Organizations as complex relational processes, narratives and emergent action (and a story!)

Harrison Owen hhowen at comcast.net
Sat Mar 13 15:27:11 PST 2004


Christ -- this is better than reading the NY Sunday Times. It takes a
while, but it is worth it. All the News fit to Print (except what they
made up :-))

So -- I'm reading and thinking. More later.

ho

Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, Maryland   20845
Phone 301-365-2093

Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com
Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org
Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm
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-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Chris
Corrigan
Sent: Saturday, March 13, 2004 3:41 AM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Organizations as complex relational processes, narratives and
emergent action (and a story!)

Okay, a dose of theory here.

I came across a paper by Frank Smits from Sydney, Australia, courtesy of
the Plexus Institute called How stories affect human action in
organisations,
(http://website.lineone.net/%7efrank.smits/Essays/Stories.htm) last
week.  I've had a chance to read it and it posits a number of
interesting points.

My reading of the paper follows the development of these key ideas:


   1. Organizations are not "things" but rather relational processes.

   2. Human beings use story to represent and understand the patterns of
experience.

   3. Stories only represent partial versions of reality and so
narrative interpretation is subject to power dynamics.

   4. Powerful storyteller can make people "captives" in the story; this
is the process of mythmaking.

   5. "Organisations, in fact the 'organising via relating, exist in
order to 'do something'. Hence somehow, the individuals in the
organisation need to 'act'...if our identity is clear and we are
actively interconnected in interdependent processes that when
information comes available, action can emerge. The information sharing
happens in interactive processes between individuals (either inside or
outside the 'organisation')."

   6. "In the language of Gover (1996) 'our identities are being
constitutes and reconstituted with their physical, cultural and
historical contexts'. The roots of narratives and identity, he claims,
'merge, inextricably embedded and nurtured in the soil of human
action'."

   7. Narratives that resonate with an individual's experience create
meaningful and sustained emergent action.

   8. If people in organisations don't pay attention to the Individual
Intention, the likelihood of the vortices of the narratives in those
organisation resonating with the vortex of the Individual Intention is
purely one of chance. It is due to individuals themselves to actively
spend the time to understand other people's Individual Intention.

   9. By consciously working on understanding Individual Intention and
consciously work on fuzzifying the narrative the complex responsive
process of interaction between the people will move to the attractor at
the critical point. This can only happen in self-organised process of
interactions where meaning can start to flow.

All of this is interesting stuff, especially the deep connection between
narrative and action. Organizations as relational processes, as arenas
for the practice of storytelling and mythmaking (with it's attendant
careful attention to compassion) and all of this as a propellant to
emergent action. It's a lucid thread.

For my money the last point is the most interesting and an example of it
cropped up for me in an Open Space meeting I facilitated last weekend.

I was working as part of a team developing a transportation demand
management plan for a city in British Columbia, basically coming up with
a strategy to get people out of their cars. As part of the process we
convened a 1.5 day Open Space meeting with the intention that the
participants would begin to work on citizen-based initiatives to get the
message out.

These people didn't know each other, and so Day One was taken up with a
lot of conversation about the "typical" issues. The day was essentially
about getting to know each other, testing out ideas and theories,
exploring the stories and myths about the issue and basically sussing
out the power relationships, the allies and the opponents. There was
very little new content, but the day was a rich field of developing and
dissolving structure, process and relationships, coalescing around
stories. Because we were in Open Space and the agenda was driven by deep
personal passion and responsibility, the process of group-forming was
accelerated. By the end of the day there was one story that emerged to
invite action. Someone mentioned that in the very neighbourhood in which
we were meeting, the world's first curbside blue box program had been
initiated. Whether or not this was an observable fact, it became the
story upon which we hung the potential for citizen action in Day Two.

Day Two was a two-hour action planning session, and I opened with that
story and my interpretation of the fact that we simply don't know when
and how small initiatives will blossom. And so the invitation for action
planning was to start something small that could change everything.

Within two hours there were three major initiatives sketched out. One
involved closing a street down for a one-day festival promoting biking,
walking and bussing. One was a project to have coporations sponsor
evening busses into town from the suburbs on weekend nights to encourage
teenagers to stay out of their cars. The third idea was the formation of
a website and the coordination of letter writing and lobbying campaigns
to align actions on specific issues. All of these ideas had champions,
follow-up meeting dates and committees or teams of people committed to
working.

I found the way this Open Space event evolved to be right in line with a
few of the paragraphs from Smits' paper:

                "By consciously working on understanding Individual
Intention and consciously work on fuzzifying the narrative...the complex
responsive process of interaction between the people will move to the
attractor at the critical point. This can only happen in self-organised
process of interactions where meaning can start to flow. That is the
domain of dialogue; it is the art of 'thinking together'... Or, in the
words of Bohm:


                                    From time to time (the) tribe
(gathered) in a circle. They just talked and talked and talked,
apparently to no purpose. They made no decisions. There was no leader.
(.) The meeting went on until finally it seemed to stop for no reason at
all and the group dispersed. Yet, after that, everybody seemed to know
what to do (.). Then they could get together in smaller groups and do
something or decide things.

                                    -- David Bohm, On Dialogue (quoted
in Jaworski, 1998: 109)



                In this quote Bohm describes how dialogue as a way of
people interacting manages to let meaning emerge because of people
understanding each other's Individual Intentions. Effective action could
emerge. Note that the course of action was not decided by someone
outside the process or decided via a compromise! It was emergent because
the process allowed the Group Intention to move to the Edge of
Incoherence."


This is exactly what happened, with people saying in the closing circle
that they were very surprised at how quickly the action plans came
together. This echoes my experience of using an Open Space action
planning process we call "non-convergence," so-called because it eschews
voting, preserves the diversity and complexity of the Day One
conversations and keeps the space open for subtle pattern and
meaning-making by those motivated enough to initiate action.

Smits' paper gives me a nice theoretical frame to understand that
process.  I thought it might spark some discussion here as it suggests a
move from seeing organizations as complex adaptive systems to complex
relational processes.  In Wilberian terms, that seems like a very big
shift from the right hand side to the left hand side.

At any rate, I've also posted this to my weblog at
http://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/2004_03_01_archive.html#10791665
3320999533 for comment.

---
CHRIS CORRIGAN
Bowen Island, BC, Canada
(604) 947-9236

Consultation - Facilitation
Open Space Technology

Weblog: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot
Homepage: http://www.chriscorrigan.com
chris at chriscorrigan.com
(604) 947-9236

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