Unorganisation

Unorganisation is an approach to organisational structure and design that consciously removes or avoids layers of management and bureaucracy, eschews job titles, and instead attempts to operate with the minimum of formal structure so as to become as flexible and effective as possible.

Unorganisation is not the same disorganisation (which is a chaotic environment in which little can be easily or quickly achieved); neither is the same as being disorganised, a term usually applied to industries with non-unionised labour (or just being personally untogether).

Whilst the idea of unorganisation has been a common theme among management theorists (see Tom Peters, for example), the term itself was apparently coined by Simon Buckingham, who wrote extensively about unorganisation on his web site www.unorg.com (now defunct) from 1996 through to 2004. The ubiquity of distributed networks, mobile communications technologies and team based project approaches to work have brought many of the ideas that he wrote about to fruition, to the extent that they now seem passé and dated. His term for what has now become common never really caught on, yet it remains an excellent catch-all for those who reject large corporate bureaucracy as a necessity (evil or not), and instead see a future of autonomous individuals contributing their skills and effort to a shifting set of projects according to their interests and/or current requirement for remuneration.

Buckingham’s writing had a particularly revolutionary flavour, looking forward to a ‘globally unorganised world of freedom, diversity and instability’, in contrast to the certainty and convention that he saw as characterising the orderly organised world. He looked forward to the rise of ‘technological capitalism’, as the next step away from communism, socialism and capitalism.