Julian, you connect the work of some SFI people with some other thinking
in interesting ways. Thanks.
Two I want to comment on. One:
> whether people can operate as part of a system
> that is too complex for any one person to understand.
Every other system operates in this way so I guess people can. That is,
the cells don't understand the body but it works fine. The individual ant
doesn't understand the colony but it works fine. The point is that this
is THE condition of complex adaptive systems.
However, in these other biological instances, there are connections -
structural couplings to use Varela's phrase - that already exist. In
human organisations these are not of the same kind. They do exist but we
are largely unaware of them. I offer language and practices as the key to
this connection. NOT formal organisation as we think of it.
Which leads to the second point:
> Initially, the main connections in the organisation are those described by
> the formal organisation.
I disagree that the formal are EVER the main connections. In the
beginning, of most corporations at least, there are a few people who
relate to each other in mainly implicit and seldom formal ways. The
formal ways may exist but they are not the source of anything significant
in the early stages. It is as an organisation grows beyond the apparent
(given our cultural history) effectiveness of informal connections that
the formal begins to assert itself.
--
Michael McMaster : Michael@kbdworld.com
book cafe site : http://www.vision-nest.com/BTBookCafe
"I don't give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity
but I'd die for the simplicity on the other side of complexity."
attributed to Chief Justice Brandeis
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations
For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>