Turtles (short)

[Tenneson Woolf]

Another thread to weave into this focus on self-organization....

It is my belief that organizations are living systems. There is a "self" that is continually created and recreated. For the good or the bad.

What is the conscious self that we can attempt to create and set free, particularly in large organizations? My sense is that this is closely tied to core values. To encourage multiple expressions of those values is to encourage the fractal of that value. The system isn't designed. It is expressed or manifested.

These may seem like removed philosophical meanderings. For me, they are helpful framings for how to explore and learn in large, complex organizations. The times call for new (or remembered) thinking.

Tenneson


> If the people involved in the system are not organizing it, then who is? If
the response is "the boss", then the boss is part of the system and so the
system is still self-organizing. And, in any case, each member (at least
each living member) of the system is making ongoing choices about how they
will organize themselves in response to the rest of the system.

Physical objects are part of the scenery. Sure they form limitations on the
choices we make, but half of an infinite range of choices is still an
infinite range of choices!

~Alan Klein

-----Original Message-----
From: Artur Silva
1. You refer often to Kaufman's conditions for self-organization. Clearly
those conditions are NOT current and they occur only in special situations.
So it seems to me that there is a contradiction between your references to
those conditions and your persistent affirmations that "there is not such
thing as a non-self-organizing-systems". Can you clarify your thoughts about
this please?

2.  I agree with Masud that the statement is true for "living systems". So
when we consider the humans as part of an ecosystem we can see them as a
"living systems". But human organizations are not only "living material".
Masud gave an example with the financial system, but there are others. An
organization is a mix of living people with objects, rules, procedures,
hierarchies, etc that are not "living" in the biological sense. Those rules
and procedures inhibit, in my opinion, their being "living systems". That's
is precisely the reason why we talk about opening the space - the fact that
quite often in organizations and even in communities the space is pretty
closed. Any comments?

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Tenneson Woolf
801 376 2213

"Stories are medicine. They have such power;
they do not require that we do, be, act anything -
We need only listen."
Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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