Yes
On 3/7/15 8:52 PM, Carmela Ariza via OSList wrote:
Dear Harrison
Beautifully written, thanks Harrison! And to your piece, I say...
MAKING ROOM FOR THE UNKNOWABLE
by: Carmela Ariza, 9:50AM, Manila, 8 March 2015
Oh emergence, where art thou?
Why did we dig so deep
To entrench cynicism
Within the very structures
That we thought would liberate us
Where can we find thee, emergence
When struggling to find you
In our hellholes is precisely antithetical
To your very nature
E-Merge-hence!
You are the energy
From forces that merge
And although we try our level best
To allow you to emerge
Our 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
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