Emergence is a nice, warm cuddly word. Makes you think of springtime flowers making their random appearance, little babies entering the world - everything just sort of popping up when and as it chooses. I can understand why this cuddly word has replaced the harsher "Self Organization" in the vocabulary of many people, but it is the same stuff by another name. Emergence is simply what life does - it just pops up randomly and never follows a plan, or certainly not any plan we might have made. The shift from "self organization" to "emergence" is, I suspect, a lightly veiled effort to sugar coat the reality that Emergence (self organization) is the manager/executive's worst nightmare. And if you are going to have a nightmare, best it be a warm and cuddly one.
Face it. Emergence is the last thing that any competent manager wants in their organization. The Enemy. It is unpredictable, uncontrollable, and quite unknowable. Without prediction, control, and knowledge, where would any self respecting manager be? The uncomfortable answer: Out of a job. The response has been the elimination of Emergence at all costs. The first line of defense is carefully designed organizational systems, crafted to prevent variability and deviance. Each working unit is precisely defined so as to integrate with all others in a seamless manner. To insure effective operation, these systems are encased in layers of control - not just one but controllers controlling the controllers, and so on ad infinitum. Rounding out the picture, we have multiple training programs, skillfully constructed to insure total compliance with system demands. The effort to date has been massive and in many ways, quite productive. Unfortunately there appear to be certain unintended consequences. For example, as organizations operate within narrower degrees of variance, innovation, creativity, agility, and flexibility almost disappear. New Leadership (one might say emergent) is noticeably absent - after all who could tolerate such Emergence? Communication is reduced to small restricted areas and allowed to follow narrowly defined channels. This sounds good, but it renders the often praised, but rarely seen Cross Disciplinary/Departmental cooperation virtually non-existent. Lastly, individuals employed by such systems are perhaps less than content. Even though they spend a majority of their waking hours so engaged they appear to devote major energy to thoughts of escape. They long for the weekend, Thank God for Friday, would rather be fishing, and often compare their situation to being in jail. I even heard some say that they felt like rats in a cage. These unintended consequences are apparently taken to be a small and inescapable price for the productivity we have achieved. In addition, an appropriate fix is readily available. Indeed we have a whole profession devoted to the effort: Consultants. These wise purveyors of Leadership Development, Communication Skills, Creativity Enhancement, Employee Motivation, Conflict Resolution, Meeting Facilitation, Change Management - all packaged in suitable interventions, programs, and "tools," are ready to assist. For a fee of course. Taken as a whole, it would seem that we have all bases covered. Productive systems function without distraction from pesky Emergence, and such unintended consequences as there may be are well handled by the professionals. Could it get any better than this? Probably not unless... ...unless it were to turn out that our organizations were actually part of life. Life, of course is incredibly complicated with many unknowns, but it does seem that we have learned a few things. For example, living creatures really don't do very well when locked in a box. They may survive, but in very reduced terms. Life always seems better with some basic fundamentals, such as fresh air to breath, space to move about in, interesting and diverse experiences and challenges, mountains to climb, and unknown hills to peer over. Always strange, always new, always a challenge, and never quite what we might expect. You could say Life is emergent. This list certainly not inclusive, and hardly scientific, but given such basics, life does seem to work itself out. Most interestingly - Given the basics, living creatures naturally display amazing creativity, agile adaptation to new opportunities and changing environments, and are constantly in communication with their fellows and other creatures. Along the way, they create complex and elegant structures, manage such conflicts as they have in ways that create minimal damage and maximum gain, and they have been doing all this for a long, long time. However, deprived of such fundamentals, life turns nasty real quick. For example, if you take a dozen perfectly respectable, amiable, well behaved rats and squeeze them into a small box - they will quickly kill each other. An odd thought does arise. It would seem that most everything we do in the name of organizational effectiveness is antithetical to what Life requires. Should our organizations be part of life it would then follow that such ills as we experience (loss of agility, creativity, leadership, etc) are actually self inflicted wounds. Doubtless our various attempts to aid the wounded through our multiple programs, interventions and tools, are commendable, but truthfully we are only dealing with problems we have created. It might make a lot more sense to just stop shooting ourselves in the foot (and elsewhere). For a next step, we might just open up some space for life to breath. Won't solve everything, but it could be a good place to start. And we might just find that the Enemy (Emergence) is our friend... Harrison Winter Address 7808 River Falls Drive Potomac, MD 20854 301-365-2093 Summer Address 189 Beaucaire Ave. Camden, ME 04843 207-763-3261 Websites www.openspaceworld.com www.ho-image.com OSLIST To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of OSLIST Go to: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/listinfo.cgi/oslist-openspacetech.org> http://lists.openspacetech.org/listinfo.cgi/oslist-openspacetech.org
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