Introducing Organizations as Social Systems Conducting Experiments

In this book, it is our aim to describe organizations as social systems conducting experiments with their survival. More in particular, we want to explain what we mean by this description, and based on this explanation, we want to formulate principles for the design of organizations, enabling them to survive, i.e., enabling them to continue to conduct these experiments. Organizations as social systems conducting experiments: “What kind of description is that?” “Can it deepen our understanding of organizations?” “Can it help to improve the conditions for their survival by providing principles underpinning organizational design?” and if so, “What are these design principles?” These are all relevant and “natural” questions that might come up when reading the aim of this book. We do think it deepens our understanding of organizations and allows for finding principles improving their design. However, it may take the rest of the book to argue why. In this introduction, we cannot exhaustively answer these questions, so we have to content ourselves with a tentative and hopefully sufficiently persuasive description of the main topic of the book: organizations as social systems conducting experiments and finding principles to improve their design.