Life in Organizations LO9689

Julie Beedon (julie@vistabee.win-uk.net)
Mon, 02 Sep 1996 21:15:49

Replying to LO9663 --

Michael commented...

>I like the new slant on this conversation that you've started. Who
>knows of a system that was bad or evil from the start?

I too am intrigued by where this thinking might take us... but then I
started to wonder and in reflecting with my husband (he of the theological
persuasions) ... might it be worth our while defining what we mean when we
say a system is 'good' or started off 'good'? We could be using a number
of alternative definitions

1. morally good - and how would we measure?

2. good in the sense that it was designed to meet it's purpose (then I
suppose bad might mean lost its way??)

3. good in the sense that systems are good because they organise etc...

We got here by discussing Aparthied - created good?

Which took us into areas of intentionality and made me wonder if the
extent to which a system was originally good could also be related to how
many of the members of the system it took into account when designing it's
intentionality/purpose... ie Apartheid was good for some and not
others.... So, like Rol's point about the environment changing and
rendering the orginal good system bad - then if we did not take account of
the whole of the environment we might not create a 'good' system in the
first place...

I am also wondering about the extent to which we should consider notions
of simultaneity as well ie systems are good/bad/improvable all at the same
time (even when created??)

What do you think?

Julie Beedon
VISTA Consulting - for a better future
julie@vistabee.win-uk.net

-- 

Julie Beedon <julie@vistabee.win-uk.net>

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