Emerging Design

The organization of the twenty-first century requires plasticity; this must be understood as the existence in the here-and-now of ways to work that are defined to operate transversely in relation to strategic objectives. The minimum requirements are horizontal streaming and non-permanence. A relational structural foundation involves the generation and concatenation of three core networks: network reliability, availability, and decisional agility. The process of design and implementation of these networks is called Emergent Design (ED), which is discussed in this chapter.

Strategic Intelligence Process

Organization is a constant process of the construction of viability, which requires a strategy to minimize entropy and maximize negentropy. Therefore, it is the domain of tenability that will determine how it is possible or how much disposition there is to reduce entropy in relation to the production of exchange value. This is the question faced by upper-level executives and its solution means the diffusion of a political vision associated with a type of relational structure. The facilitating or support process for the spread of a political vision is the Strategic Intelligence Process (SIP). In this chapter, the authors show how the conceptual foundations of the SIP and its application to organizations are put forward.

Organizational Relational Viability

In the organizational design concept, feasibility proves highly relevant since it reveals the conservation strategies of an organization. Understanding these strategies allows us to assess where emphasis must be placed to generate value. This makes it possible to anticipate the breakdowns and productivity areas that the organization will address in its evolution. This chapter introduces the reader to Organizational Relational Viability as a theoretical framework for evaluation and organizational design.

From Manufacture to Mindfacture

In this chapter, the authors observe the historical shift from man-made to mind-made. They show how the common sense of inherited legacies shaped the attempts to account for how value is added in a product-oriented view that pushes products to market. They show how legacy thinking creates havoc when the focus shifts from things to concerns and accounting practices lose touch with reality. As the world becomes more complex, the need to view the world in a holistic way is assumed. The authors show how a U.S. manufacturing company deals with its own legacies and those created by government practices and legislation. As the world accelerates, human interaction requires increased and more rapid interaction, through relationship building and ever-expanding networks.

The Sound of the Spiral

When we speak of organizations and organization, we necessarily have recourse to the idea of form. Our Judaeo-Christian culture has pressured us towards what is stable, certain, invariant: this to keep from sinning. We drastically need to create objects that remain independent and indefinitely without us, so that we can preserve them and reference them as signs of reality. But what is it that remains, and what is it that changes when we refer to organizations? We are talking in a world of the unseen, the relational process, of which we cannot say anything complete, anything referring to moments of certainty; it appears to us in a ghostly, hidden, and playful way. It is of this world whose condition of uncertainty we have not been able to live, and where nothing is more than the opportunity to know, of this world in a spiral that the authors discuss in this final chapter.

Why Not?

In this chapter, the authors show how leading companies are introducing new business logics and how innovations are produced through new ways of design thinking. They show how the elimination of constraints triggers acceleration and how this must be dealt with through new paradigms. The authors show the migration from cause and effect thinking to emergent design, from the world of tangible assets to that of emergent dialogue in relational networks. They show that in a world of transformation being successful means managing both the matter-of-fact world that we have inherited and the visionary world as it emerges: one a world of things, the other a world of competences. The authors show why the question is no longer “Why?” five times over, but “Why not?”

Mind Value Processes

Capitalism today faces a daunting challenge since much of the value produced in today's world is not a direct consequence of investment dollars or working capital but produced by skills, knowledge, and relational associativity. Although the so-called “intangibles” that produce value today are referred to as “assets,” they are accounted for as expenses and are usually not managed as “capital” at all. Leading businesses are attempting to understand how Intellectual Capital produces value, and it marks the beginning of a shift from traditional ways of looking at value creation, but the phrase itself embodies legacy thinking and moves in the wrong direction. It is necessary, therefore, to return to the epistemological basis of the concept of value. This chapter attempts to explain the relational basis of value and its transformation from knowing, as the organizing process of what is behind being human.

Value Creation Process

At present, knowledge plays a key role in the new economy. Nevertheless, its measurement as intellectual capital has not been possible from a certainty vision for the states, events, and entities, leaving aside the complexity of organizations. This chapter proposes a paradigmatic shift where the fundamental support is the relational-semiotic condition of human organizations; any deviation from its strategic goals could be explained through the closeness between language and the action emerging from language. Defined as coherence and congruity (sustainability) management, the process named NEUS allows increasing both coherence and congruity through co-participating in decisional modeling, and transferring repulsion interactions to organization areas that re-signify the conflict. Configurations arising from viability are Production Cognitive Value.

From Autono-Mine to Autono-Yours

Current styles and ways of thinking that boast of paradigm shifts have failed to pull up the anchors of Cartesianism and the religious Mass celebrated to offer the certainty of the object. No matter what its shape, the epistemological fetish that arises from objectivity and subjectivity has preserved an obscurantism against the possibility of understanding the relationship as the foundation of knowledge. This chapter aims to understand “relationship” as the centralizing concept when we explain the process of knowing and emerging strategies in shaping organizations. From this perspective, it is no longer possible to speak of autonomy, because others are necessary to make it happen (i.e., we necessarily must speak of an epistemology for co-autonomy or autonomy-yours).

From Hierarchical Structure to Relational Networks

In this chapter, the authors show how functional organizations, derived and perpetuated by the Romans, the Church, and the army of Frederick the Great, were ready-at-hand with the emergence of the industrial era and associated with the creation of wealth through a series of subsequent and specialized value-adding steps. This is a typical command and control model. The chapter shows that this is not the only model for wealth creation over the centuries, even though it continues to predominate in contemporary organizations. Relational networks existed throughout the same historical span of time and are undoubtedly responsible for the greatest accumulation of wealth. They often accumulated such a significant amount of wealth that they threatened the legacy models of church and state. Legacy thinking, directly and indirectly, continues to perpetuate questionable assumptions and cognitive blindness about how work really gets done and how wealth is really created.