A部分

Organisation is big business. Whether it is of our lives – all those inboxes and calendars – or how companies are structured, a multi-billion dollar industry helps to meet this need.

We have more strategies for time management, project management and self-organisation than at any other time in human history. We are told that we ought to organise our company, our home life, our week, our day and even our sleep, all as a means to becoming more productive. Every week, countless seminars and workshops take place around the world to tell a paying public that they ought to structure their lives in order to achieve this.

 
This rhetoric has also crept into the thinking of business leaders and entrepreneurs, much to the delight of self-proclaimed perfectionists with the need to get everything right. The number of business schools and graduates has massively increased over the past 50 years, essentially teaching people how to organise well.

组织是一项大生意。无论是我们的生活 - 所有那些收件箱和日历 - 还是公司的结构，一个价值数十亿美元的产业帮助满足这种需求。

我们有比人类历史上任何时候都更多的时间管理、项目管理和自我组织的策略。我们被告知，我们应该组织我们的公司、家庭生活、周、天甚至睡眠，都是为了变得更有生产力。每周，世界各地都会举行无数的研讨会和研修班，告诉付费的公众他们应该如何安排自己的生活以实现这一目标。

这种说辞也渗入了商业领导者和企业家的思维中，这让自诩为完美主义者并渴望做到一切都正确的人们非常兴。在过去的50年里，商学院和毕业生的数量大幅增加，实质上教人们如何进行良好的组织。

B部分

Ironically, however, the number of businesses that fail has also steadily increased. Work-related stress has increased. A large proportion of workers from all demographics claim to be dissatisfied with the way their work is structured and the way they are managed.

This begs the question: what has gone wrong? Why is it that on paper the drive for organisation seems a sure shot for increasing productivity, but in reality falls well short of what is expected?

然而，讽刺的是，失败的企业数量也在稳步增加。与工作相关的压力也增加了。来自各个人口统计学的大部分工人声称对他们的工作构和管理方式不满意。

这引出了一个问题：出了什么问题？为什么在纸上，组织的推动似乎是提高生产力的一剂良方，但实际上却远远不及预期？

C部分

This has been a problem for a while now. Frederick Taylor was one of the forefathers of scientific management. Writing in the first half of the 20th century, he designed a number of principles to improve the efficiency of the work process, which have since become widespread in modern companies. So the approach has been around for a while.

D部分

New research suggests that this obsession with efficiency is misguided. The problem is not necessarily the management theories or strategies we use to organise our work; it’s the basic assumptions we hold in approaching how we work. Here it’s the assumption that order is a necessary condition for productivity. This assumption has also fostered the idea that disorder must be detrimental to organisational productivity. The result is that businesses and people spend time and money organising themselves for the sake of organising, rather than actually looking at the end goal and usefulness of such an effort.

最新的研究表明，这种对效率的迷恋是错误的。问题不一定是我们用来组织工作的管理理论或策略；问题在于我们在处理工作方式时所持有的基本假设。这里的假设是秩序是生产力的必要条件。这种假设还培养了一种混乱对组织生产力有害的观念。结果是企业和个人花费时间和金钱来组织自己，而不是真正考虑这种努力的最终目标和用处。

E部分

What’s more, recent studies show that order actually has diminishing returns. Order does increase productivity to a certain extent, but eventually the usefulness of the process of organisation, and the benefit it yields, reduce until the point where any further increase in order reduces productivity. Some argue that in a business, if the cost of formally structuring something outweighs the benefit of doing it, then that thing ought not to be formally structured. Instead, the resources involved can be better used elsewhere.

此外，最近的研究显示，秩序实际上会有递减回报。秩序在一定程度上确实会提高生产力，但最终组织过程的有用性和产生的效益会减少，直到进一步增加秩序反而降低生产力的程度。一些人认为，在企业中，如果正式结构化某个事物的成本超过了这样做的好处，那么那件事就不应该正式结构化。相反，涉及的资源可以更好地用于其他地方。

F部分

In fact, research shows that, when innovating, the best approach is to create an environment devoid of structure and hierarchy and enable everyone involved to engage as one organic group. These environments can lead to new solutions that, under conventionally structured environments (filled with bottlenecks in terms of information flow, power structures, rules, and routines) would never be reached.

G部分

In recent times companies have slowly started to embrace this disorganisation. Many of them embrace it in terms of perception (embracing the idea of disorder, as opposed to fearing it) and in terms of process (putting mechanisms in place to reduce structure).

For example, Oticon, a large Danish manufacturer of hearing aids, used what it called a ‘ spaghetti ’ structure in order to reduce the organisation’s rigid hierarchies. This involved scrapping formal job titles and giving staff huge amounts of ownership over their own time and projects. This approach proved to be highly successful initially, with clear improvements in worker productivity in all facets of the business.

In similar fashion, the former chairman of General Electric embraced disorganisation, putting forward the idea of the ‘boundaryless’ organisation. Again, it involves breaking down the barriers between different parts of a company and encouraging virtual collaboration and flexible working. Google and a number of other tech companies have embraced (at least in part) these kinds of flexible structures, facilitated by technology and strong company values which glue people together.

近年来，许多公司开始慢慢接受这种无序状态。其中许多公司在感知上接受（接受混乱的观念，而不是害怕它），并在流程上接受（制定机制来减少结构）。

例如，丹麦一家大型助听器制造商奥蒂康（Oticon）采用了所谓的“意大利面”结构，以减少组织的僵化等级制度。这包括废除正式的职位名称，让员工对自己的时间和项目拥有巨大的所有权。这种方法最初证明非常成功，在企业的各个方面都明显提高了工人的生产力。

同样地，通用气的前董事长也接受了无序，提出了“无界”组织的概念。同样，它涉及打破公司不同部门之间的障碍，鼓励虚拟协作和灵活工作。谷歌和其他一些科技公司已经（至少部分地）接受了这些灵活的结构，通过技术和强大的公司价值观将人们联系在一起。

H部分

A word of warning to others thinking of jumping on this bandwagon: the evidence so far suggests disorder, much like order, also seems to have diminishing utility, and can also have detrimental effects on performance if overused. Like order, disorder should be embraced only so far as it is useful. But we should not fear it – nor venerate one over the other. This research also shows that we should continually question whether or not our existing assumptions work.