I resonate with your remarks on working with these new paradigms in
practical management situations. One of the approaches which we take,
both in our consulting approach and embedded within our software, is to
encourage our clients to take into account many more of the actual
relationships present in their organization, which impact upon their
throughput and quality, then their conventional attitudes and measurement
systems allow.
The reason that this works is I believe, because it is richly connected
networks of relationships from which innovation and wisdom emerge, not the
conventional top-down structures of command and control.
In fact, I suggest that the "New Sciences" signal a paradigmatic shift
from a culture which tends to think that everything is accomplished from
top-down organizations, and especially from top-down intellectual
thinking, to a culture in which both wisdom and innovation are nurtured as
bottom-up (emergent network) processes. One advantage of this bottom-up
approach from the perspective of personal growth, could be that We would
be doing a lot more relating with each other and the rest of the world on
a "direct" basis, rather than through the obscurations of our precious
cognitive constructs. In the end, however a dynamic balance between
top-down and bottom-up approaches is perhaps the best, with scope for
inside-out and outside-in processes as well.
Does anyone else have any feelings about such a paradigmatic shift ?
-- Doug Seeley: Compuserve 100433.133 Fax: +41 22 756 3957 (Geneva) "Are there places where networks do not exist?"