UN-NGLS Publications: Development Dossier

The need to look at relationships between elements of the system, to apprehend the invisible patterns which govern organisational life, leads to the understanding that we need to stand back and get a feel of the whole if we hope to effectively intervene into the organisation or into any of its component parts. This brings us to a further appreciation of the complexity of organisations and of organisational interventions, or capacity building.

While it may be true that organisations can be seen as systems of interlocking elements which are arranged in a hierarchy of complexity from those which are less tangible to those which are more, this perspective is not always appropriate. It is not always the case that capacity-building interventions into organisations should always begin with the intangible before they move onto the more visible, or with the whole before a particular part. The reality is far more complex than any one theory or model can contain. It all depends on where a particular organisation is at a particular time, and on what kind of organisation it is.

A small, new development organisation has a different level of impact and "sophistication" from a large organisation which is established and effective. The larger organisation has more need of "sophisticated organisational conditions" because development and growth in capacity implies greater sophistication of organisational processes, functions and structures. While the new organisation will need clarity of vision, it may not yet have the problems which often accompany organisational vision building activities within the older organisation. (To put this slightly differently, the vision "field" of the new organisation may still be forming, while that of the older will already be determining large aspects of organisational life.) The needs of individual staff members in terms of skills-and therefore training courses-will differ at different stages of the organisation's life, as will material resource constraints and assets. Similarly, with respect to structure, organisations will have different needs at different stages of their lives. At times, an increasingly complex structure will be called for; at other times "destructuring" will be required.

One NGO may be struggling with the transition in "attitude" from resistance to responsibility, in the wake of a political transition, while another NGO, comfortable, well-resourced and operating in a context of political stability, may be dealing with attitudinal issues which it refers to as organisational culture, issues of meaning, principle and motivation. An NGO in its early phases may function healthily with a flat, informal structure and later, in order to maintain the same level of health a more hierarchical structure may be called for. A membership organisation may have achieved greater organisational clarity through clarifying its constitutional or membership structures, only to discover that it degenerates into chaos and conflict when it begins to employ staff without clarifying the relationship between its operational structure (staff) and its constitutional structure.

The point is that although there is a basic order in which competency in the elements is attained, and in which organisational capacity building occurs, needs change with respect to all these elements as the organisation develops. Even more importantly, although intervention or work done on any one of these elements will not prove effective unless sufficient work has been done on the preceding elements in the hierarchy-for example, training will not "take" when organisational vision, culture and structure is unresolved, and it does not help to secure resources when the organisation is not equipped to carry out its tasks-even so, these elements are interdependent and one may have to work on a number of levels simultaneously in certain situations if one is to be effective.

Even more importantly-and perhaps paradoxically-while the concept of a hierarchy provides us with a guide, there are many times when one has to work on lower elements in the hierarchy in order to have an effect on higher elements. For example, there are times when the acquisition of an appropriate structure will have a beneficial effect on organisational culture where work on that culture itself has proved ineffective. Such organisational examples abound throughout the hierarchy.

And then, of course, we have been describing the organisation as an almost abstract system without taking account of the most salient point-the fact that it is composed of people. When dealing with an organisation we are dealing with far more than a single system; we are dealing with individual people as systems in themselves, and we are dealing with their relationships. People, with their depths and trivialities, with their potentials and eccentricities, with their inspirations and their struggles, with their strengths and shadows, build the elements out of which organisation arises; these elements take on the character of the strongest and weakest aspects of the people who build them. At the same time, the behaviours and attitudes of organisational members are moulded and shaped by the organisation itself, by their particular relationship to the organisation and through their relationships to one another.

For example, conflict may arise through disagreements concerning contextual understanding, organisational vision or strategic focus; it may be encouraged by an organisational culture which has (unconsciously) come to accept constant bickering and in-fighting as endemic; it may arise through procedural inconsistencies. Equally, however, it may arise through genuine individual dislike, the inability of certain people to appreciate each other's contributions; and these individual struggles may then influence vision, strategy, culture and procedure. The same can be said of effective teamwork, as opposed to conflict. And it is not always clear that conflict is unhelpful. It may be the very thing needed to shake an organisation out of a dangerous state of comfort and lethargy, and help to re-establish its cutting edge.

Organisations have to steer narrow passages between organisational and individual need, between encouraging creativity and ensuring accountability, between stimulating unique contributions and insisting on regulatory procedures applicable to everyone equally. Organisations demand effective leaders; equally they demand effective followers. An organisation will both thrive on, and suffer through, diversity; sameness may make things easier in the short term and less sustainable in the long term. People, and their relationships, spread themselves throughout all the elements of the organisation; without them there would be no organisation. An organisation is a participative enterprise, or it is nothing.
Organisations, then, have to work with people, and people introduce vast areas of complexity into organisational life. Interventions towards organisational capacity have to recognise that the building of individual capacity, and capacitated relationships, is a requisite for the building of organisational capacity, and in fact determines that capacity in the same way as do the elements of organisational life. Capacity building has to respect the complexities generated by the interplay between individual and organisation, and work as much with individuals and with small groupings as with the larger system.