Ends and Means LO8060

John Woods (jwoods@execpc.com)
Sun, 23 Jun 1996 20:38:17 -0500

Replying to LO8035 --

In response to my comment at self-organization:

>The first is: "It seems to me that it is a natural tendency of people to
>self-organize to achieve their common goals."

Robert Lucas said:

>This is true to a degree, but I have seen too many teams self-destruct due
>to personality conflicts, hidden agendas, bad processes, lack of
>resourses, etc. to put too much faith in "self organized" structures. I
>would argue that the entire emergence of the "Learning Organization" as a
>subject of study and discussion is a testament to the limitations of
>people's natural abilities to self-organize.

To which I comment: The self-destruct behaviors you mention do not
change the point I was making, they just describe the nature of that
self-organizing, which is a function of the larger system in which it is
taking place. There must be a payoff to the participants to behave in
such ways in that system. Or participants don't take the goal or
project they're working on seriously. In other words, I think we need
to look at such behaviors as symptoms of how the system they are part of
operates. It is likely that the system that the parts of the system
itself are filled with hidden agendas, inefficient (though staunchly
defended) processes, and so on. In other words, people will
self-organize to the best of their ability, given their experience,
information, resources, awareness, and the environment in which they are
operating. Recognizing this, we should work at dealing with
organizational symptoms that would foment such dysfunctional behaviors
on the part of team members.

John Woods
jwoods@execpc.com

-- 

John Woods <jwoods@execpc.com>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>