The aestheticization of business processes: Visualizing their Gestalt for collective thinking

Abstract

Business processes, simply defined by Davenport as “structures for action”, organize the creation of value in a company. In addition to being carried out visibly, processes also have an inner dimension which remains hidden in the existing mechanistic metaphor of process management models. Aesthetic business processes draw from systems theory and Gestalt theory in order to uncover this inner dimension. The aim of this phenomenological investigation presented here is to describe the super-summative nature of business processes, in other words, to understand them holistically as a Gestalt. Mechanical Engineering students at a university of applied sciences analyzed business processes at different companies to discover patterns which they then visualized with the process participants at those companies. They used Christopher Alexander’s pattern language as a paradigm to make implicit knowledge buried in those business processes explicit. Using this technique, the structure of a pattern language for business process was developed, offering patterns for visualization as a tool for collective thinking and as a form for expressing the Gestalt of aesthetic business processes. The shared visualizations highlighted the nature of the business processes and made it possible to see, in a metaphorical way, their significant interactions.