Organizational engineering

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Organizational engineering (OE) is a form of organizational development. It was created by Gary Salton of Professional Communications, Inc. It has been developing continuously since 1994 on both theoretical and applied levels.

The core premise of OE is that humans are information-processing organisms. It posits that individual behavior can be understood and predicted using engineering's basic model of:

INPUT > PROCESS > OUTPUT

This offers advantages over the more typical psychological approaches. Primary among these is that it requires only simple logic. There is no need to rely on unseen forces or "inherent" mental characteristics.

For example, life requires a person to navigate a host of relationships with people and things. People's lives tend to be relatively stable. They live in the same house, drive the same car, put the same children to bed in the evening and go to work to the same place each morning. This stability allows people to perfect a strategy that works in their typical situations. Since people tend to reuse things that work, this strategy becomes their general approach. They will try to use it even in unfamiliar situations. It becomes a characteristic approach.

OE calls the strategies people regularly use strategic styles. Styles are different combinations of the Input>Process>Output. Each mix produces a different but predictable pattern of behavior. For example, a person may elect to pay attention to detail (input). It is virtually certain that this will slow response. The more detail they require, the slower they will be. Others will probably infer that they are cautious or deliberate. This result is a certainty. It takes time to process information. Unless a way can be found to speed the chemical reactions between the neurons in the brain the result will always be the same.

OE applies the same kind of logic to define the range of possible behaviors. These relationships have been codified under the name of "I Opt." This is an acronym for "Input Output Processing Template". It is the basic measuring tool of Organizational Engineering.