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Madness As Usual

Four-Square Schemata

  • Stefan Kühl
  • Thursday, 23. January 2025

Procedures for Reducing Complexity

Organizations like to use simple four-square schemata. Two dimensions are chosen and used to create four possible quadrants. One dimension could, for instance, be ‘organizational design’, with two possible values: ‘controlled’ and ‘self-organizing’. A second dimension could be ‘role of employees’, with the values ‘implementer’ and ‘creator’. Et voilà – now we can form four quadrants and generate the corresponding descriptions and types: the ‘instructing and controlling organization’, the ‘overstretched organization’, the ‘shadow organization’, and the ‘network’.  

In the same manner, we can define the two dimensions as ‘pressure for global integration’ and ‘pressure for local adaptation’, and we get the four quadrants ‘international’, ‘global’, ‘multinational’, and ‘transnational’, which can be used to identify how businesses react to increasingly global market pressures. 

It is interesting to note that most of the creators of these four-square schemata cannot resist the urge to present one of the quadrants as superior to the others, making the schema a more or less explicit recommendation of whatever that quadrant represents. Varying the schema for analysing organizational culture only a little, using ‘high or low risk avoidance’ and ‘large or small power gaps’ as the dimensions, yields the four fields of ‘clan-like organization’, ‘disciplined organization’, ‘hierarchical organization’, and ‘democratic organization’.

It does not take a genius to determine which of these squares is the desirable one. Another example: if we analyse organizations with the dimension ‘form of work’, distinguishing between ‘traditional world of work’ and ‘new world of work’, and the dimension ‘success’, distinguishing between ‘moderate’ and ‘high’, yielding the four fields of ‘traditional middling business’, ‘modern overstretched business’, ‘classic top-performing business’, and ‘successful pioneering business’, it is again pretty clear in which quadrant you want your business to end up. 

One advantage of four-square schemata is that they can be constructed with simple methods of quantitative data collection. Through the use of standardized questionnaires, organizations can apparently be objectively positioned within the schema. With this grounding in quantitative data, the schema can then be used to pressure the organization to move towards the one quadrant that is championed by demonstrating how few employees, teams, units, and organizations have managed to advance to this elite area. 

Among practitioners, the simple construction of four-square schemata has led to the proverbial claim that your classical business economists can think along no more than two dimensions, and thus their intellectual tools have a maximum of four squares, with one of them representing the unambiguous ideal to be achieved. The complexity of organizations is reduced as much as possible.  

This is not to say that a four-square schema cannot be useful as an analytical tool. But it is most useful when used with the honest intention of working through and classifying the phenomena, not for promoting personally preferred ideal types. Examples of such balanced four-square schemata can be found in the management literature, for instance the analysis of organizational culture in terms of the agonistic pairs of an excessive ‘speculation culture’ and a short-term ‘sales culture’, and a risk-taking ‘investment culture’ and a rigid ‘administrative culture’. In the same way, a ‘clan-like culture’ driven by consensus, a dynamic ‘adhocratic culture’, a more formal ‘hierarchical culture’, and a ‘market-based culture’ could be compared without thereby suggesting that one culture is better or the best. 

Perhaps the point here could be illustrated by a four-square schema of four-square schemata. One dimension would distinguish between the low and high complexity of the conception; the other would deal with the degree to which the schema suggests that a particular field is the ideal one. The devisers of four-square schemata would then – and we must accept the self-contradiction that arises here – aim to have their creations end up in the quadrant which captures those schemata that are highly complex but do not suggest which field is the ideal one. 

Prof. Stefan Kühl

links in his observations the latest results from research with the current challenges of the corporate world.

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