Replying to LO27711 --
Leo writes:
> This series of At was another master piece of this/our/my teacher. This
> series reconfirmed a lot of ideas which developed in my mind after some
> years of following the products of At's free energy.
Amen and "me too".
> This series has also generated some new questions and meandering in my
> mind. And I like to put these into our space of dialogue.
> 1. Could we imagine an organisation without a leader? Is such situation
> possible?
> 2. Why is a leader necessary?
> 3. Is the leader the member of an organisation with the highest available
> amount of free energy?
> 4. Could the emergence of a leader be the result of entropy production by
> the organisation?
> 5. Should we make a distinction between 'muscle free energy' and 'brain
> free energy'. Is a balanced situation of both the ideal situation?
> 6. Was the top stone of the pyramid of Cheops in Egypt carried by the
> leader (the strongest) or was the leader the conductor who managed the
> slaves? (If you are not strong, be smart). I have noticed the sentence of
> At: "Since the spiritual is higher than the physical...", although that
> was mentioned in an other context.
I have a similar question: would leadership in a practicing LO be
"situational", in time and space, so that the individal in the leader role
could change from time to time? Or perhaps the organization might even
have more than one leader during some periods, each leading a different
part or aspect of the organization's behavior (a many-to-many mapping).
Of course, this is a violation of the traditional principle of Unity of
Leadership, but it may be characteristic or even essential for an advanced
LO.
> In line with the above, At has sketched also in many other contributions
> that if a system 'wants' to evolve constructively via an emergence, the 7
> E's should be in balance with eachother. All of them must be tuned. I got
> the impression that nature has a clever conductor who is a master in
> tuning the 7 E's. To the contrary with humans, who seem to have
> difficulties in this tuning and therefore 'create' the risk for
> immergences to happen.
There's a darker explanation possible. Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, in
their book "The Collapse of Chaos", propose a metaphorical counterpart to
The Grim Reaper, which they call The Grim Sower. This is in relation to
creatures that reproduce by generating a large number of offspring, of
which only a few will make it to maturity. Nature seems to conserve
bifurcations sometimes, and at other times to spawn them willy-nilly,
letting the (imm-/em-)ergences fall where they may.
The well known "skunk works" approach to innovation in corporations is in
line with this; with a small, relatively simple organization, you can try
many things ("grim" sower), allowing the unsuccessful things to be
"reaped" and building on the relatively few successes.
There may be a Law of Conservation of Complexity, somthing like: the more
complex the system, the more carefully the approach to bifurcation must be
managed. Simple systems can more easily be generated, repaired and/or
replaced than complex systems (possibly this is a corollary of the Law of
Singularity of Complexity).
--Don Dwiggins "Solvitur Ambulando" d.l.dwiggins@computer.org
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