I wonder if we could think about what it is like to have an organisation that is run along functional lines? Where people who do the same things are co-located and where the more experienced people can teach the more junior staff the 'tricks of the trade' and in the process of interacting preserve corporate culture.
Then we can think of organisations which have taken on board the strong matrix management model which implies that people work in projects which aggregate into programs and are staffed by a labour force of multi skilled people who get together for a project and then are separated into another amalgam for the next project.
The second type of organisation assumes that the people in the organisation are all highly skilled and enables a growth in the horizontal learning that is across disciplines. The functional organisation on the other hand emphasises the vertical learning that leads to in depth expertise.
Modern organisations of course need both to be flexible and responsive to the frequency and rapidity of change.
The question is how to resolve the dilema.
One answer seems to lie in Communities of Practice in combination with a knowledge data base comprising of tips and tricks.
I wonder when most organisations will learn to mix and match rather than to have one organisational form only?
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