Dear Organlearners,
Cliff Hamilton <CliffRH@aol.com> writes:
> I'd resolved to get back to business and not be drawn into this discussion
> again, but some things caught my attention that I simply cannot let go
> without comment. My finding time to respond usually means the
> conversation has moved several iterations ahead so, in the risk of tardy
> redundancy I'll comment anyway.
Cliff, it is much the same with me. I wonder how many others members of
this forum have the same experience? Is it not essential to organisational
learning?
> On Monday, 8 Dec 1997, Dr. Steve Eskow wrote:
>
> >Organizations aren't alive. Since they aren't alive they have none of
> >the powers of >living beings: they don't have intelligence, nervous
> >systems...They can't learn, >adapt, weep, be happy.
>
> What is alive? Do all living things give birth, weep, have intelligence
> and nervous systems? Most of us probably agree many things are alive that
> do not - like the whole plant kingdom as a start. So is a person really
> "alive" or are just your individual cells alive and acting in concert with
> many others to form structures to accomplish some result and make you as a
> whole unit seem alive? Communication and connection between the cells is
> what lets the whole collection become tissue and collections of tissues
> become what we interpret as a single "individual."
Since your contribution, others have expounded on you line of thinking. I
love it when people now actively try to incorporate life in their
organizational thinking.
But you are right. Life is not only animals, or even less mammals, or at
the least humans. We must be very careful not to fall in the trap of using
exclusive morphemes. Using exclusively, for example, humans as morphemes
leads to anthropomorphic (antrhopocentric) thinking. As you have pointed
out, what about the plant kingdom? And for that matter, what about living
entities which cannot be fitted under the plant or animal kingdoms such as
virusses?
I want to go even further. I have mentioned many moons ago on this forum
that in 1967, at the end of my master degree in physics, I wanted to get
of the bus of static, fragmented, demarcative, fruitless, measured,
homogenous and closed thinking. I jumped of the bus right into soil
science. However, I have learned through mathematics, physics and
chemistry the value of organised thinking. I tried to organise the then
existing information on soils and failed to do so because of a lack of a
systemic framework powerful enough to provide for such an organisation. I
then began to search for a suitable framework. Eventually I stumbeled on
irreversible thermodynamics (the study of entropy dissipation/production)
which proved to be powerful enough.
I also changed my view on soils completely. I began to think of a soil as
a Complex Adaptive System (CAS), long before the term CAS became a fashion
among others, long before I began to study life itself (plants and
animals) as a CAS., long before I even began to study mind in its abstract
world as a CAS.
> But this is only in so called "higher" life forms. What about all the
> single- celled life forms of which there are millions? Remember, many of
> your cells too will remain alive for awhile after you as a collective unit
> "die."
What about soils? It does not even have single cells! Yet it is "alive" as
any plant or animal can wish to be. I can use hundreds of soil morphemes
as metaphors to illustrate individual and organisational learning. But few
of you, except those who have persistently "dirtied" their hands with
soils, will be able to understand the "mind", "heart" and "soul" of soils.
Thus I refrain from using these metaphors. Nevertheless, our thinking must
be such that it does not exclude soils.
Why? A sustainable "biological" life without soils is not possible!
Furthermore, it is possible to influence a soil through its own CAS
properties in such a manner that the soil cannot sustain life itself as
another CAS. Thus I began to perceive how important it is to have harmony
between different kinds of CASs.
Once I began thinking in terms of different kinds of CASs and the harmony
needed between them, the process accelerated. For example, I began to
percieve our climate (together with its relationship with the rest of our
solar system) as another kind of CAS. How many of you are aware how much
our climate is influenced by solar winds - clouds of plasma (ionised
particles) rushing from the sun. These solar winds have a much greater
influence on our climate than "El Nino" can ever wish to have. How many of
you are aware how our climate shape our soils - and vice versa?
