organization.

You believe in a world of chance . . . and I believe in a world of law and order.
--Albert Einstein (to Niels Bohr)

Complexity shows how Euclidean geometry is not an effective geometry for our mostly effective world. As physicist Benoit Mandlebrot described it, "A fractal geometry is needed. Clouds are not elipses, lightning is not a straight line."

Machine View

Where does our mechanistic paradigm come from? It is over 400 years old, and dates all the way back to Decarte's clockwork universe. Rene Descartes, one of the most famous rationalists in philosophy (not to mention a pretty decent scientist) likened the workings of the universe to that of a clock.

Rene Descartes (1596-1640)

Optimization Defined

Function: noun
: an act, process, or methodology of making something (as a design, system, or decision) as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible.
Source: Merrian Webster Dictionary 2007

Optimization means to make something the best it can be.