Architecting flexible organizations

The twenty-first-century organization is faced with the apparent dilemma of being efficient and innovative, lean and flexible, and hierarchical and flat. The seemingly contradictory characteristics extend into every organizational system, from culture and strategy to process and technology. The flexible organization must embrace and cultivate opposites; indeed, the organization should recognize opposites as opportunities for inventiveness and synthesis and not a dilemma that requires a choice between opposites (Takeuchi and Nonaka 2004). This is in contrast to a more traditional organization that either chooses one principle over its apparent opposite or adopts an engineering perspective that optimizes something between opposites. The knowledge organization, in contrast, synthesizes opposites into something unique and new.