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The paper aims to propose a model and a comprehensive diagnostic method of organizational health status based on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).

The methodology is qualitative/interpretive and uses of the concept of functional homomorphism of WR Ashby is used, establishing similarities between the way in which this ancient medicine considers the human being and their condition as healthy to transfer it to an organization that produces goods and/or services.

A healthy organization is conceived as one constituted by an association of people regulated by a set of norms based on certain purposes in a state of harmonious balance of their physical and energetic dimensions. In that the physical refers to storage functions, regulation and allocation of resources; transformation of raw materials and inputs into goods and services; waste disposal, distribution and coordination and with information systems for management control, while energy is associated with the ability to act with its management and policies.

The current paper is a first theoretical proposal, which should be enriched with practical applications that feedback its conceptual formulation, thus contributing to its validation.

A comprehensive organizational diagnostic method is made available.

The proposed method allows a comprehensive organizational diagnosis, considering the participation of all the actors that make up this type of social systems.

Although the methodological resource is old, the way it is used here is considered original, and it is also part of an original investigative process by the authors, oriented toward the search for comprehensive organizational diagnostic methods.

The paper aims to contribute conceptually to the conversation about organizational models and to the future development of an organizational diagnostic method, based on the human being seen as an allopoietic information processing gray box.

Methodologically, the approach is qualitative and interpretative, using the concepts of autopoiesis and allopoiesis of H. Maturana and F. Varela, the ideas of cybernetic machine, black box and functional homomorphism of W.R. Ashby, moving from the human being to the organizations producing goods and/or services.

Observing the human being as an allopoietic gray box allowed us to confirm the human being as an information-producing entity and the nervous system as its productive component. The functions distinguished were to emote, feel, perceive, think, memorize, decide, communicate, regulate, control, coordinate and move. Similarly, the proposed organizational model is composed of the same functions in which emoting is homologated with distributed leadership for the achievement of the organizational climate and to move with production. Notwithstanding the circularity of affectation between the functional components, the climate is the basis of organizational operation and consequently, the decisional closure distributed between owners and employees.

This is a theoretical proposal that needs to be discussed, and although there are precedents that could help in this regard, it is essential to enrich the model and derive thereof specific tools that can be applied.

A general model is provided from which methods of organizational design, diagnosis and treatment could be derived.

The proposed model is expected to be a contribution to organizational research discussion.

It is considered that the work has a certain degree of originality when proposing a functional organizational model of a general nature, based on the emotionality of the people that constitute it.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the condition of human beings and organizations producing goods and/or services as autopoietic and allopoietic machines, with the aim of establishing a functional homomorphism between the productive system of an organization and the productive system of human beings, a matter that involves reflecting on what human beings do that is distinguished as allopoietic by an observer.

Use is made of Ashby’s concept of functional homomorphism to establish similarities between human beings and organizations. The definitions of autopoietic and allopoietic machine of Maturana and Varela are used to distinguish similarities and differences between what organizations do and what human beings do.

As a result of using the autopoietic/allopoietic viewpoint, it is proposed to homologate the human nervous system with the production system of an organization, defining the latter as a world-creating energy/communication processing system.

A homomorphism is established here between a human nervous system and the production system of an organization; it remains pending the other homomorphisms that can be made between the systems of the human body and the organization.

A proposal is made to understand an organization as a world-creating energy/communication processing system, and it is estimated that this would imply displacing attention, at present strongly centered on the generated products and/or services, toward the sense that they have for both persons and society, restating the question on the world we construct/live in, from the organizational standpoint.

Human beings are seen as allopoietic machines, aiming to contribute to the discussion about what it is that we call human, homologating it with the work of an organization. As a result a new definition of organization is proposed.

To contribute to the search for new viewpoints that will enrich the understanding of the complex organizational phenomenon, in particular by contributing to the development of a method that allows qualifying, in the fullest possible way, whether an organization can be said to be healthy. So the objective of this work has been to experiment with the diagnostic method of the organizational health situation – proposed in a previous paper published in this journal – through applications that allowed backfeeding it and offering a new improved version of it. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The present work takes up the challenge of advancing in the development of the method of determining the health condition of an organization, revising the general homomorphism as well as the information that will be considered, its sources, the way of obtaining it, and the way of making the synthesis that will allow issuing the final overall judgement of healthy or not of the organization that is being studied. To that end, recourse is made to the experience obtained from eight applications made to different kinds of small organizations in the city of Santiago, Chile, from 2008 to 2012.

