The Agential Organisation
Why your ‘People’ and ‘Processes’ don’t exist separately
Discover why you cannot fix your culture without redesigning the material conditions that produce it.
If you walk into any boardroom and ask, "What is this organisation actually made of?", you will likely get a Newtonian answer. You will be told about two distinct piles of things.
In one pile, you have the ‘Soft Stuff’: People, culture, values, trust, leadership, and relationships.
In the other pile, you have the ‘Hard Stuff’: Strategy, IT systems, office buildings, budget codes, and metrics.
Management, for the last century, has been the exhausting act of trying to force these two piles to talk to each other. We try to ‘align’ the people with the strategy. We try to ‘install’ a new culture into an old building. We treat the organisation as a machine composed of separate parts that interact like billiard balls. If we hit the ‘people’ ball with the ‘incentive’ ball, we expect a predictable direction of travel.
But this view is scientifically outdated. And because it is outdated, our change programmes fail.
The reality of your organisation is stranger, messier, and far more potent. There are no independent ‘people’ and there are no independent ‘processes’. There is only the apparatus.
To understand this, we must look through a lens called Agential Realism.
The Illusion of Separation
We tend to believe that a ‘Manager’ is a standalone entity. They are a human being who walks into a room, picks up a ‘Tool’ (like a dashboard or a performance report), and makes a decision. We see them as separate things - the Subject (Manager) and the Object (Tool).
Karen Barad, the physicist and philosopher behind Agential Realism, argues that this separation is an illusion.
Consider a senior executive without their ‘apparatus’. Strip away their job title, their budget authority code, their laptop, their access to the shared drive, and the corner office that signals their status. What is left? A human being? Certainly. But is it an Executive?
No. The agency to ‘manage’ (to hire, fire, spend, and direct) does not reside in the human soul. It resides in the entanglement of the human plus the budget code plus the IT access plus the building.
Barad calls this Intra-action.
Interaction assumes two separate things meet and bounce off each other (Billiard Ball A hits Billiard Ball B).
Intra-action says that things only exist because they are entangled.
The ‘Manager’ and the ‘Tool’ co-constitute each other. The dashboard produces the manager’s view of the world. The manager is the subject produced by the dashboard.
Sociomaterial Apparatus
If we accept this, we must stop managing ‘people’ (psychology) and ‘things’ (operations) as if they are different disciplines. We must start managing the Sociomaterial Apparatus.
The apparatus is the specific arrangement of matter (walls, screens, forms, cash) and meaning (rules, roles, strategies) that creates your reality.
The Sales Team is an entanglement consisting of Humans + CRM Software + Commission Algorithms + The Monthly Ranking Email. If you change the algorithm, you literally change the subject; you produce a different kind of ‘Salesperson’.
The Strategy is a phenomenon that only exists when a Leader intra-acts with a presentation in a Town Hall. If the projector breaks, or the room layout prevents eye contact, the strategy fails. The material object is an active agent.
Why ‘Culture Change’ Fails
This explains why so many organisational transformations collapse. We often try to change the culture (the human mindset) without re-cutting the apparatus (the material conditions).
We give speeches about ‘Collaboration’ and ‘One Team’ (psychological input), but we leave the employees in an office layout full of high-walled cubicles, using legacy software that locks down data permissions between departments (material input).
The apparatus is shouting "Isolation!" while the leader shouts "Together!"
In an Agential Organisation, the Apparatus always wins. The material entanglement is stronger than the mental intent. You cannot have a culture of innovation in an apparatus designed for compliance.
The New Role of Leadership
If you view your organisation through this lens, your role changes fundamentally. You are no longer a leader of people or an operator of processes.
You are a designer of entanglements.
To lead effectively in a complex system, you must look at your organisation and ask:
What is the apparatus here? (Who and what is entangled? Which humans, which software, which physical spaces?)
What reality is it producing? (Is this apparatus cutting the world into ‘silos’ or ‘streams’? Is it producing ‘compliance’ or ‘care’?)
Are we responsible for this cut?
In this series, we are going to build a new management toolkit based on this reality. We will use Agential Realism to see the entanglement, Constraints Theory to design the architecture, and Pragmatism to test if it actually works.