Bridging between Organization Design as a Noun and as a Verb

The two conceptions of organization design—simultaneously historical legacy and dynamic change—create a major conundrum, identified by Simon’s (1996) as an important challenge to the design of social organizations. The solution, according to Simon, is to design without final goals, however no advice is provided about how this might be achieved. In this chapter, it is proposed that this is possible through the use of mechanisms that bridge between the past and the future of the organization’s design. The mechanisms are formative affectual contexts and design trace. Enhanced by embodied cognition theory, the notion of formative context provides a solid background for an understanding of the processes of organizational change that co-evolve with organization designing. The notion of design trace is based on the idea that organizational interactions leave a trace that can be harnessed and used to help manage the organization’s designing effort.