Hi Uri Merry,
As you will gather from the responses, several people on the list have
been working on the New Sciences as metaphors and models in management.
Together with a colleague, Prof. Brenda Zimmerman of York University, I
have written two articles on the use of fractals (Breaking the Boundaries:
the Fractal Organization, Journal of Management Inquiry, December 1993)
and complexity (From Life Cycle to Ecocycle: A New Perspective on the
Growth, Maturity, Destruction and Renewal of Complex Systems, Journal of
Management Inquiry, December 1994). I have also just finished a book
"Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change", HBS
Press, 1995, which is underpinned by models derived from complexity and
chaos.
One of the major issues in the use of the New Sciences as metaphors and
models in management is the extent to which one can "map" between the two
universes. Ideally a metaphor should allow one to understand the
unfamiliar in terms of something familiar, but often we seem to end up
with two things which are unfamiliar! The same applies of course to the
more familiar Newtonian metaphors of "motivation", "inertia" etc: they are
surface descriptions of organizational phenomena, not explanations. So
they don't really help us understand cause-effect relationships.
I find that when talking to general managers I have to keep the complexity
and chaos metaphors buried in the footnotes. Otherwise (understandably)
their eyes just glaze over when they hear about the "edge of chaos": chaos
(scientific or generic) is the last thing that they want to hear about!
They need their question "So what?" answered for them in their context.
What we need is stories of management action taken which can be mapped
onto the New Science models and which produced results consistent with
them. A major challenge, but it would be really helpful!
-- Best wishes, David Hurst Speaker, Consultant and Writer on Management dhurst1046@aol.com