The human-being/organization homomorphism was reformulated, going from eight component systems of the human body to 13, by reformulating some and incorporating others. Although a set of indicators may be used in different kinds of organizations, each one of them also presents a specificity that makes it highly complicated to make comparisons; the health situation of an organization is related only to itself. Consequently, the set of indicators that are selected to determine the health condition of an organization depends on itself. Not all the variables, systems and dimensions have the same weight for those interested in the overall health judgement to be issued, so this task of searching for the weights becomes a key aspect of the method: what was found to be most advisable was to set up a group of experts composed of key informants belonging to the organization itself and of external analysts. The symptoms – perceptions of the key informants – must be transformed into signs that allow objectifying the judgement of healthy or not of an organization.

The work contributes new elements that enrich the method for diagnosing organizational health proposed earlier, starting from the homomorphism established between the way in which allopathic physicians study their patients and the way the analyst operates with an organization.

The purpose of this paper is to present a reflection that can contribute to the discussion of the possibility, or not, of measuring the complexity of any given system.

The reflection takes place considering three aspects: the first one, of an etymological character, with the purpose to specify the semantics of complexity. The second, epistemological, refers to the forms of complexity measuring in different domains. And the third, of an ontological character, refers to the essential in the complexity of reality, which contains to the observer who observes and that is observes himself.

It is proposed to reserve the word complex to refer to systems that are treated as an undecomposed and irreducible totality and the act of measuring does not take place; while the expression complicated may be used when the act of reduction takes place by measuring the system.

The statement made claims to be revised, criticized, questioned, confronted … , with the aim to enrich it and accept it, or else to reject it and discard it.

There is some degree of originality, with respect to other works, that deals with the measurement of complexity, but which does not refer to the distinction that it is possible to establish between complexity and complication, with its epistemological implications and in particular with the challenge of its quantification.

This paper offers a framework based on the key principles of the complexity paradigm proposed by Edgar Morin to review what can be considered the dominant approach towards knowledge management, i.e. the intellectual capital construct. The purpose of this paper is to identify epistemological weaknesses to offer insights for the improvement of the theory and practice on knowledge management.

Based on the complexity paradigm and its dialogic and recursive principles, a framework to understand knowledge is offered comprising three interrelated requirements, each of which is based on a pair of opposites, arguably critical for the conceptualisation of a complex knowledge: order and disorder, whole and parts, and non‐logical and logical modes of thinking. This tool is applied to reviewing the epistemological assumptions under the intellectual capital approach, in order to find insights for further research on knowledge management. The task has an interpretative character and is carried out highlighting central aspects of the intellectual capital construct.

As a result it is possible to point out that the intellectual capital approach does not fulfill the complexity requirements, since it only recognises at the level of human beings their objective and functional aspects of knowledge, given by qualifications and other features that can be measured on the one hand, and driven a priori by a functional strategy, on the other. It ignores, in consequence, the more unstructured and disordered aspect of knowledge which, from a complexity perspective, is constitutive for the creation of innovative ideas.

The study is fully centered on intellectual capital literature. A complementary review of other less used expressions of knowledge management such as the construct of “communities of practice”, applying the same diagnostic tool, could enrich the conclusions and theoretical proposals.

A framework for the detection of epistemological biases is offered and used in this paper to study the intellectual capital construct, which could be also applied for other knowledge‐based settings. For business managers and consultants dealing with knowledge management, this paper can also give some insights for the improvement of their organisational interventions.

A novel approach, the complexity paradigm, is proposed as the epistemological standpoint to improve theory and practice on knowledge management.

To design a method of systems definition that helps that task especially in the field of human activity systems.

The design is carried out from a constructivist platform and on the basis provided by systemic axiomatic and the Le Moigne nine‐level model.

A method is offered as a result, which comprises the following stages: nomination of the system and those with which it interacts and are in the mediate and immediate environment; determination of what the system studied does, treating it as a black box; opening of the black box to know its internal structure and functions; identification of its regulatory mechanisms with their corresponding information flows; recognition of its decision, memorization, coordination, conception and closure subsystems; and distinction of the system's evolution.

