Organizational Patterns - Principles of Discovery and Use

Principles of Discovery and Use

Like other patterns, organizational patterns aren't created or invented: they are discovered (or "mined") from empirical observation. The early work on organizational patterns at Bell Laboratories focused on extracting patterns from social network analysis. That research used empirical role-playing techniques to gather information about the structure of relationships in the subject organization. These structures were analyzed for recurring patterns across organization and their contribution to achieving organizational goals. The recurring successful structures were written up in pattern form to describe their tradeoffs and detailed design decisions (forces), the context in which they apply, along with a generic description of the solution.

Patterns provide an incremental path to organizational improvement. The pattern style of building something (in this case, an organization) is:

1. Find the weakest part of your organization
2. Find a pattern that is likely to strengthen it
3. Apply the pattern
4. Measure the improvement or degradation
5. If the pattern improved things, go to step 1 and find the next improvement; otherwise, undo the pattern and try an alternative.

As with Alexander-style patterns of software architecture, organizational patterns can be organized into pattern languages: collections of patterns that build on each other. A pattern language can suggest the patterns to be applied for a known set of working patterns that are present.