Fluidity has its benefits

Contingency theory argues that organic structures arise and are successful when tasks are unpredictable, mechanistic structures when they can be known in advance.

This isn’t ridiculous when you think about it. When you go to the example of a group project, if a group has three people and a paper needs to cover the history, current state, and interconnections of LCSH, that’s a pretty predictable task. You’ve all written papers before, the assignment has told you what parts you have, you all know what tools you need, it’s pretty clear. And that means that you’ll probably centrally determine a structure at the beginning and stick to it. 

But what if the assignment was more open-ended? What if the assignment was to come up with some kind of creative deliverable related to a classification scheme? Would you still be able to easily carve it up into chunks in advance? Probably not. You’d probably need to meet to talk through what you might do, and only after you get your arms around what you’re doing would you be able to break it up into discrete tasks. Without thinking about it too much, you’d probably adopt an organic, fluid structure when the context was uncertain and a more stable, fixed structure when it stopped changing. 

Galbraith says, “The greater the task uncertainty, the greater the amount of information that must be processed among decision-makers during the task execution in order to achieve a given level of performance.” (Galbraith, 1973, p. 4)

I’ll note, also, that not all information processing during a task limits your ability to plan equally. In our first example of writing a group paper, we would expect each person to be processing a lot of information as they research. But processing that information is the task, which can occur in a known context. It doesn’t change the task itself. Whereas doing research to decide whether your group will create a zine or an interpretive dance does.

References