Ontology
What is functioning?
Defines the object of the Discipline and what we observe when we speak of organizational functioning.
The Discipline
What is the Discipline of Functioning?
The Discipline of Functioning takes the way work happens as its object of observation, knowledge and intervention. It seeks to understand how people, working relationships, decisions, structures, absences, knowledge and different conditions participate in that way of functioning, and how it can be structured to sustain itself over time. To understand and structure this functioning, it engages with fields such as Management, Strategy, Governance, Communication, Working Relationships, Systems and Complexity. Its interest lies in what happens between what has been defined and what must actually reach execution.
The discipline is organized
into four dimensions
Epistemology
How can we understand functioning?
Organizes the principles through which evidence, relationships and manifestations of work enable knowledge to be produced about what sustains a particular way of functioning.
Methodological Architecture
How can functioning be transformed?
Organizes the transition from knowledge to intervention and guides its reading, structuring and sustainment.
Pedagogy
How does an organization learn to sustain and improve its own functioning?
Addresses the development of organizational capacity to understand, structure, sustain and continuously improve its own functioning.
The Discipline does not produce knowledge merely to describe functioning.
It produces knowledge to increase organizations’ capacity to understand, structure and sustain their own functioning.