Replying to LO28057 --
Dear Organlearners,
Don Dwiggins <dond@advancedmp.com> writes
>Of course, we can reduce this number to "manageable"
>proportions by partitioning the company. Consider an
>11-person company (thus having 2,048 entities). If we
>partition it into two 5-person "departments" plus a
>separate "CEO", and assign a "VP" in each department
>to relate to each other and the CEO, we have many fewer
>entities: 31 in each of the departments plus 7 in the
>"executive suite": 2 x 31 + 7 = 69 (actually 67, since the
>VPs were counted both in the departments and the
>executive suite).
Greetings dear Dwig,
I wonder whether fellow learners grasp the consequences of such a
partition. The enities (associative patterns X*Y*Z) for 11 members
decrease from 2,048 to 69 for a 6+1+6 members partition.
This is how living organisms (protista and bigger) do it. They consist of
many similar cells, each having a restricted number of organelles (like
mithocondria and ribosomes) rather than one big cell containing all these
organelles.
One of the reasons why the apartheid government could not suppress the ANC
was that they organised themselves into cells, a lesson which they learned
from their communist protectors. Thus the cell-like organisation got a bad
name among whites and still has it for many. This is a pity.
I personally think that the transformation of an OO (Ordinary
Organisation) into a LO (Learning Organisation) should happen
via cells. I hope to report within a year whether such an approach
will be successful or not. The central clues, I think, are:
* cells ought to divide rather become too big
* all behaviour in a cell ought to be spontaneous
* all cells ought to seek win-win-win-win... relationships.
>It's easy to see what's gained by this arrangement,
>but what might be lost? Of the almost 2 thousand
>entities that have been "pruned", are there any that
>are important to the company?
If the two partitions ("cells") are also allowed to communicate with each
other in Learning Teams, I do not think that any vital entity will get
lost. The danger in any partitioning is when the partitions get isolated
from each other. Let us look again at a multi-cellular organism. Although
each cell is confined within a cell wall, these walls are by no means
isolated. Hundreds of different chemical compounds are exchanged through
these cell walls so that the cells can "communicate" with each other. It
is only the higher ordered organelles which cannot pass the cell walls.
And they need not because of the effective "communication" between the
cell walls. (By the way, the "communication" between the different
organelles within the cell is just as complex, of not more complex.)
>I think I'll stop here, to see what reactions
>people have to this model.
Thank you for describing this model so clearly. It helped me to understand
cellular growth even better.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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