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ix The aim of this series is to give expression to a particular way of speaking about complexity in organizations, one that emphasizes [JLJ - numbering added for emphasis]
- the self-referential, reflexive nature of humans,
- the essentially responsive and participative nature of human processes of relating and
- the radical unpredictability of their evolution.
1 Introduction: getting things done in organizations
p.3 This book is about movements of thought... Although this first volume is about the roots of organization and management thinking, and is therefore necessarily written at a theoretical level, it is animated by our conviction that there are more useful and less frustrating ways of making sense of life in organizations than those that currently dominate our thinking.
p.6 The matters of control and difference seem to us to be centrally important paradoxes of contemporary life and we are interested in exploring how current management thought deals with these paradoxes and how alternate ways of thinking might be able to offer ways of living with them without collapsing into a search for the "right way," the solution. We need a way of understanding that places paradox at the heart of the matter.
p.6 The puzzling situations people find themselves in, the questions they ask, or fail to ask, all reflect some way of thinking. It is a way of thinking that focuses their attention on systems and procedures in the belief that this is how "things get done."... We suggest that there is nothing more important than the way managers think about the nature of their organization, particularly how it comes to be what it is.
p.6-7 our key questions are as follows. [JLJ - bullets added for readability]
- What causes an organization to take the form it takes and what causes the pattern of its evolution into the future?
- Can that future be known and therefore predicted?
- Can that future be chosen in a rational way?
- Or is the future under perpetual construction and hence unpredictable to a significant extent?
- If so, what are the processes of perpetual construction?
In what they do and how they talk about it, managers demonstrate a particular way of thinking about questions like this.
p.7-8 There are alternative ways of thinking about causality, some of them suggested by the more provocative thinkers in the complexity sciences, which lead to very different answers to the questions we have been posing. These thinkers suggest that interaction itself has the intrinsic capacity to yield coherent patterns of behavior. They propose that the entities of which nature is composed interact locally with each other, in the absence of any blueprint, plan or program, and through that interaction they produce coherent patterns in themselves. There is a further suggestion too - namely, that interaction in nature takes place not primarily in order to survive but as the creative expression of identity. There is another provoking idea. It is only when the interaction between entities has a critical degree of diversity, emerging as conflicting constraints on each other, that there arises the internal capacity for spontaneous novelty. In other words, creativity and destruction, order and disorder, are inextricably linked in the creative process.
p.8 intrinsic properties of connection, interaction and relationship between people would be the cause of emergent coherence and that emergent coherence would be unpredictable... People would still be understood to be choosing and acting intentionally, but this would apply to particular, local responses to others in ordinary, everyday organizational life. It would be the interaction itself that caused the emergent pattern, and plans and procedures would feature in these interactions without determining their pattern... What an organization becomes would be thought of as emerging from the relationships of its members rather than being determined simply by the global choices of some individuals.
p.9 Our project is to develop an alternative to systems thinking about human organizations, not merely an extension to it... This volume explains why we think such an alternative is required and it briefly outlines the sources we might turn to in order to construct such an alternative. We will be arguing that the complexity sciences on their own do not supply this alternative. [JLJ - an alternative conceptual framework. These guys are actually thinking. Bravo for that.]
p.9-10 Chapters 2 and 3 review the contrasting views of Kant, Hegel and Darwin on the nature of causality. It argues that Kant's work underlies systems thinking, the dominant perspective in current thinking about organizations and their management. We intend to found our position on the thinking of Hegel, Mead and Elias.
2 The age-old question of stability and change
p.13-14 A teleological cause is an answer to the "why" question... The "why" question, then, is held by most to fall outside the domain of science... However, in our view, it is completely inappropriate to remove the notion of purpose from an explanation of human action. Human action is purposeful and it is important to make clear in one's explanation just how one thinks about that purpose.
p.14-15 By teleology we mean two things. First, we mean the kind of movement into the future that is being assumed. A key distinction will be whether the movement toward the future is assumed to be toward:
- a known state; or
- an unknown state.
