Introduction by Blog Coordinator Darnell Lattal, Ph.D.
Andy Lattal received a paper from his good friend, John Keller, Ph.D., and asked if I would read it. Neither Andy nor John knew that I would take to it as I did. John presents ideas in need of attention to shape a better organizational world. Beginning by writing about what he learned working in an experimental animal laboratory, he goes on to introduce us to his interest in quantum physics and the New Science. Having worked for many years inside organizations, John tells us what he saw and candidly offers his impressions. He calls our attention to how governance and coercion can limit human potential. Much of what John writes about resonates with the work of others: Sidman (Coercion and its Fallout), Goldiamond (writings on freedom, nonlinear behavior analysis, choice, and coercion), and Abernathy (Managing without Supervision). In PART II, John offers an up-close example of a model that works, allowing behavior along principles of an organizational-behavioral interface to evolve in good ways for the benefit of all.
The Self-Organizing System: Learning How to Float
John V. Keller, Ph.D.
Geriatric Behavior Laboratory – GerBL
[1] Paper originally presented at the Netherlands Institute of Tourism Management, Breda and Enschede, The Netherlands, October 2004.
Introduction
At one time in my career, I considered myself a scientist. I worked in a laboratory. My shoes were scuffed, my hair was long, and I wore a white lab coat. I was a psychologist, but I was careful to make it clear that I was an experimental psychologist and not at all like those other psychologists.
My career as an experimental psychologist began when I was the age of many of you. At that time, I entered the Psychology Department at Columbia University in New York as a graduate student. In addition to my coursework, I was fortunate to have a teaching assistantship in the Introductory Psychology course.
We felt in those days that we were in the forefront of the development of Psychology as a science, and the Columbia psychology curriculum took, as its model, the approach of physics, chemistry and biology. Columbia’s first course in psychology was not a survey course, as it is in most universities. It was a laboratory course, and it taught the principles of reinforcement. It gave students a foundation in human and animal learning.
On the first day that this lab met, each pair of students received a white rat that was to be their experimental subject for the rest of the semester. They placed their rat in a small cage for training. Through one wall of the cage there protruded a metal lever. The students’ first task was to train the rat to depress the lever. The students used small pellets of food to reward their rat. These food pellets were dropped into a recessed tray next to the lever by a mechanical feeder that the student controlled.
A modern training enclosure or “Skinner box.”
To train their rat to press the lever, the students used a technique called “shaping.” At first, they dispensed a pellet whenever the rat faced the lever. After doing that a few times, they waited until the rat approached the lever before they delivered a pellet. Then they gave the food only when the rat was very close to the lever. Then they required that the rat’s forepaws be above the lever. Then, finally, they delivered a pellet only after the rat had actually pressed down on the lever. When, at last, the rat successfully depressed the lever, it made an audible “click” (all of our equipment in those days was of the loud, electro-mechanical, type – not the solid-state circuits of today).
That first day in the lab was always very exciting. Sometimes we had to wait 10 minutes before the first rat pressed the lever. Then, within a minute or two, there came a second response. Then another rat would join in. “Click”…… “click”… “click”.. “click” . It was like popcorn beginning to pop. Soon the room was full of the sound of clicks, and, over it, the excited voices of the students.
However, there were always a few rats that did not immediately learn to press the lever. Failing to condition their rat, the comments of the students were altogether predictable: “My rat’s stupid;” “My rat’s not motivated;” “I think my rat has fleas. All he does is sit and scratch himself.”
After assuring the students that their rats were of normal intelligence and desire, we would help them shape the desired response, often beginning the process again. After a bit of such remedial instruction, all the rats would be ready to advance to the next stage in their education. We were so confident in the “teachability” or our subjects that we had an expression we often used,
The rat is always right.
By this, we meant that the rat is not lazy or stupid. The rat is not depressed, unmotivated or overly anxious. The rat is not phobic or anal-retentive. If the rat has not learned, it is because of something we have done or not done as the experimenter.
This class taught an important lesson. Under the controlled conditions of the laboratory, behavior can be quite orderly and predictable. Control and prediction, I was taught, is the hallmark of science, and we felt certain that psychology would someday join the ranks of physics and chemistry as a true science.
We prided ourselves on our ability to uncover functional (cause and effect) relationships: if I do this, then that occurs. Our ultimate goal was always the prediction and control of behavior. We were in pursuit of a few basic laws that would explain even the most complex behavior. We wanted to say, “Hey, this isn’t so complicated. Two or three principles reduce it all to a very simple system.”
The early behaviorist, John B. Watson, once said,
“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select–doctor, lawyer, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.” (1924, p. 82)
Although we might not have gone as far as Watson, we did view man and other organisms as sort of advanced machines and us as the mechanics and engineers.
Some years later, I left the laboratory to begin working with organizations, I found that most company managers had a similar desire for organizational control and prediction. They wanted, more than anything, to reduce uncertainty in their organizations. They wanted things to run smoothly and predictably. Anyone or anything that upset the organization was to be avoided. Many, many times I have heard executives exclaim, as a project was getting underway, “Just be sure I don’t get surprised!”
I found that the companies I worked with were fearful of uncertainty. They viewed the world as a very threatening place, and they built strong and complex structures to hold back the dark forces of uncertainty and chaos. Their organizations felt like fortresses to me. The people in them protected themselves with unnecessary memos, guarding personnel files and wage scales as if they belonged to the guardians, not, in the end, the individual employees, and bulletin boards were covered with warnings and rules. Many of these organizations had a rigid chain of command that limited informal communication across departments and discouraged people from going “over the head” of their boss. I am quite certain that these types of companies exist today.
