----------Notes below----------------
My perception of the paths that we are on: we have already what we need.
Trying to understand living systems.
This exploration has raised some questions about life, What are we
doing? what is life ? what is the purpose of life ? what is possible
to create ?
Life is messy, disturbing, diverse . It is difficult to change our
mechanistic thinking.
You can not analyze a living system, that is a mechanistic orientation.
Our ideas must fit the mechanistic mental models. 3 examples :
TQM, MBTI. Our culture which seeks knowledge to control. The desire
for control, for techniques, for prediction.
If we think of organizations as Living Systems not just systems:
1. Autopoiesis happens, give birth to itself, bring forth itself, a world.
2. How to affect , influence a process.
Organizational identity is important. is about agreement of belonging.
We wnat to create a LO ? Ethics, is how we behave when we decide to
live together. Who am I willing to be in order to be in this org ?
And, what what is the org asking me to be in order to live here ?
Why are we not succeeding in creating LO's ?
Unless the agreement of belonging/Identity is about long/life learning.
What agreements are people organizing around ?
Ask them, ask the people in the organizations, rather than introduce
another training program, another set of techniques.
The US Army recognizes it's better to learn than to be dead.
This is not the belief that people have in your organizations.
We are tinkering with the superficial stuff, rather than going to
the core beliefs, going deeper, we need to surface those beliefs,
agreements.
Living beings are autonomous/freedom. Living systems are influenced by
choice, only if Living systems are open / finds meaning.
Francisco Varela talks about perturbation. Let's send a perturbation
to the system as an experiment, to see what it wants, what is its
responses. a LS will choose to notice what they choose to notice.
Biology/Emergence in a human system , you can't predict its behavior.
example of misuse MBTI used for prediction.
It's in the relationships, in the interactions, that Emergence will
occur. give up predictable expectations. If, we take Emergence seriously,
we give up control/predictable. Varela says, that if a LS is suffering
the remedy is to connect it more to itself. LS have an innate desire
to be healthy. We should focus on what the Living System wants/needs to
connect itself.
I guess I really want us to do different work, because we really could
make a difference. The world we are bringing forth, are based on our
beliefs, mental models. We have not changed our mental models
sufficiently.
We can give birth with others to organizations that are really alive.
People don't organiza themselves in order to do less.
Example, The world Bank, 85% of the people there agree with its
purpose and vision. the same 85% hate working at the bank.
We take the human spirit in organizations and put it in a mechanistic
structure and destroy people's dreams.
We may be really be able to pull it off. depends on which paradigm
we are standing in. ( mechanistic vs Living systems). but it
depends if we are conscious or not conscious about it.
Vigilance is needed. Friendship is also needed. we need conscious
thinkers about Living Systems, not just Systems thinkers.
I like to quote from Heidegger, whom I have not read. heidegger talks
about "Dwelling". How do we dwell with our clients ?
Living systems path of embodiment, interaction.
Put contemplative into the phenomena of observation.
How do we convene not describe the system ?
-----------------------------------------
Manuel Manga
Organization Design Consultant
<0007015296@mcimail.com>
--Manuel Manga <0007015296@mcimail.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>