- [JLJ - in my view, a third and important possibility is a movement towards an unknown state with "typical" consequences which are known. For example, getting a college degree does not guarantee you a good job, but typically it does. You just have to scheme ways to get that degree - the results of getting that degree - whatever they are afterwards - will likely result in acquiring a good job. Or, finding ways to increase the mobility and potential mobility of your game pieces in a chess game "typically" produces a better position.]
Second, we mean the reason for the movement into the future. "For the sake of what?" is a phenomenon moving? "In order to realize what?" is a phenomenon moving to the future? A key distinction will be whether it is assumed that a phenomenon moves toward the future in order to realize:
- some optimal arrangement;
- a chosen goal;
- a mature form of itself;
- continuity and transformation of its identity.
We will suggest five causal frameworks that answer these questions in different ways. They are:
- secular Natural Law Teleology
- Rationalist Teleology
- Formative Teleology
- Transformative Teleology
- Adaptionist Teleology
...the first three of these causal frameworks... all assume movement toward a known future state... The remaining two causal frameworks assume movement toward an unknowable future
p.18 Very briefly, self-organization is a process in which local interaction between parts of an organization produces emergent patterns of behavior of a coherent kind in the whole, all in the absence of any overall blueprint or plan for that whole. Local interaction produces a global pattern that need not be designed. It is this kind of claim that is often backed up with references to Heraclitus..., Kant and sometimes Hegel.
p.19 We argue that it is not possible to make reasoned judgments about the validity of the various ways in which the complexity sciences are being used in relation to organizations and their management without examining what assumptions are being made about how and why organizations come to be what they are... We will be arguing that self-organization as cause can be understood in one of two fundamentally different ways, the first being formative and the second being transformative.
p.21 Today's writers on complexity appeal to Kant because he introduced a theory of wholes and parts, with notions close to self-organization and emergence, as a radical new way of thinking about causality. In fact, what Kant did was to introduce, for the first time, a systems theory and it reached a position in subsequent philosophy that was to serve as the foundation of systems thinking around the middle of the twentieth century. Such systems thinking came to have an enormous impact on thinking about both nature and human organizations.
3 Moving toward an unknowable future
p.30 It is important at the outset to be clear that Hegel's thinking has found its way into organizational theory after being filtered through many interpretations and simplifications. [JLJ - Karl Marx was a Hegelian]
p.31 An alternative notion of the whole is that of a whole that is never complete; that is, a whole that is under perpetual construction. Bortoft (1985) moves toward this idea with his notion of an "absent whole." He argues that it is not possible to point to a whole in the same way as it is possible to point to a part.
p.32 the whole... is truly emergent in that it is not the result of a prior design or the revealing of an already existing, hidden whole. The absent whole is in the parts and emerges from the parts. At the same time, however, a part is only a true part, as opposed to some accidental, superficial thing, if it is essential to the emergence of the whole of which it is a part. What Bortoft is talking about here is self-reference, a phenomenon creating itself, in that the parts are being formed by the whole while they are forming it at the same time.
p.33 In talking about communication between organisms as a social act, Mead distinguished between a gesture made by one organism and the response to that gesture by another... Mead argued that the meaning of the communication did not lie in the gesture alone but in the whole social act... In conversation, we too follow the same circular movement in which one discovers the meaning of what what one is saying in the response of others to it.
p.34 In the unknown emerging of meaning, pattern in that meaning nevertheless comes to be recognized. Knowing is such an act of recognition. Communication here is a movement from and toward an as yet unrecognized position that comes to be recognized (known) in the act of communication itself... All communication carries the possibility of change.
p.35 In the thinking of Hegel... and also in the way Mead... takes it up, there is paradox reflected in a different time structure of action. The here-and-now is not simply a point in time but also has temporal structure. One might think of a macro-temporal structure from past to present to future, and a micro-temporal structure of the present, which has a micro-past, micro-present and micro-future, a kind of fractal process. That micro-temporal structure is the gesture and the response the gesture calls forth, taken together. The here-and-now, then, has a circular temporal structure because the gesture takes its meaning from the response (micro-future), which only has meaning in relation to the gesture (the micro-past).
