Organizational elements are responsive to each other yet keep separate identity, buying adaptability at the cost of coordination.
Weick's 1976 analysis of schools. Loose coupling lets one part fail without taking down the rest, at the cost that reforms in one part do not propagate to the others either.
In practice
- A university where departments can fail independently survives a bad department; one where a central system links them all fails together.
- A retailer whose stores are loosely coupled absorbs a regional problem, and cannot roll out a change in under a year.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Why organisations learn, harden and decline