I would like to offer my feelings on complexity within physical systems.
A very promising definition was being worked on about eight years ago by
Heinz Pagels, before his untimely death in 1988. My sense of it is that
the complexity of a system is the difference between the amount of
information needed to describe the system in its present state, and the
amount needed to describe all the stages it might have been in at the
point at which it changed from the last previous state. Applying it to
the psychology of self and organizations, we might infer that a complex
person or organization is one whose behaviors and ideas could not be
easily explained, and whose development is not obviously predictable.
But I am struggling to make this connection more understandable and
concrete.
Frank Voehl: FVoehl@aol.com
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>