p.36 The two Kantian approaches focus attention on the macro sweep of time from the past to the present and into the future, with the here-and-now simply a point in that sweep. We cannot make sense of experience of a point and so we focus our attention on the past or on the future. Hegel's approach focuses attention on the micro-temporal structure of the here-and-now itself. It opens up the here-and-now point and invites us to make sense of the experience of this as the living present. This is very much about the detailed nature of interactions, micro interactions, that may be the same but may also be potential transformations... Within the overarching Transformative Teleology there is the transformative causation of micro interaction in which each moment is influenced by previous moments. Each moment is a repetition of the past but with the potential for transformation.
p.36 Hegel's thought is suggesting, we think, that the source of change lies in the detail of interactive movement in the living present, movement of a circular kind that is reflected in the macro-sweep of time, past and future... In what we will call the Transformative Teleology of Hegel there is self-organization that has the potential for transformation as well as continuity at the same time... It is in acting that meaning is formed and the acting entities realize themselves in forming this meaning... Self-organization is then a process of interaction characterized in an essential way by paradox and the emergence of the truly unknowable... It is a process that produces novelty, the creatively new that has never before existed... We are arguing, then, that Hegel was presenting a Transformative Teleology that was taken up by Mead.
p.38 Transformative Teleology... movement is toward an unknown form; that is, to a form that is in the process of being formed, to a form that is itself evolving. Truly novel change is possible and self-organization is a paradoxical process of repetition and potential transformation. It is emergence of identity in a transformative, self-organizing process and the paradoxical experience of identity in transformation... identity, or organization, is evolving in unknowable ways, being created as it goes along. Here, the parts form and are formed by a whole that is under perpetual construction.
p.40 Species change through variations at the level of the individual organism, some of which enhance its chances of survival, and thus reproductive success, in a changed environment. Other variations do not do so and so disappear from the species. In other words, some of the small individual changes turn out to be more adapted to a changed environment than others do. The more adapted changes, arising from chance... spread through the species so that it gradually changes toward more adapted forms... Novelty... arises through a gradual process of chance changes (unknown causes) sifted by natural selection, the struggle for survival, so that the most-adapted forms survived to constitute a new species... We call the process of change just described Adaptionist Teleology because the movement of form is toward the most-adaptive state.
p.40-41 Darwin's argument, then, was that novelty arises through a gradual process of divergence in small chance variations naturally selected for their adaptive functions, and it is hard to say just when the novelty occurs. What Darwin was proposing was a formative process of variation, selection and retention, a kind of self-organization at the level of whole organisms in which truly new species emerged. This was a systemic approach in that interactions between organisms and the physical environment they inhabited produced emergent change in forms of organism. It was self-organization in the sense that the new forms did not reflect any kind of previously existing global design... Darwin... His question was truly radical at that time: how did new species originate? [JLJ - we can ask a similarly radical question today: how do moves in a complex game of strategy originate? The question is radical but the answer is provided by Darwin: perhaps as above, novelty arises through a gradual process of divergence in small chance variations naturally selected for their adaptive functions, and it is hard to say just when the novelty occurs - a formative process of variation, selection and retention, a kind of self-organization.]
p.42 In seeking an explanation of this evolutionary process Darwin's main concern was with how species originated... What was revolutionary about his answer was the assertion of a concept of time in which the future emerges as the unknown, as different from the past... In Kant's formulation, nature moved to known forms and so nothing completely new was ever produced.
p.43 Nature acts in producing species that cannot be known before they emerge.
p.43-44 Darwin's theory of evolution is movement towards the unknown according to a formative process of variation and adaptive selection and retention at the level of the organism... For Meade, the source of variation lay in the gesture and response structure of interaction between organisms. Variation with its potential for transformation arose in the micro detail of interaction between organisms. In this Hegelian perspective on the structure of time, a gesture of one organism calls forth a response in another and in so doing the gesture is changed in unpredictable ways. Mead argued that it is this process that accounts for the simultaneous emergence of human minds and human society.
p.46-47 The surviving form, that to which the whole process is moving, is adaptive fitness and the search for this is at the heart of the process. Any notion of a system only comes into the process of competitive selection, which has no effect on the gene variations themselves. They arise individually by chance in a way unconnected with anything else. This evolution produces emergent outcomes in the sense that there is no blueprint or program for the pattern of evolving species, but it does so by blindly cobbling together chance changes, retaining only those that compete most successfully... Adaptionist Teleology... implies a largely non-systematic kind of formative causality in which competitive selection, adaptation, sifts out chance variations in individual genes... it is contained within the formative process and it implies a given fitness waiting to be discovered, as it were.
