Form follows function

One of the oldest explicit principles that has shaped my thinking is “form follows function”. When I joined the GTZ (predecessor to GIZ) in 2003, this was one of the first principles that my manager (Mrs Gabriele Trah) often repeated when we received proposals from our counterparts or were designing interventions in a particular context. The principle has proved very valuable ever since, especially when working in bottom-up development, as it constantly challenges us to seek an appropriate level of organisation that matches the capacities of the stakeholders with the context. At the time, it became one of the key principles of the Local Economic Development toolkit that we were developing with Mesopartner, the company I am now a partner of.

At the time, I just took this principle as a universal truth, and only recently did I discover where this principle came from. While following an interesting idea down a rabbit hole, I stumbled upon a letter that Peter Drucker wrote to Bill Emmot, the editor of the Economist, in 1994. In it, Drucker corrected the editor that he did not favour smallness or bigness based on an earlier article published in the Economist. (The whole letter is worth reading, because Drucker was a really great author.)

Drucker argued that size follows function. Look at how eloquently he described the appropriate form.

“The right size is one that is appropriate to an organisations function – elephants better be big, butterflies better be small”.Peter F Drucker, 1994

As far as I can tell, this is where the principle “form follows function” comes from. Drucker credited D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson for this idea, but Drucker seemed to get the credit for this precise formulation.

I found this sentence valuable because promoters of innovation, entrepreneurship, or economic development more broadly are often strongly biased towards smallness and against bigness. Yet, some kinds of innovation are better suited to bigger organisations than smaller ones, or vice versa. Also, as technologies and industries change, what is more suitable for a larger or smaller organisation also changes. For instance, a large retailer can better overcome the logistics, infrastructure, and supply chain challenges in a country like South Africa. But this might change as technologies, markets and infrastructure change.

In the same letter, Drucker argues that even within a large organisation, it is necessary to figure out how to create smaller organisational units that are better able to respond to the challenges they were created for. He argued that the appropriate form is determined by the function to perform. Perhaps this is where the subsidiarity principle comes from (pushing the decision to the most appropriate and proximate level of decision making). Still, I would have to do a little more digging about this first.

I would add that Drucker's form follows function, which seems like a universal heuristic but becomes powerful when we recognise the context. What are the functions and forms that are most appropriate in this particular context. In general, Drucker also questioned the whole form of the public versus private sector as much as he questioned assumptions about size. The business school he helped to establish and many of his publications on management kicked against the conventions of small versus big, public versus private, and state versus market.

In my work, where I support groups of people to make sense and innovate, I have to remind myself often that “form” and “function” are both equally important, and that there is a tension. Wherever you start, form, or function, you have to go to the other and then back, and then consider the context. It is not only about determining the best arrangements (form) for decision making, sensemaking or innovation, but that function, the job-to-be-done, is also important.

This is often where my clients struggle the most. They prefer the form, and the exact functions and what it would take to perform these in a particular context are unclear.

For example, in a conversation with a senior manager supporting innovation in the mineral processing sector, I was told that their organisation's funder had specified the exact number of small businesses they had to either create or support in their activities promoting innovation in the mining sector. The form was specified before the appropriateness of the form in relation to the functions was clear. In another meeting last week, a senior public official said that we must prevent larger retailers from using e-commerce and their ability to negotiate with suppliers from destroying small retailers.

To use Drucker’s example, we often want bees to perform like elephants or vice versa.

The kinds of problems that must be solved (the functions to be performed) should frame the thinking about what forms would be appropriate, within a specific context. This is what Drucker wanted us to ponder. Furthermore, we must remember that as technologies, markets and contexts change, the appropriateness of different forms will shift. In mining innovation, the regulation and compliance costs are probably important factors that shift the balance towards bigness. As technologies and red tape change, the balance might shift in favour of smaller organisational units.

Have you recently used the “form follows function” principle in your work?

Did you start with form or function, or did you manage to think of both?

Can you share any experiences where assumptions about the preferred form did not consider the functions required within a particular context?

Credits:

The image of Peter Drucker is from Wikimedia. It is attribued to Jeff McNeill, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The correspondence from Peter Drucker to Bill Emmot is from the Drucker Institute. https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/dac/id/1177/