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In organization design, the boundary between physical and social design is disappearing. Does this mean that leaders and managers must become architects? Psychologists? Sociologists? Political scientists? Economists? Philosophers? Historians? Yes. Or learn to work with them. Not to acquire their skills, but their perspectives.

It is a given that managers need to work with individual employees, one-on-one, becoming continuously and intensively involved with their work. Equally important is dealing with constellations of people, such as project teams. From there, consciousness grows. The better managers see that these small groups are embedded in larger systems—organizations, industries and communities. These, in turn, are part of even larger social, cultural, political and physical systems—corporations, cities, and international systems. As they look more intensively at these environments that are so determining of human events, the distinction between the social and the physical systems blurs. They are interdependent. Each has something important to contribute to the other. That ability to expand one’s view, and appreciate the forces at work in the larger context, serves as the basis for developing a design perspective.

Design achieves its power because it can create situations, and a situation is more determining of what people will actually do than is personality, character, habit, genetics, unconscious motives or any other aspect of our individual makeup. Nobody smokes in church, no matter how addicted.