I have now given you two kinds of CASs (soils and climates) which are very
much "alive", but which cannot qualify as biological systems. I can
discuss other kinds of a CAS, for example, the fantastic hard-core
chemistry taking place in our oceans. But I think that by mentioning
soils, climates and oceans, I have made my point. We cannot afford any
more to leave out any CAS from reality - the ultimate CAS - the web of
complex adaptive systems. We cannot afford any more exclusive thinking
when we wish to understand the complexity of reality.
To put it in other words, we need to think inclusively. This means that we
have to seek those things which are common to all reality and incorporate
them in our explantions, descriptions and predictions. It took me a long
time to understand that these "common things" of reality are not simple
themselves. They are complex. Their meaning varies as we trace them
through all the levels of complexity/reality.
Is life/live such a common thing? I think so. But we have to bear
something else. So much has been written on life that we have an immense
baggage to carry around when trying to understand life/live. The inertia
of this baggage may become too massive to release us from our conformed
ways of thinking. For example, you write:
> If we cut to the chase and accept the general human definition, then most
> of us participating in this list probably qualify as "alive." Thus, in
> organizations, if "alive" individual human members communicate and join
> together to act in concert with others to form functional units to
> accomplish some result, is the organization alive? If that same
> organization adapts and changes to different pressures around it and
> different combinations of members, is it then alive?
To this I can add: how many of you think of soils, climates and oceans as
living entities? How many of you can visualise a soil, a climate or an
ocean in your organisation? I do it almost every day, but I keep it to
myself because others lack the experiences to undertsand it.
Thus I prefer to formally complexify another concept which has acquired
much less baggage, but which adjoints the concept of life/live, namely
creativity. For example, notice how much easier it is to decide
intuitively whether an organisation is creative or not than to decide
whether it is alive or not.
We cannot explain life/live in terms of itself. Explanations are mental
emergences. And all emergences, even mental ones, are
transitive-asymmetric rather than reflexsive-symmetric. Thus we have to
explain life/live itself in terms of something else. I cannot think of a
better concept than creativity. Unfortunately, we then also have to
explain creativity itself in terms of something else and not itself. What
will it be?
This question troubled me since the middle sixties when I was still a
student. Since the early seventies, the answer was in my sight, but I
could not see it because I operated from the wrong paradigm. And even
after the paradigm shift during 1982 (when I discovered empirically that
entropy production/dissipation also governs the abstract world of mind),
it took me another four or five years to finally see what was should have
been so obvious to me.
CREATIVITY IS THE RESULT OF ENTROPY PRODUCTION.
I know that this "definition" is not at all obvious to most (all?) of you.
But many of you have read about Ilya Prigogine and his contributions to
science. His contribution most known to you is his discovery that living
systems are dissipative systems. How can I formulate his discovery in
other words.
LIVING SYSTEMS ARE THE RESULT OF ENTROPY PRODUCTION.
(And to connect another loose end, CASs are the result of entropy
production)
In other words, the "dissipation of entropy" and "entropy production" is
one and the same thing! It is this entropy production which makes soils,
climates, oceans, virusses, cells, plants, animals and even human
organisations so interesting - the fact that they change and the fact that
when they change, some pattern seems to be involved. The pattern which we
seem to perceive, points to some very important things. Firstly, there is
some corrrespondence between our minds and the material world out there.
Secondly, this correspondence forces us to accept that our minds and the
world out there are firmly connected into one reality. This the very
essence of holistic thinking.
Now, to end this contribution on the thread "Can Organisations Learn?", I
wish to oberve YES, provided that the members of the organisation think
holistically. How should we define this holism? It is not part of my own
culture (which is not English), but whenever I hear or read the extended
marriage vow which goes like this "Do you, ABC, promise to love XYZ in
sickness and health, in ......", I say to myself that I will have to look
far for a finer expression of holism than this sacred vow.
If you carefully work through my contribution again, you will notice that
I tried to stress the message: Think holistically. Let this be one of our
goals for 1998! (By the way, holism has very much to do with one of the
seven essentialities of creativity, namely "associativity-monadicity". If
I just could get my book published so that I could better refer to them, I
would have suggested in making the seven essentialities our seven goals
for 1998.)
Best wishes
--At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>