Leveraging the power of self-organizing in systems

[Masud Sheikh]

Temperamentally, I am something of a heretic (what Tom Watson Jr. of IBM
used to call a "wild duck"), and often have unresolved questions on my mind.
Here is the background to the questions I am going to ask now. Last year, I
wrote an article (named "Journeying as a Systems Thinker) for Shambhala
Institute Fieldnotes. In one section, I picked my thoughts from Dana
Meadows. Most of that section is reproduced below:

 

The question we have to ask ourselves when intervening in a system is, where
can I have the greatest leverage? To answer, we not only need to clearly see
the system being studied and its interconnections with other systems, but
also who is doing the intervening. We need to know our own strengths and
weaknesses, the quality of our relation ships, our deepest assumptions, and
the quality of our attention.  

 

The question of leverage can perhaps be illustrated by the life of an
exemplary systems thinker, the late Dana Meadows. Dana was a contemporary of
Peter Senge and accomplished at systems dynamics. She was the lead author of
a study published in 1972 named The Limits to Growth and became a leading
voice in the sustainability movement. Thinking systemically, Dana seems to
have decided that her contribution would be inadequate if she simply
continued to publish scientific studies, and she decided to write a weekly
column, "The Global Citizen," where she commented on world events from a
systems perspective. She also became an organic farmer, in effect becoming
"the change she wanted to see" in the world.  

 

In an article titled "Places to Intervene in a System," Dana listed nine
leverage points, ranking them from those having the least to the greatest
leverage. Not surprisingly, the least leverage was assigned to "measurable"
points that are within - and use the paradigm of - the existing system. 

 

Her top three leverage points follow, along with excerpts:  

Third: The power of self-organization. "The human immune system can develop
responses to (some kinds of) insults it has never before encountered. The
human brain can take in new information and pop out completely new thoughts.
Self-organization seems so wondrous that we tend to regard it as mysterious,
miraculous."  

 

Second: The goals of a system. "The goal of keeping the market competitive
has to trump the goal of each corporation to eliminate its competitors. The
goal of keeping populations in balance and evolving has to trump the goal of
each population to commandeer all resources into its own metabolism."   

 

First: The mindset or paradigm from which the system arises. "The shared
idea in the minds of society, the great unstated assumptions - unstated
because un-necessary to state; everyone knows them - constitute that
society's deepest set of beliefs about how the world works. There is a
difference between nouns and verbs. People who are paid less are worth less.
Growth is good. Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human
purposes. Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens. One can
'own' land. Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our
culture, all of which utterly dumbfound people of other cultures. Paradigms
are the sources of systems. From them come goals, information flows,
feedbacks, stocks, flows."  

 

My questions: Open Space does address the third leverage point. In some
cases, the second leverage point is addressed. For instance, on the FSN
listserv, Ralph Copleman asked a question about allowing his own agenda (as
an environmental activist) influencing the client agenda. How do we "choose"
who we work with? And what is the basis of our choice? I can see that some
of us (an example that comes to mind is John Engle) make conscious choices.
How important are such choices?    

 

But to address the first leverage point: What are the paradigms of our
system - the OS Network? What are the unstated assumptions? 

Take care, ladies & gentlemen    

Masud    

  

 

     

 

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at
the testing point - C.S. Lewis 

 


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