from my weblog today at http://www.globalchicago.net/weblog
...been doing much thinking recently on open space as the possibility for corporate compassion... embodying responsible care in organization. here's my latest discovery. a rock-solid business version of the biology/self-org story we've played with for so long. self-org meet "spontaneous order"... michael h -- Discovering Hayek On F. A. Hayek <http://www.mises.org/hayekbio.asp> (1899-1992) and knowledge, prices, and competition as a discovery procedure... In "Economics and Knowledge" (1937) and "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945) Nobel Laureate Hayek argued that the central economic problem facing society is not, as is commonly expressed in textbooks, the allocation of given resources among competing ends. "It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality." Much of the knowledge necessary for running the economic system, Hayek contended, is in the form not of "scientific" or technical knowledge--the conscious awareness of the rules governing natural and social phenomena--but of "" (unconscious? circumstantial? tacit? latent?*) knowledge, the idiosyncratic, dispersed bits of understanding of "circumstances of time and place." This tacit knowledge is often not consciously known even to those who possess it and can never be communicated to a central authority. The market tends to use this tacit knowledge through a type of "discovery procedure," by which this information is unknowingly transmitted throughout the economy as an unintended consequence of individuals' pursuing their own ends. For Hayek, market competition generates a particular kind of order--an order that is the product "of human action but not human design" (a phrase Hayek borrowed from Adam Smith's mentor Adam Ferguson). This "spontaneous order" is a system that comes about through the independent actions of many individuals, and produces overall benefits unintended and mostly unforeseen by those whose actions bring it about. To distinguish between this kind of order and that of a deliberate, planned system, Hayek used the Greek terms cosmos for a spontaneous order and taxis for a consciously planned one. Examples of a cosmos include the market system as a whole, money, the common law, and even language. A taxis, by contrast, is a designed or constructed organization, like a firm or bureau; these are the "islands of conscious power in [the] ocean of unconscious cooperation like lumps of butter coagulating in a pail of buttermilk." Most commentators view Hayek's work on knowledge, discovery, and competition as an outgrowth of his participation in the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s. The socialists erred, in Hayek's view, in failing to see that the economy as a whole is necessarily a spontaneous order and can never be deliberately made over in the way that the operators of a planned order can exercise control over their organization. This is because planned orders can handle only problems of strictly limited complexity. Spontaneous orders, by contrast, tend to evolve through a process of natural selection, and therefore do not need to be designed or even understood by a single mind. Italic in this last paragraph are mine. This is the case for OpenSpaceTech <http://www.globalchicago.net/wiki/wiki.cgi?OpenSpaceTech>. The planned orders of our organizations simply can not handle the levels of complexity and adaptation that most organizations are facing. The only compassionate thing to do is look carefully at the knowns and unknowns... and then to use planned orders for what we know and use OpenSpaceTech <http://www.globalchicago.net/wiki/wiki.cgi?OpenSpaceTech> to discover and invite spontaneous orders to address all of the real and uncertain complexities, diversities, urgencies and conflicts we face. The compassion (and the vision, wisdom and real power) comes in seeing the distinctions between the knowns and unknowns, plan-able and un-plan-able, without separating, discounting or attempting to dominate either one with the tools and temperment that work with the other. Give to Ceasar what is Ceasar's... -- Michael Herman Michael Herman Associates 300 West North Avenue #1105 Chicago IL 60610 USA (312) 280-7838 http://www.michaelherman.com - consulting & publications http://www.globalchicago.net - laboratory & playground http://www.openspaceworld.org - worldwide open space ...inviting organization into movement * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