In these organizations, employees were defined by their titles and salary. Differences in status and power were evident everywhere. Sometimes, you could make an informed guess about employees’ salaries and titles by the thickness of the carpet in their offices or even the type of wastebasket by their desk.
These companies defended themselves against their employees as much as they defended themselves against the outside world. They had rules, regulations, time clocks, and policies and procedures to cover a wide range of circumstances. The resolution of disagreements between employees and employers was codified under a sterile and extensive process of “progressive disciplinary action.” In many U.S. companies today, new employees are presented with a list of 20 or more offenses for which they can be summarily fired.
I had hoped that the behavior principles I had studied in the psychology laboratory would help me better understand organizations. I hoped they could help me create organizations that are more productive and happier places to work. But it turned out that for me, they weren’t much help.
The problem was not that these principles applied only to rats or to highly controlled laboratory conditions. Quite the contrary. I am convinced that human behavior is as lawful as that of lower organisms, and that it is subject to the same basic principles of reinforcement. I believe that positive reinforcement, whether in the form of money, recognition, or promotion, affects the behavior of businesspeople in much the same way that the pellets of food affect the lever pressing of our white rats.
The real problem was that reinforcement, when delivered to individuals and groups of individuals, often has unintended, negative effects on the organization as a whole and all too often on the individual. The reinforcement delivered without contextual or contingent relationships can easily contribute to employee alienation, rivalry, and distrust. It further separates management and workers. It causes many employees to resent management “manipulation.”
All too frequently, it promotes behavior that is not in the ultimate best interests of the entire organization. For example, when manufacturing managers receive a financial incentive for reducing cost, they may decide to save money by cutting back on preventive machine maintenance. Commissioned salespeople sell to customers that they know to be a poor credit risks so that they can reach their sales’ quota. Company presidents use artificial methods to raise company earnings and thereby raise the value of their stock portfolios. I have observed that the rewards that are used to motivate one group of employees are a source of deep resentment by other groups that feel their contributions are equally worthy of recognition. Such examples abound in the companies I have worked with. And while I have used the past tense to describe the issues I have found, I am certain all these things I have identified exist in many companies today.
Slowly, I have come to realize that I need a less mechanistic way of dealing with organizations. I have grown weary of the process of identifying and breaking down organizational problems, developing schedules and plans, and assigning accountabilities. Seldom does anything significant result from these tired practices that my colleagues and I have employed. The assigned tasks may or may not get done, and perhaps it then does not matter. They did not change the organization, and they did not help me understand what was needed to address these issues.
The New Science
When I received the call from Hans Schuurmans, asking if I would be willing to speak to this group, I had just finished a book by Margaret Wheatley called Leadership and the New Science. Wheatley’s book and others I have read since, have been a life-changing experience for me. They have given me a different scientific model to work from and a different way of looking at organizations.
They point out what I had observed but not fully appreciated: a company is an evolving, ever-changing system. It is never in equilibrium. In this sense, it is more like the weather than it is like a billiard table where the balls collide and rebound in nice, predictable ways. The weather never settles down, and it never repeats itself exactly. It is essentially unpredictable more than a week or so in advance. Yet meteorologists have learned to identify important weather features: cold fronts, high- and low-pressure systems, jet streams and the like. They now understand the dynamics of these features: how they interact with one another to produce our weather.
The meteorologist would say that his research is still scientific even though it does not permit him to control or even fully predict weather events. He would say that this is because control and prediction are not the true essence of science. The true essence of science, he would say, is understanding and explanation.
I began to see that I had been using a science that was not well suited to an understanding of adaptive, highly complex systems. I was looking for cause and effect when I might better be looking for patterns and relationships. Perhaps I was applying the wrong scientific model.
As Wheatley explains it, the way we do research in the social sciences, as well as the way we manage organizations, comes from a Newtonian view of the universe. “We manage by separating things into parts, we believe that influence occurs as a direct result of force exerted from one person to another, we engage in planning for a world that we keep expecting to be predictable, and we search continually for better methods of objectively perceiving the world” All of these tendencies, she says, come to us from a seventeenth-century view of the universe, from Newtonian physics.
But science has changed. If we are going to use science to help us design and manage organizations, we need to stop looking for 17th century simplicity. We need to be more aware of what is known about the universe. A great deal is going on in science today that challenges our old assumptions about order, prediction, structure, and change. We need to see what this New Science can teach us.
I will not try to review the research that is going on. That is outside the scope of this paper, and I am not the one to do it justice. What I will do, instead, is extract some ideas I have gleaned from it that might be applicable to the way we think about organizations.
1. It’s the System, stupid
In physics and other sciences, there is a growing movement away from reductionism and toward “holism.” In the past, science tried to understand a complex system by studying the behavior and structure of its parts. Today, the movement is toward a more holistic view of systems. Scientists are trying to understand the system as an entity. They are not so much interested in the structure and behavior of the parts as they are in determining how these parts interrelate and work together.
For example, if a physicist were to follow the older reductionist approach, he would try to understand the behavior of a solid or liquid by investigating its component molecules, atoms, ions or electrons. A follower of a more modern holist approach would argue that this approach is misguided, that studying the parts will not give us an understanding of the system as whole.
This reminds me of a cartoon that appeared, many years ago, in the Columbia Jester, the campus humor magazine. It was both funny and insightful.
| Boy, have I got this guy conditioned! Every time I press the bar down, he drops in some food. [Columbia Jester] |
It showed two rats in a Skinner box. One rat, with his paw on the lever, turns to his neighbor and says, “Boy have I got this guy conditioned! