We can mine some gold from "self organisation" but first we need to get
rid of some mischievious baggage. Rol's skepticism is well placed.
First, because what is called "self organisation" frequently takes
somewhere between a long time and never. Second, as he points out, we may
need to take a very distant view to see something as self organising.
At one level, we could say that everything in existence is self
organising. But that won't help us very much even is accurate. At
another, little if anything is self organising in the sense that no
intentional forces (or, in nature, forces extrinsic to the thing self
organising) are at play.
Most references to self organising teams ignore the factors that are in
place - the forces or attractors and structures - which heavily influence
the occurrence and specific directions of this "self organisation".
After the right conditions are in place, self organisation is not a
problem. But then, at least in human affairs, it isn't self organisation
at all.
I make the distinction between design and management or control. The
attractors and structures can be created that allow the maximum interplay
of human creativity and the results are beyond what could be predicted and
certainly beyond what can be managed or controlled into existence. But
that is a function of design and then free interaction of intelligent
agents within the environment created.
Any borrowing from the work of the Santa Fe Institute and their work on
self organising systems (a la Tom Ray's "artificial life") needs to
realise that an environment, including rules of interaction and sources of
energy, are created before the "self organising agents" are turned loose.
Rol says:
> but the bigger issue is that by and large, the localized, self-organizing
> team does not have -- and cannot have -- perfect information about the
> happenings beyond their own boundaries.
Perfect information is not required for decision making and this is a
red-herring in the argument. Executives don't have perfect information
either but they are charged with running companies. The larger
intelligence of the whole organisation has most information but it too is
far from perfect. This is not to be in any state.
It is this condition that makes the work of SFI relevant.
Rol says later:
> In a world of scarce resources, teams need support from senior
> management to get needed resources.
This should read ".....and a hierarchy where management controls the
resources." This is not a necessary condition as accepted by most
management structures.
Michael McMaster : Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk
book cafe site : http://www.vision-nest.com/BTBookCafe
Intelligence is the underlying organisational principle
of the universe. Heraclitus
--Michael McMaster <Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>