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p.4 Knowledge is not a "thing," or a system, but an ephemeral, active process of relating.
p.5 Transformative Teleology is an alternative causal framework derived from Hegel as interpreted by Mead, in which the future is understood to be under perpetual construction.
p.6 It is the purpose of this book to explore just what complex responsive processes mean and how they perpetually construct human futures, particularly how they perpetually construct human knowledge in organizations.
p.47 For Bion (1961b), thoughts arise in the individual as inherited preconceptions, that is, raw elements of sensuous and emotional experience in which the physical and the psychical are indistinguishable and lend themselves only to projective identification. The development of a thinking apparatus to think the thoughts requires a relationship with another... Thought, therefore, arises in inherited preconceptions originating in the individual outside of relationships with others. The individual then relates to another, transmitting feelings that are arising in him or herself, which may be contained by the other and then transmitted back again. Successful accomplishment of the process enables thought.
p.60 Transformative Teleology
Movement is toward a future that is under perpetual construction by the movement itself. There is no mature or final state, only perpetual iteration of identity and difference, continuity and transformation, the known and the unknown, at the same time. The future is unknowable but yet recognizable, the known-unknown.
Movement is for the sake of expressing the continuity and transformation of individual and collective identity and difference at the same time. This is the creation of the novel, variations that have never been there before.
The process of movement or construction, that is, the cause, is the processes of micro interaction in the living present, forming and being formed by themselves. The iterative processes sustain continuity with potential transformation at the same time. Variation arises in micro diversity of interaction as transformative cause. Meaning arises in the present, as does choice and intention.
The kind of self-organization implied is diverse micro interaction of a paradoxical kind that sustains identity and potentially transforms it.
Changes in identity depend upon spontaneity and diversity of variations in micro interactions.
Both freedom and constraint arise in diversity of micro interactions as conflicting constraints.
p.70 I will be arguing that the "system" does not provide an analogy for human action but that the process of interaction does. The reasons for this claim and the meaning of Transformative Teleology are presented in the first volume (Stacey et al., 2000) in the series of which this book is part and summarized in Box 3.1 on p. 60.
p.83 feelings unconsciously guide choice and when the capacity to feel is damaged, so is the capacity to rapidly select sensible action options.
p.84 Mead said that humans are fundamentally role playing animals.
p.93 complex responsive processes of relating... amounts to a particular causal framework, namely that of Transformative Teleology, where the process is one of perpetual construction of the future as both continuity and potential transformation at the same time.
p.117 From this perspective, the underlying view of causality is one of Transformative Teleology (see Box 3.1, p. 60). In other words, complex responsive processes of relating are the transformative cause of themselves as a process of perpetually constructing the future as continuity and potential transformation at the same time.
p.133-134 Complex mixtures of unique influences occurring both within and around people shape their actions... These movements of dialogue are... potentially transformative and it is in the minute variations that the possibility of the novel arises... as individuals engage in public, vocal conversation with each other, they simultaneously engage in private, silent conversations with themselves.
These silent private conversations that are an individual mind have exactly the same features as the public vocal conversations described above: they mirror each other. Minds are associative, with one thought or voice silently triggering another thought or voice. One "voice" seeks to persuade or negotiate with some other "voice," in a silent role play... An individual asks questions of him or herself and gives replies, complains and responds, compliments and denigrates oneself, and so on.
p.138 Bruner (1990)... suggests that humans are born with a predisposition to organize experience in narrative form
p.138 narratives display sensitivity to what is ordinary and what is exceptional in human interaction.
p.139 Narrative... renders the exceptional comprehensible. It provides a means of constructing a world and identifying its flow as well as regulating the affects of people... communicative action in the medium of symbols... constructs both individual mental and social realities.
p.140 Each individual is simultaneously evoking and provoking responses from others so that the particular personal organizing themes emerging for any one of them will depend as much on the others as on the individual concerned.
p.149 without... disruption to current patterns of collaboration and power relations there could be no emergent novelty in communicative interaction and hence no novelty in any form of human action...disruptions generate diversity. One of the central insights of the complexity sciences is how the spontaneous emergence of novelty depends upon diversity (Allen, 1998a, 1998b).
p.150 It is in... continued struggles for meaning, and the imaginative elaboration going with it, that the novel emerges.
p.150 people... act toward each other in a manner that recognizes their interdependence and so negotiate their actions with each other... The immediate consequence of... interdependence is that the behavior of every individual is both enabled and constrained by the expectations and demands of both others and themselves.
p.150 Power enables one to do what one could not otherwise have done and it also constrains one from doing what one might autonomously like to do.
p.156 Any organizational change, any new knowledge creation, is by definition a shift in patterns of communicative interaction, hence a shift in power relations
p.162 Teleology is concerned with why a particular phenomenon becomes what it becomes, that is, with the purpose that causes it to do what is does... Teleology also has to do with the reason for the movement into the future.
p.162-163 The assumptions I have been making about teleology in the last four chapters are summarized by the term Transformative Teleology. Here, the movement of human action is toward an unknown future, that is, a future which is under perpetual construction by the movement of human action itself. The reason for the movement of human action is to express continuity and transformation of individual and collective identity and difference at the same time... The process of human action is that of perpetual reproduction of identity, with the potential for transformation. There is no optimal, mature or final state, only the perpetual construction of the known and the unknown, at the same time. The future is unknowable but yet recognizable.
p.163 The perspective of Transformative Teleology... suggests that making sense of organizational life requires attending to the ordinary, everyday communicative interacting between people at their own local level of interaction in the living present. This is because it is in this process that the future is being perpetually constructed as identity and difference.
p.164 I am arguing that complex responsive processes of relating are the basis of all forms of human joint action using tools no matter how sophisticated those tools might be.
p.188-189 reified symbols... have no meaning until they are used as tools in the process of communicative interaction... It is in the ordinary, everyday detail of such interaction in the living present that people are constructing the future of their organization, enabled and constrained by the communication tools they and others have constructed... This perspective places power relations, or the emergence of enabling and conflicting constraints, at the center of the explanation. It views change as the evolution of the thematic patterns organizing the experience of being together... Such evolution is possible only when the dynamics of communicative interaction are fluid enough, when there is diversity, tension and conflict in the thematic patterning of communicative interaction
p.189 knowledge is meaning and it can only emerge in the communicative interaction between people. It emerges as meaning in the ongoing relating between people in the living present. This is an evolutionary concept of knowledge as meaning continuously reproduced and potentially transformed in action. Knowledge is, therefore, the thematic patterns organizing the experience of being together... Organizational change, learning and knowledge creation are the same as change in communicative interaction [JLJ - perhaps knowledge is anything deemed useful in constructing an argument for how to "go on". As in, you have to decide among several ways to proceed. What do you use in your argument (with yourself) to evaluate the options, ultimately, to decide?]
p.217 Knowledge is the themes and variations in them that organize the experience of being together and they can be "found" only in the actions of relating between people. Knowledge is not designed, nor does it exist in a transcendent common pool, but emerges in a process in which it causes itself in the interaction between bodies in local situations in the living present. From this perspective, it becomes impossible to think of designing such a process and it makes no sense to think of managing it. [JLJ - well duh, in the living present humans must "arm" themselves with knowledge in order to "go on". This knowledge must be "used" in our day-to-day interactions, or else it is useless. Knowledge grows in the interactions with others, who also "use" their knowledge.]
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