Organisational relationships
Rethinking our social relationships (and also our manufacturing relationships). An urgent and important task, and one that is far from easy, but which must nonetheless be done. Driven by recent events, there is certainly no doubt that we need to review everything: our own relationships, company structures, strategies for production and expansion, and even our personal understanding of the world of relationships and production in the most general sense.
Reading “La classe. Ripensare la crisi ripensando le organizzazioni” (The class. Reconsidering crisis by rethinking organisations) by Enrico Parsi
is thus a useful exercise for those who wish to approach the subject from an unconventional perspective.
The book was written a few years ago, but in recent weeks it has once again become particularly relevant. The theme upon which the author focuses is that of a theoretical crisis faced by an organisation, and the subsequent need to re-examine everything, beginning with the relationships that exist between the various areas of the organisation itself (and thus between the individuals of which these are composed).
The metaphor used here is that of a class in a school. The core idea is that a crisis is not something that happens naturally or by chance, an anomalous event. For the author, every crisis that occurs is ultimately a “crisis of our relationships”, and as such, he observes that: reacting means observing the places around which our lives are centred more closely – the organisations within which we live and exist – in order to understand if and how they produce and feed the poverty and the poor economic results that blight the existence of many (although not all) of us. It also means taking another look at the contexts within which we work – school included – which are seen as powerful places for building social relations and for learning for all of us, both young and old. The metaphor of the class is thus drawn from the image of the layout of a classroom, which is very similar to that of an organigram of a company.
Parsi also highlights how there is too much company and too much market in our lives and in our schools today. And indeed, perhaps even in our businesses. He suggests that, instead, we need to recover our sense of relationships, and hone our awareness of the need to continue to learn.
The argument pursued by Enrico Parsi (who draws from his experience as director of the Scuola Coop, Istituto Nazionale di Formazione delle Cooperative di Consumo, the National Training Institute for Consumers’ Co-operatives), weaves through a text which combines the experience of training with that of businesses; the pages are full of cues and references to a number of sources of knowledge (from literature to management), which must be read with care, and perhaps reread. Thus we move from the analogy of the class and the organisational chart to a discussion of the role of individuals, and from the complex theme of rules and procedures to another, equally complex – that of the organisational “words” and idioms that are used in working environments.
In the first few pages of his book, the author writes: “In this way, a culture has spread that encourages us to believe that everything is possible thanks to good design. As such, if something goes wrong, we think that the design in question was not accurate enough, and as a result, we proceed with increasing our focus on the design phase, pursuing a self-referential style of thinking, stranded in the indisputability of its own presuppositions. This is a type of thought that is only apparently rational, but which in actual fact takes the same form as that of those who believe in the evil eye, and who thus consult a «sorcerer».”
We area not obliged to always agree with the ideas of the author of “The class”, but we must certainly take them into consideration.
La classe. Ripensare la crisi ripensando le organizzazioni” (The class: Reconsidering the crisis by rethinking organisations)
Parsi Enrico
Guerini e Associati, 2017
Rethinking our social relationships (and also our manufacturing relationships). An urgent and important task, and one that is far from easy, but which must nonetheless be done. Driven by recent events, there is certainly no doubt that we need to review everything: our own relationships, company structures, strategies for production and expansion, and even our personal understanding of the world of relationships and production in the most general sense.
Reading “La classe. Ripensare la crisi ripensando le organizzazioni” (The class. Reconsidering crisis by rethinking organisations) by Enrico Parsi
is thus a useful exercise for those who wish to approach the subject from an unconventional perspective.
The book was written a few years ago, but in recent weeks it has once again become particularly relevant. The theme upon which the author focuses is that of a theoretical crisis faced by an organisation, and the subsequent need to re-examine everything, beginning with the relationships that exist between the various areas of the organisation itself (and thus between the individuals of which these are composed).
The metaphor used here is that of a class in a school. The core idea is that a crisis is not something that happens naturally or by chance, an anomalous event. For the author, every crisis that occurs is ultimately a “crisis of our relationships”, and as such, he observes that: reacting means observing the places around which our lives are centred more closely – the organisations within which we live and exist – in order to understand if and how they produce and feed the poverty and the poor economic results that blight the existence of many (although not all) of us. It also means taking another look at the contexts within which we work – school included – which are seen as powerful places for building social relations and for learning for all of us, both young and old. The metaphor of the class is thus drawn from the image of the layout of a classroom, which is very similar to that of an organigram of a company.
Parsi also highlights how there is too much company and too much market in our lives and in our schools today. And indeed, perhaps even in our businesses. He suggests that, instead, we need to recover our sense of relationships, and hone our awareness of the need to continue to learn.
The argument pursued by Enrico Parsi (who draws from his experience as director of the Scuola Coop, Istituto Nazionale di Formazione delle Cooperative di Consumo, the National Training Institute for Consumers’ Co-operatives), weaves through a text which combines the experience of training with that of businesses; the pages are full of cues and references to a number of sources of knowledge (from literature to management), which must be read with care, and perhaps reread. Thus we move from the analogy of the class and the organisational chart to a discussion of the role of individuals, and from the complex theme of rules and procedures to another, equally complex – that of the organisational “words” and idioms that are used in working environments.
In the first few pages of his book, the author writes: “In this way, a culture has spread that encourages us to believe that everything is possible thanks to good design. As such, if something goes wrong, we think that the design in question was not accurate enough, and as a result, we proceed with increasing our focus on the design phase, pursuing a self-referential style of thinking, stranded in the indisputability of its own presuppositions. This is a type of thought that is only apparently rational, but which in actual fact takes the same form as that of those who believe in the evil eye, and who thus consult a «sorcerer».”
We area not obliged to always agree with the ideas of the author of “The class”, but we must certainly take them into consideration.
La classe. Ripensare la crisi ripensando le organizzazioni” (The class: Reconsidering the crisis by rethinking organisations)
Parsi Enrico
Guerini e Associati, 2017