p.50-51 The micro interactions themselves are simultaneously cooperative and competitive. In Transformative Teleology, it is micro interaction, in the form of conflicting constraints... that is the process perpetually constructing the future and constraining itself. The "competitive selection" occurs in the living present in the course of construction itself. The process is not producing something that is taken away and subjected to another causality. It is a process perpetually constructing itself. [JLJ - more exactly, it is a process which produces itself. How Luhmannesque.]
p.51 we will be arguing that any combination of the five causal frameworks immediately implies the kind of split upon which the dominant management discourse is built, particularly as it is influenced by systems thinking.
p.51,55 We are interested in exploring the implications of Transformative Teleology as the basis for understanding change in organizations and, in particular, the way in which the complexity sciences might point to such understanding. [JLJ - so am I]
4 Limits of systems thinking: focusing on knowable futures
p.59 management science and systems thinking... both encounter difficulties when it comes to explaining, within their own frameworks, the role of ordinary human freedom and the closely related possibility of transformative change... organizational change of a fundamental kind, and how that change comes about... cannot be adequately understood from either mechanistic or systems perspectives. Another perspective is required. We suggest one of complexity understood as Transformative Teleology.
p.73 Our argument, then, is that systems thinking contains a fundamental difficulty right at its roots. This is to regard human interaction as a system.
5 How the complexity sciences deal with the future
p.97 Prigogine... sees the future for every level of the universe as under perpetual construction and he suggests that the process of perpetual construction, at all levels, can be understood in nonlinear, nonequilibrium terms, where instabilities, or fluctuations, break symmetries, particularly the symmetry of time. He says that nature is about the creation of unpredictable novelty where the possible is richer than the real... he sees life as an unstable system with an unknowable future in which the irreversibility of time plays a constitutive role. He sees evolution as developing bifurcation points and taking paths at these points that depend on the micro details of interaction at those points. Prigogine sees evolution at all levels in terms of instabilities, with humans and their creativity as a part of it. For him, human creativity is essentially the same process as nature's creativity
p.101 Transformative Teleology... its future is under perpetual construction through the micro interactions of the diverse entities comprising it. The "final" form toward which it moves is not given in the model itself, nor is it being chosen from outside the model. The forms continually emerge in an unpredictable way as the system moves into the unknown... What emerges does so because of the transformative cause of the process of the micro interactions, the fluctuations themselves.
p.102 Micro interactions transform global patterns and themselves in a paradox of forming while being formed, and an explanation of what is happening requires an understanding of these micro interactions.
p.102
In complex systems, both the definition of entities and of the interactions among them can be modified by evolution. Not only each state of a system but also the very definition of the system as modelized is generally unstable, or at least metastable. (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984: 204) [JLJ - text had incorrect 'interaction' - verified from source, Order Out of Chaos, 1984]
p.104 The conclusion we reached in Chapter 4 is that systems thinking about organizations, while it may be very useful for understanding and controlling behavior of a repetitive kind, cannot deal with the question of novelty.
6 Complexity and the emergence of novelty
p.123-125 We suggest that Transformative Teleology... presents a challenge to the dominant management discourse because it points to:
- Severe limitations on predictability in the evolution of complex organizational processes. Although short-term developments are predictable, long-term evolution emerges unpredictably. Emergent creative developments can be articulated and understood only as they emerge and cannot be predicted in advance. Creativity and uncertainty are thus inextricably linked, and if organizations are to change in novel ways then managers have no alternative but to act continually into the unknown. The invitation is for managers to reflect seriously upon how they do this...
- The centrality of self-organizing interaction as transformative cause of emergent new directions in the development of an organization... Since power is constraint, this perspective places power, politics and conflict at the center of the cooperative social process through which joint action is taken...
- The limits to individual choice... Both outcomes and dynamics producing those outcomes emerge from the interaction between organizations, with no one being able individually to choose them...
