Nani's Goal Analysis Blog

Hi colleagues of the class of Goal Analysis, Professor Renata S. S. Guizzardi, and other interested fellows,

Today, listening to Baden Powell wonderful music, I am going to talk about  Herbert A. Simon's paper "On the Concept of Organizational Goal" as I promised yesterday.

The author presents his work to the reader as a deconstruction of big picture, the organizational world, taking apart the pieces, regrouping them and showing how they are fit to build the original world back. This approach is useful in guiding the reader to focus on the specific (deconstructed), identify these entities and relevant properties, as goals imposed by organizational role and individual ones. Another interesting process used is try to reconstruct the world in a way and arguing why that way is no good, to show that we need more understanding about some concepts or of more concepts and properties. 

Paraphrasing the author, the first step toward clarification about organization goal, individual goals, goals of the owners or whether the organizational reflects the owners' goal or have a "personality" of its own, is to separating goals from motives. Goals are value premises that lead to decisions, and motives are causes that lead individual to choose some goals rather than others to lead their decisions.

But goals are not simple in the sense that they express one value premise. There isn't a unique criterion embedded in a goal. In fact there might be multiple criteria collapsed in a goal which evince the necessity of proper decomposition. 

They (goals) can be seen as a set of requirements or constraints and are applicable to the organization's decision-making process, as well as of individuals. Goals of an action may, on one hand, be the constraints that satisfy the solution, or, on the other, may be used to test the satisfactoriness of the proposed solution. 

The sets of constraints used by decision-makers organization-wide seem to be quite similar. Nevertheless, if we focus on the second approach, the goals as sets of tests, will be actually quite different from one individual to another.

Enough for today, fellows!

Tomorrow is a tough day, but I will try to go on in a very interesting section that almost transports the reader to the today approach, of the theme. Really very interesting! If not tomorrow, the next day, I promise.

Thank you for staying with me. See you soon.

Ernani