Within the context of the inquiry to which BeautifulSystems.org is dedicated, texture is a special term (it has its own category). So, here I want to say a few general things about texture.

Here are some things you’ll find on Wikipedia:

“Texture refers to the properties held and sensations caused by the external surface of objects received through the sense of touch”

In painting, texture is described as the “feel of the canvas based on the paint used and its method of application”

In music, it’s defined as “a way to vaguely describe the overall sound of a piece of music”

In computer graphics, texture is “a bitmap image applied to a surface in computer graphics”

Here are some points that we may glean more generally from these definitions:

Texture is sensual, not conceptual–it requires a body.

Texture brings other more ‘noticeable’ elements together.

Texture is emergent–it comes about through the interaction of those other, more ‘noticeable’, elements.

Consider, for instance, the texture of a book. The book has a certain weight when you hold it. It has a particular smell to it. The pages have a certain feel as you run your fingers over their surfaces–a feel that comes about both from the texture of the paper itself and from the very minute protusions on the page that are formed by the ink. the cover has a certain texture.

In addition, the book has other kinds of textures. The font, the setting of the letters. The page layout. And, perhaps most generally, there are the things we do in order to facilitate our reading– the direction in which we turn pages, the scanning orientation (in English, for instance, we move our eyes from left-to-right, from top-to-bottom of the page). The location in the book of footnotes and citations.

All of these aspects of the book don’t just ‘frame’ our experience of reading–in fact, reading would not be reading without these things. (Amazon’s new Kindle attempts to recreate many aspects of book reading, acknowledging the loss of texture which current online reading experiences yield).

Organizations (companies, software source code, communication, etc.) have textures as well. Those textures describe the every-day-ness, the mundane qualities, of those organizations. They define what it’s like to dwell within those organizations (as an employee, as a programmer, as speaker or listener).

Subsequent writings on this topic will continue to flesh out this important aspect of organization, bringing attention to those aspects of organization that are often ignored, often relegated to the inessential. What if, as leaders and organizational change facilitators, we were to turn our attention to the transformation of texture? What would that look like? How might it be manifested, in practice?

Stay tuned.

Posted in: Organization, Texture by admin on Thursday, December 20th, 2007

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