Organizational 'Vital Signs' LO19265

Mnr AM de Lange (amdelange@gold.up.ac.za)
Wed, 16 Sep 1998 11:52:24 GMT+2

Replying to LO19240 --

Dear Organlearners,

Michael Bayers <mbayers@mmm.com> writes:

> Suppose for a moment that you were an Emergency Medical Technician --
> except that you were called in to work on organizations rather than on
> individuals
(snip)
> If you were that 'organizational
> EMT', how would you do triage? What would you look for first to determine
> whether the 'patient' is alive or dead?
(snip)
> My thoughts (that is, this afternoon, anyway) suggest that there are two
> fundamental 'flows' (analogous to air and blood) I'd want to check. I
> think I'd look for the flow of Trust from heart to heart within the
> organization, and I'd look for the flow of Knowledge from brain to brain.

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the post. It gave me one big smile! I could not resist the
following.

You have probably not noted how I "pestered" this list through the years
with the topic of "entropy production".

Up to Ilya Prigogine, everybody thought that entropy production did only
one thing, namely describing the dissipation (spreading) of energy.
Prigogine initiated a paradigm shift when he realised that "entropy
production" does not only cause the dissipation of energy (i.e chaos), but
also the concentration of energy into a structure (i.e. order). Thus he
speaks of "dissipative self-organising systems".

Typical of a paradigm shift, few are able to make it. Thus Planck,
discoverer of the quantum effect, noted that the new paradigm take effect
in the newer generation while the old paradigm and the older generation
die away. It took about 20 years for the quantum shift to become
established among physicists. The "evolution of organisms" is orders more
complex than the "motion of objects with mass". Thus the shift from
"Darwinian evolution" to "dissipative evolution" will take much longer
than 20 years. We are now a little over 20 years in the entropy shift.

The entropy shift will happen in two phases. The first phase concerns the
material (physical) world. It is the phase we are now in. The second phase
concerns the abstract (spiritual) world. That phase will soon begin. Only
then will the paradigm shift become an avalance.

Since few people have shifted to the paradigm "entropy production", few
ask themselves how entropy is produced. It is produced by force-flux (or
tension-flow or "being-becoming") pairs. The reason why I smiled, is that
your "knowledge flow" and "trust flow" may easily qualify as entropic
fluxes. (I would rather think of them as fluxes of "good reason" and "good
will".)

In other words, what you are saying for me, is that you will look for
the factors causing intellectual+spiritual dissipation. The first,
chaotic phase will be mind storming (see Osborne's brain storming)
+ heart storming .

> And somehow, it seems like both need to be present and the flow of
> one influences the flow of the other.

This sentence caused my smile to become a big smile. See if you can follow
the following.

Prigogine got the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on irreversible
thermodynamics (dissipative systems). Irreverisble thermodynamics is a
difficult subject. Thus it is not surprising that few scientists have a
deep knowledge of it. Those who do have, know that the Onsager reciprocal
relationships (for which Onsager was also awarded a Nobel prize) play a
key role in irreversible thermo- dynamics.. These Onsager relationships
have to do with the fact that one entropic force-flux pair may induce many
other force-flux pairs. Electronic technology, for example, rely heavily
on the Onsager relationships.

Best wishes

-- 

At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za

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