Re: [OSList] Emergence: Enemy or Opportunity? (A Parable of Sorts)

Carmela Ariza via OSList Sat, 07 Mar 2015 17:52:45 -0800

Dear Harrison
Beautifully written, thanks Harrison! And to your piece, I say...
MAKING ROOM FOR THE UNKNOWABLEby: Carmela Ariza, 9:50AM, Manila, 8 March 2015
Oh emergence, where art thou?Why did we dig so deep To entrench cynicismWithin 
the very structures That we thought would liberate us
Where can we find thee, emergenceWhen struggling to find youIn our hellholes is 
precisely antitheticalTo your very natureE-Merge-hence!
You are the energyFrom forces that mergeAnd although we try our level bestTo 
allow you to emergeOur structures are mere traps
Help us to listen intently to the flow of life
Enable us to create open spaces where our energies Merge into one beautiful 
harmony of surprises and miracles Befriending the "unknown"And in our very 
hearts, make room for the "unknowable"

 True happiness is a state of mind.
Happiness is not a consequence of things that happen. 
Do not pursue happiness - practice it. 
Sing, even if you do not sound good. 
Smile, even when things go wrong. 
Create happiness, and happy you will be.
      From: Harrison via OSList <[email protected]>
 To: 'World wide Open Space Technology email list' 
<[email protected]> 
 Sent: Sunday, 8 March 2015, 4:52
 Subject: [OSList] Emergence: Enemy or Opportunity? (A Parable of Sorts)

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 Address7808 River Falls DrivePotomac, MD 20854301-365-2093 
 Summer Address189 Beaucaire Ave.Camden, ME 04843207-763-3261  
Websiteswww.openspaceworld.comwww.ho-image.comOSLIST To subscribe, unsubscribe, 
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Re: [OSList] Emergence: Enemy or Opportunity? (A Parable of Sorts)

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