Self-Organization/Free Will

[Harrison Owen]

At 09:51 PM 11/19/01 -0900, you wrote:
>Self-organization is to an organization as free will is to an individual.
>
>I can't quite get my mind around why this might be important.  Perhaps
>it's that so much has been thought and said about free will.  If
>self-organization and free will are analogous, then perhaps we could begin
>to recognize similar patterns on different scales.  That would be very
>fractal-like, wouldn't it?

Interesting thought, if only because I think a lot of people might think of
self-organization as the absolute antithesis of Free Will. The argument
might go something like -- Since we are all part of self-organizing
systems, of one sort or another, and since those systems are going to
organize themselves regardless of what we do/will -- Free Will is just a
fond delusion. I couldn't agree with that notion, and in fact  I think it
represents a profound mis-understanding of both Free Will and
Self-Organization. As I am coming to understand it, Self-Organization is a
fundamental principle in our existence, and it applies to both
organizations and to us as individuals, just as gravity or the Laws of
Thermodynamics. All these things are, to quote Birgitt, "Givens" which
describe the context or boundaries within which our activities as
individuals and organizations will take place. We ignore these "givens" at
out peril -- jumping off a cliff, and expecting to fly is not a career
enhancing move. At the same time, we can learn to live with these
"fundamentals" and (eventually) use them to our advantage -- and this is
where the exercise of Free Will comes in, I think.

The Open Space Experience, for me, is an important and powerful educator in
terms of our capacity to "live with and use" the principles (or maybe I
could say Laws?) of Self-Organization. We learn, amongst other things, that
the one way to close things down is to attempt to organize it (control).
This can be a painful lesson, particularly to the old ego, which thought it
was in charge. But there is good news as well, for it turns out that much
of what we used to work very hard to accomplish will pretty well take care
of itself, and we can go on to do some more useful things. Down the road,
as we get better at it, I think we can learn to skillfully surf the waves
of our collective self-organizations in order to achieve some pretty
remarkable stuff. For me, this is where the excitement lies, and the
learning curve is a steep one to be sure.

Harrison


Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, MD 20854 USA
phone 301-469-9269
Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com
Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org
Personal website www.mindspring.com/~owenhh

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