- The sources of stability. Stability emerges in relationships because relationships are conflicting constraints, that is, power... stability is sustained by redundancy..
- The importance of diversity and difference. Complex systems evolve when there is micro diversity, or fluctuations..
- Limits to the ability to design and plan. Complex systems have the internal capacity to change spontaneously in unpredictable ways that cannot be described as optimizing anything. Their creative development cannot be designed, planned or controlled...
- Potential success as the paradox of stable instability. This means that organizations have the potential to succeed in that they possess the capacity for novel change only when they combine stability and instability...
- The centrality of the expression of identity and thus difference...
7 Differing views on complexity in organizations
p.128 The central proposition in Transformative Teleology is that human actions and interactions are processes, not systems, and the coherent patterning of those processes becomes what it becomes because of their intrinsic capacity, the intrinsic capacity of interaction and relationship, to form coherence. That emergent form is radically unpredictable, but it emerges in a controlled or patterned way because of the characteristics of relationship itself, to do with conflicting constraints and the self-controlled dynamics of creation and destruction in conditions at the edge of chaos.
p.142 Wheatley (1992)... holds that the "New Sciences" reveal how order is created by a few guiding principles rather than complex controls.
p.143 Brown and Eisenhardt (1998) give a more detailed account of the importance of simple rules.
p.146 For Brown and Eisenhardt... Organizations at the edge of chaos are those that are only partially structured in formal terms... Partial structure is not a state of contradictory forces that can never be resolved but, rather, a simple balance: too much structure produces stability and too little produces chaos, while a balance between the two produces the dynamics of the edge of chaos. When an organization is at the edge, its managers allow a semi-coherent strategy to emerge; that is, one that is neither too fixed nor too fluid... where self-organization produces potentially novel strategies... in Brown and Eisenhardt's version, managers are "allowing" strategies to emerge. [JLJ - perhaps this should apply to game theory as well]
p.148 Wheatley (1992) claims that living systems do not seek equilibrium but, rather, maintain themselves in a state of off-balance so that they can change and grow.
p.149 For us... Systems are either stable and so cannot change, or they are unstable and so can change.
p.149-150 It is not the individual entities but their dynamic interaction in "edge" conditions that cause the emergent pattern of behavior. The dynamic conditions at the edge are not chosen by any entity in the system, but evolution to the edge is itself a property of, and is caused by, the internal dynamics of the system; that is, the interaction between entities... The internal dynamic of a system cannot be chosen by a system on its own because it is in interaction with other systems that the internal dynamic of each is formed as a property of the network of networks.
p.152 Beinhocker (1999)... points to the limits to predictability and concludes that reliance on a single strategy is inappropriate. Instead, managers should develop a population of strategies so that at least some of them will turn out to be successful.
p.153-154 Brown and Eisenhardt (1998)... talk about strategy as an unpredictable, uncontrollable, relentless struggle for competitive advantage. They then immediately state that managing change means reacting to the unexpected as a defensive tactic and anticipation, that is, gaining insight into what is likely to occur and then positioning to meet it. It could also mean foreseeing the emergence of new customer segments... Having said that the future is unpredictable, they immediately call for anticipation and foreseeing the emergence. [JLJ - found the book (used) for $0.39 on amazon... ordered it...]
8 Complexity and human action
p.160 Mental models are said to be below the level of awareness, but it is held that people are able to surface the unquestioned assumptions they are making about the world and change them... The notion that most knowledge is below the level of awareness has come to feature prominently in the theory of knowledge creation in organizations (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995).
p.171 Chapter 3 referred to Mead's (1934) argument that all social animals communicate with each other through a conversation of gestures: movement, touch, sound, visual display and odor. Each gesture by one animal calls forth a response from another, and together gesture and response constitute a social act; that is, an act that is meaningful to those gesturing and responding. This is what the social, in general terms, means to him
p.172 To have a mind means to be aware of the possible consequences of actions, as those actions unfold, by means of silently conducted conversations in the pauses between gestures and responses. Mind is the silent, private role-playing of gesture-response conducted during the vocal, public interaction of gesture-response that is social cooperation. [JLJ - if this is true, then this is what we must aim to accomplish, as software developers, when writing software to play a complex game of strategy. We could be clever and strip off 'to have a mind means' and argue that the remainder: 'to be aware of the possible consequences of actions, as those actions unfold, by means of silently conducted conversations in the pauses between gestures and responses' is what we must aim for. Having accomplished the proof, we shockingly reveal the front portion.]
