the.com/organization
The art of making chaos fill out paperwork before it causes trouble.
means A group of people arranged with roles, rules, and structure so they can work toward a shared goal without descending into chaos.
from Traces back through French 'organisation' to Late Latin 'organizare,' built on Latin 'organum' — meaning tool or instrument, itself borrowed from Greek 'organon,' an implement or means of doing work. The word originally described living things arranged with functioning parts (think bodily organs), before it widened to cover any system of parts working together — bureaucracies included.
- biology link
- Body organs and companies share the exact same root word
- org charts
- Invented partly by railroads managing 1850s scheduling chaos
- Dunbar's number
- Humans struggle organizing past roughly 150 stable relationships
- irony alert
- Most organizations exist to manage problems they themselves created