Design 21 recently wrote about Tim Brown’s question,  Can Organisations be Beautiful?

For background and reference, check out the wonderful book Connected (by Nicholas Chrisakis and James Fowler), and a little more dense a read, Linked (by Albert-László Barabási).  Mildly obsessing about network theory and how your friend’s friend’s friend can have an impact on you (always measurable and sometimes significant) – it got us thinking about eating and smoking.  Do we all have fit, non-smoking, friends?  Not quite.  But putting idyllic social networks aside –  it is the trust and strength of the nodes in our network that should really be our concern.  As with the social web and physical networks, the nodes can be many, and of all shapes and sizes – but it’s the durability of what ties them that matters.

Networks like spiderwebs can be beautiful. And organisations? We will have to wait and see.  Brown worries that without an aesthetic component, the best design minds will not apply themselves to making durable organisations.  This is, “Partly because of a frustration with current organisational design practice that seems to largely be about arranging boxes in an organisational chart.”  But networks, like all living things – must evolve.  And as more and more businesses start to appreciate this, a landscape will be shaped where businesses design and organise themselves as living and breathing networks.

B – E – A – U – T – I – F – U – L.