p.172-173 Meaning is not something that is going on in a mind as thought before action but, rather, arises and continually re-arises, in the conversation of gestures, in the action and interaction, through social relationships conducted in significant symbols.
p.175 Elias (1989) defined the human mind in terms of the capacity to utilize symbols to explore potential reactions to an action before undertaking that action... He located power in relationships... maintaining that power relations were co-created.
p.176 Shotter (1993) emphasizes communication and language as the medium of relationship in which mind arises.
p.178 meaning is not located in the inner world of an individual, according to an intersubjective perspective. Informed by the detailed research into infant development already mentioned, this theory posits relationship itself as the structuring process for mind and personality.
9 Getting things done in organizations: from systems to complex responsive processes
p.186 we want to move away from the notion that human action and interaction is a system or can usefully be thought of as a system, when it comes to understanding change of a transformational kind.
p.187 What we are getting at is the need to understand human intentions, choices and actions as essential to, as operating within, the dynamic of daily interactions between people.
p.188 The move we want to make... is away from thinking about an organization as a system, to thinking about organizing as highly complex, ongoing processes of people relating to each other. We refer to this as Complex Responsive Process of relating in order to differentiate what we are talking about from any notion of a system.
p.188-189 We seek to understand Complex Responsive Processes of relating within the causal framework of Transformative Teleology. This means, for us, that the relational processes of communication, within which people accomplish their joint action, are actively constructing the future as the living present and that future is unknowable in advance. Throughout, the process is characterized by the paradox of the known-unknown and in it emerges the aims people formulate, the goals they set, the intentions they form and the choices they make.
p.189 We are talking about regularly irregular patterns that cannot be separated out into regular and irregular components. We are saying that complex responsive processes of relating between people are movements in time that are simultaneously regular and irregular. Here instabilities are intrinsic and thinking in this way focuses attention on bifurcations in the process of relating... we want to think of the ever-present, ordinary detailed differences of interpretation in communication between people as the generators of variety and, hence, the source of novelty.
Appendix 1; The origins of Western notions of causality
Appendix 2: Complexity sciences as sources of analogy
Appendix 3: The movement of our thought
p.208 [Ralph D. Stacey] In 1990 I published a book based on my experience of the previous fifteen years and concluded that organizations hardly ever move into the future in accordance with their long-term plans. [JLJ - not so fast. The "plans" as such have a "primary" thread and many various "secondary" threads. We simply lose interest in the secondary threads because they show either that 1. we are prepared for such a future or 2. that it is unlikely and not worth additional time. For example, I hang a fire extinguisher in my kitchen in case I have a kitchen fire. I deem it to be unlikely, but I am prepared for it, so I rarely think about the possibility. I also have homeowners insurance as a fallback. I deem my response capacity to be adequate (in the unlikely event), so I lose interest in further "planning". "Planning" typically does not seek to divine the future, only to help an organization to be adaptively and resourcefully ready for whatever future arrives.]
p.210 As my co-authors and I worked on this volume we reached the conclusions we present here that there is a fundamental problem with thinking about organizations entirely in terms of systems. Hence our interest in moving away from systems thinking and pursuing what it might means to think of organizations as Complex Responsive Processes of relating, drawing on on the complexity sciences as a source domain for analogies.
p.210 "Meaning is only meaning as meaning." [JLJ - this is the winner of the 2016 John L. Jerz award for incomprehensible text. If you can figure out what this means, let me know. Perhaps I can offer a retort: "Obfuscation is only obfuscation as obfuscation."]
p.211 Encountering complexity theory in the mid-1990s I immediately sensed a way of challenging systems thinking, but I first thought that this would be from within systems thinking. [JLJ - only an academic can think of challenging a concept, and to use that soon-to-be-disproven concept as the method for that challenge. So logically, what has been accomplished?]
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