ABSTRACT
“The beautiful, ugly truth” is how the leader writer in a mid-2014 issue of New Scientist headlined the argument that it is “better to see the cosmos as it is, rather than as the author would like it to be”. When managers delve more deeply into what’s actually going on, drawing on their own lived experience, they have little difficulty in recognizing and relating to unacknowledged aspects of organizational life. Not long after the publication of Informal Coalitions, the author accepted an invitation to give a brief, after-dinner talk on organizational change to a group of senior managers in the oil industry. The interactions through which organization is being continuously (re-) enacted do not respect formally defined boundaries. There is a fundamental difference between the dynamics of organization and those that govern the workings of the natural and technological worlds.
