The road and the stream: Facing the turbulent stream of new product development

This dissertation is an inquiry into the implicate order of a product development organization. The data for this inquiry are conversations within a new product development team and their immediate environment. It is an attempt to develop a generative sociotechnical systems approach by looking under the explicit chaos of the organization for the implicate patterns of order, due to the breakdown of traditional explicit structure and process in the organization.;One of the primary challenges to routine sociotechnical systems is professional individualism. In terms of evolution the challenge is similar to the deconstruction of the atom by quantum physics. What is more fundamental than the isolated individual? Process theory would suggest that events and occasions are more fundamental to reality than classes of objects. Chaos theory has described this implicate order as strange attractors, the consistent core path around which there appear to be constant varieties in the explicit nature of phenomena. The project cycle was found or speculated to be the strange attractor for this system.;The implicit holographic forms of the organization have become more salient as the organization seeks to thrive in a turbulent environment. What has occurred in many instances is the breakup of traditional hierarchical organizations. Higher levels of organization such as job, group, function and department, have given way to multifunctional and multidisciplinary formations. At this fundamental level, the old orders of domination are breaking up whether by people or machines, calling organizations to be composed of peers coordinated through deliberative dialogue, supplanting the parental and arbitrary relationships of past organizational forms.;This dissertation is largely descriptive and projective in this implicit sense. This does not call for an intentional change in corporate culture, but the recognition of what has been called the informal organization. All people in the organization need to be able to respond to the stream of their experience beyond the road of their intentions and concepts. By better understanding their fundamental process, they can connect with others on this ground of Being and build the new organization in these green fields.