The proposed method needs to be validated and improved, which is estimated to happen as long as it is used and receives feedback.

The method gives organicity to the description of human activity systems, consequently aiding other tasks such as the organizational diagnosis and design.

A new method of systems definition is proposed, especially thought to contribute to the understanding of human activity systems: organizations.

Viable system model, developed by Stafford Beer, and nine level model by Jean Louis Le Moigne, are presented and analysed as ways of distinguishing systems. From the study of both models, requirements to be fulfilled by systems to preserve its identity and, consequently being able to be distinguished by an observer, are derived. The interest and stress here is in a set of postulates by which any system is guaranteed to be recognized as such. Particular attention is paid to self‐regulating systems, but the demands imposed to systems here, to be recognized as such, are estimated to be granted to any kind of system in different time‐space scales.

The purpose of this paper is to propose, from the way in which an allopathic physician makes a diagnosis of a person's health, an organizational diagnosis metaphor that can contribute in the search for an increasingly more integral way of qualifying an organization as healthy.

The methodological approach is essentially functional and is based on the cybernetics of W.R. Ashby with respect to the concept of a model and especially on “iso‐” and “homomorphisms.” In this way, similarities are found between the behavior of the components observed by the physician in a person, according to his diagnostic guidelines, and the functioning of an organization.

The paper finds that various authors recognize the value and power of the use of metaphors, following the spirit of L.V. Bertalanffy, in the search for a better understanding of the organizational phenomenon, particularly that of human health, including the definition of the World Health Organization, from which a way is proposed here to understand a healthy organization and a general model of organizational diagnosis. It is estimated that one of the most significant finding made so far is the need to formalize structurally dependencies meant to apply “organizational awareness” as a way of permanently reflecting on the organization, helping its members to distinguish what belongs to the person and what belongs to the emergent phenomenon called organization, a task that until now is done partially, considering only some actors and at some points in time. Strategic planning, coaching higher executives, and empowerment of employees have gone in that direction, but still show insufficient efforts.

The work done so far has consisted in the theoretical development of homomorphism and some applications about which it is not yet possible make a report because of their scarcity. However, this method of work has made it possible to refeed the initial model and make some adjustments according to the divergencies seen between the theoretical and the practical. Consequently, this is a proposal that requires discussion – the purpose of this communication – and further experimentation that may lead to its eventual validation.

The proposal of a general model for making organizational diagnoses.

Some degree of originality is considered with respect to known work, because the idea is to articulate a model having an integral character that allows an organization to be qualified as healthy, trying to go beyond partial views that attributed that condition to organizations that were seen from a particular perspective, such as the health of its workers or its economic‐financial performance.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a way of asking about organizational conceptions. Some years ago, Edgar Morin proposed the paradigm of complexity as the one that opposes to and contains both the mechanicist and the systemic paradigms, which he calls simplifiers. Based on these paradigms, some of their principles, as well as their influence in organizational thinking are studied here, looking for the establishment of a set of considerations to be taken into account when treating an organizational conception as complex.

Ten paradigmatic principles were compared from the mechanicism, systemic and complexity viewpoints, considering how they were used in the organizational discourse.

As a result, complex organizational conceptions consider the subject as active conscience in the world. In the same way, they establish dialogic relations among: the universal and the particular, temporal reversibility and irreversibility, the parts and the whole, linear and circular causality, order and disorder, organization and environment, observer and organization, and autonomy and dependence, through the use of the complex logic that allows adopting a meta‐point of view to articulate the contradictions and paying attention to the result of the dialogic processes pointed out.

The paper focuses especially on the dialogic principle, leaving the need to approach both the recursion and hologramatic principles, according to that proposed by Edgar Morin.

The paper establishes some references which should contribute to the understanding of complex organizations, as human activity systems, beyond the objectivism of the so‐called “complex systems”.

In this paper, a way of asking about organizational conceptions is proposed, with the aim of knowing the degree of satisfaction of paradigmatic requirements of complexity; so that, it allows knowing if what is being called complex – the organizations – is being treated in a complex way in turn.