Building new knowledge frameworks for productive organisations

In the 21st century, most organisations in the public and private sector are in the process of adapting their stand-alone more specialist historical arrangements to an emerging work context that is increasingly fast moving, interconnected, and multidisciplinary. The global context for organisational decision making is also multi-cultural, highly mobile, and increasingly places demands for collaborative approaches to becoming or remaining competitive. These changes are stimulating new strategies for checking interpretations, creating feedback loops and impact checks, and new efforts to design work contexts for high levels of engagement, devolved authority to specialist teams, and new responsibilities for leaders. In Australia, most of this development is happening in an ad hoc fashion with little shared public discussion of the way ahead. The THEORI group has presented some of their research based knowledge in this book as a first strategic step in a program to share their knowledge in ways that enable organisations to become sustainably productive.