Why do these familiar problems seem so ingrained in organizations? Because they are. Many performance problems are unintentionally designed into the organization's structure.

Organizational structure is a science, not a matter of personalities, politics, fads, and intuition. There are five fundamental building blocks of structure present in any organization. The way these are combined into an organization chart determines the health and performance of the organization. And the mechanisms of teamwork (cross-boundary work flows) determine whether or not the organization chart actually works.

Structural Cybernetics is an overview of the science of designing healthy, high-performance organizational structures -- abstracted from a comprehensive study of the same name that documents the details necessary to implement these concepts. This overview presents the basics of organizational theory, clear definitions of the building blocks of structure, practical principles for designing organization charts, and an approach to high-performance teamwork that is far more flexible and powerful than traditional work-flow engineering.