Organisations exist to get things done. They are necessary because they solve problems ranging from communication and co-ordination to moral hazard. But in principle, if we could find other ways of solving those problems, we wouldn’t need organisations any more – at least of the traditional kind. This article gives some examples of where that is starting to happen, by assembling not just project teams, but project organisations, created to meet a specific need and disbanded as soon as that need is met.
The examples given show that it can work, but they don’t and can’t show that it can scale, and there may be good reasons to think that it can’t. But that doesn’t stop the idea being a good challenge, particularly to those in organisations which don’t tend to think about organisational change in quite those terms.