Discussion on complexity measurement in LinkedIn Orga Design Group

I posted on organizational complexity reduction in what might become an interesting discussion on Linkedin's Organizational Design Community:

"If you meant me wrt defining complexity: The use is made from a 'pragmatic usage perspective' focussed on the need to measure a proxy and certainly somewhat in flux. It may be that complication is the better term as hinted at above, but I need to know more about the understanding of complication here.

So, I would measure it ('complication-complexity') as the frequency and strength of interactions among members of an organization - currently.

I would include in the definition of the concept additionally rules and constraints that enable or hinder organizational interactions, processes and structural relationships between organizational 'members' or 'subsystems'."

Here the link to the discussion - be aware you need to join Linkedin and the group:

LinkedIn ODC discussion page

Is complexity measurement of organizations posible and feasible?

Organizations can be seen as hierarchical systems with business line / unit and departmental ‘modules’ that allow execution of specific functions through specific capabilities concentrated in particular areas. This confers economies through separation of work but also leads to interpretation and filtering problems in non-standard or changing situations - interpretative blindness and inertia are fostered in organizations. Therefore, organizations need to be heterarchical. Particularly in conditions of increased complexity and speed of change we face today. 

Heterarchical structures allow faster and broader interpretation of information, but also demand higher interpretative capabilities by management. Given traditional and often still normal ‘linearly’ organized procedures and structures, these interpretative capabilities determine to a large extent the success of an organization – as Edith Penrose already highlighted.

On the other hand, functional and departmental decomposability, i.e. separable modularity of an organization correlates with flexibility, adaptability and ease of change of an organization.

Does measurement of decomposability (e.g. based on Simon’s near decomposability) allow for a measurement and thus management of organizational complexity? What do you think?

A discussion I have started in the Quantitave Complexity Management Group on Linkedin: