Towards a G.O.D. Organization for Organizational Self-Awareness

In this paper we draw on concepts from the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations, and also from its theoretical foundations, to discuss our notions of Organizational Self-Awareness and ontological meta model. These are deemed as central notions to understand and present, in a clear and precise manner, solutions for our main research purpose: finding concepts and methods to better handle organizational change caused by unexpected exceptions causing dysfunction in an organization’s activity. Based on ontological notions like state base of a world and the ontological parallelogram, we arrive at precise definitions of what we call organizational self and its awareness. These then serve to put in perspective our proposal for the G.O.D Organization, considered to exist in every organization and being responsible for the Generation, Operationalization and Discontinuation of organization artifacts – e.g., actor role pizza deliverer – reflecting change of the organizational self. The main contribution of this paper is a discussion and clarification of how one can perceive an organization in a precise and thorough way, as to be able to keep a fact record of its relevant changes and, as a consequence, have a dynamic and “living model” of the organization.