Published in: International Associations 23, 1971, June, pp. 332-334. [PDF version]

The main problem in the study of "problems" and the organizations attempting to solve them is that the environmental context of organizations is changing, at an increasing rate, and towards increasing complexity. In many cases, the changed texture of the environment is not recognized by the executive body of an organization until it is too late. It fails entirely to appreciate that a number of outside events are becoming connected with each other in a way that leads up to irreversible general change. The first response to this situation is to make an herculean effort to defend the traditional approach. When this does not succeed, many upheavals and changes in approach take place, until a "redefinition of mission" is agreed, and slowly and painfully the organization reemerges with a very much altered programme, and something of a new identity.

It was this experience and a number of others, not dissimilar, by no means all of them industrial (and including studies of change problems in hospitals, prisons, and in educational and political organizations), that gradually led two scholars, F.E. Emery and E.L. Trist, to feel a need for redirecting conceptual attention to the nature of the organization environment *. They isolated four "ideal types" of organization environment. An attempt has been made below to define the four types of problem that may be associated with each of the four types of organizational environment described by Emery and Trist.

Type 1: Docile, isolated problems

The simplest type of problem is relatively isolated. This means that it is in effect "contained" by an organized and orderly environment. An organization is therefore free to locate such problems and move towards them, attack, and eliminate them. Because such problems are randomly distributed, there is no necessity for an organization to make any distinction between tactics and strategy. The optimal strategy is just the simple task of attempting to do one's best on a purely local basis. The best tactic, moreover, can be learned only by trial and error, and only for a particular class of local environmental variances.

This means that organizations can easily adapt to each new problem as it is located within their domain.