Date: Mon, 24 Jun 1996 10:08:04 +0000
To:RLucadello@aol.com
From:apb@cityplex.demon.co.uk (arthur battram)
Subject: replying to Ends and Means LO8035
just a few comments on your posting:
>"It seems to me that it is a natural tendency of people to
>self-organize to achieve their common goals."
>My response: This is true to a degree, but I have seen too many teams
>self-destruct dueto personality conflicts, hidden agendas, bad
>processes, lack ofresourses, etc. to put too much faith in "self
>organized" structures. Iwould argue that the entire emergence of the
>"Learning Organization" as a
>subject of study and discussion is a testament to the limitations of
>people's natural abilities to self-organize.
OK, from a 'normal management ' perspective [whatever that might be] I
would agree, but from a 'complexity' perspective, I tend to disagree. What
you describe isn't self-organising as I know it.
The processes are crucial: that's where the self-organising in the
complexity sense comes in: in the 'rules'.
the term 'rules' in the sense of cellular automata, game of life, 'boids'
simulation, etcetera, is difficult to translate: for me the human system
equivalents can be felt [I haven't pinned this down yet] in special types
of rule, using the word almost in the sense of 'algorithm' or a rule in
logic; it's a sort of 'driver', a tendency, an overwhelming pressure that
you can't avoid, any more than a bird can avoid flocking [moving into the
centre of mass- rule 2: don't do it and you're lunch for a hawk].
A couple of examples:
Have you heard of 'Critical mass'? It's a bike ride through major cities
in rush hour same time once a month, it's fun and a protest about the lack
of sane transport policy for cities. Maybe 500 cyclists turn out and
peacefullytake over the streets for a couple of hours, just by riding en
masse. It's self organised: a small group of activists kicked it off but
now it just happens...and it's a flock! Just like boids in the
simulation, the pressure of the rules is overwhelming: I once got
seperated from the main group with about 10 others- the traffic closed in,
including vehicles who saw us as the reason they'd been held up- the urge
to rejoin the group was incredible! - that's what I mean by rules. [3
rules, as Brian Eno in his recently published diary , page 189,
speculates: a generative rule, a diminishing rule, a maintenance rule].
In organisations, the best example I have so far is a 'voluntary
redundancy policy'- funny how the 'wrong' people stay and the right'
people leave...
Because self-organising has a specific meaning in the work of complexity
scientists like kaufmann, langton, et al, and I feel that it is important
to try to maintain some rigour about the way we use the language [although
Im probably on the complexity police's most wanted list already].
I agonise about this; currently I'm about to run the first 'MagNet' - an
attempt to create a new kind of network for people in local government who
want to apply complexity ideas to the learning organisation concepts in
local authorities and I have the usual fears about how it will go.
On language I think I've reached this point: we must preserve technical
language:
1.- to keep 'rigour' in discussion, so we're discussing the same thing [as
much as possible, I don't mean rigour in a logician or a professional
sense, just that WE are very clear about what WE mean by THAT word in THIS
discussion, right NOW],
2.- to create group feeling around the emergence of new ideas, so that we
can use language to embody these new ideas in the group 'possibility
space' [ this is very influenced by 3 sources: Michael McMaster, Varela
and Maturana, Hari Tsoukas, Univ of Cyprus/Warwick Uni, UK, in his work on
'reforming self-referential social systems' which is what we all try to
do... isn't it?]
And I also worry about elitism: [I'm happy to be accused of it, because
the feedback I get I that I open up things, and explain new ideas, and
listen to others so I'm not worried on that point] it's very easy for
someone to throw out the accusation, and it often disrupts a group badly.
And I still want to preserve my use of special language...
> but believe, from my experience,
>that there is a corollary statement that should be considered: "local,
>informal, organizations will tend to seek local, informally optimal
>results".
yes absolutely, this 'localness' is another key feature of true
self-organising: a kind of local fitness peak in the fitness landscape
[which includes the parent organisation and all other players...]
>I work in an effort to re-engineer planning and scheduling for a large
>company. Many of the disfunctional practices we are trying to eliminate
>are completely rational, and even ingenious, by the standards of the
>small, self-organized groups that developed them. Never the less, the sum
>of all these local optima is not the global optima; it is a mess.
of course it's not a global optimum: as kevin kelly tells us in
'out-of-control', in 'the 9 rules of god' pursue no optima! to do so is
to risk decreasing overall fitness. The trick is to deform the fitness
landscape, by the application of global rules so that fitness increases in
pockets across your organisation; then use network links [ like in
kaufmann's boolean n-k networks ] to pass around the improved practice
[receiver based communication at xerox, cited by Michael McMaster is a how
-to example]. of course the real trick is 'operationalising' these
ideas...
And as ralph stacey says -mess is important: it's where creativity and
therefore adaptation comes from...
>A good
>hierarchy, and I don't believe I have ever worked for one, would foster
>the alignment of self-organized groups with overall goals, visions, values
>etc.
I know what you mean, and I think that's the role of the networks in an
organisation: network can be seen as the chaotic class 3 counter to the
class 2 order of the hierarchy...
>This is an interesting area of discussion. I have wandered into it both
>as a participant in self-organized groups (which did threaten the
>hierarchy, just as John described) and through a, so far, shallow
>acquaintance with the "emergent behavior" or "emergent intelligence" area
>of Chaos theory.
I now consider chaos to be a small subset of complexity theory: what
complexity theory gives us is 'order for free' the self-organising
tendency of all life, a new big principle to set alongside natural
selection. These two biggies answer 2 big questions:
-how do you search for something when you don't know what is you're
looking for and you don't know how to search?
-how do you organise a mess/mass of independent agents, or rather how do
they organise themselves?
thanks for your thoughts- they've helped me express some ideas I hadn't
written down until now...
Best wishes
Arthur Battram
-- from Arthur Battram, organiser of 'Tools for Learning', assisting local authorities to apply complexity concepts to learning apb@cityplex.demon.co.uk "simplicity is out there..."
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>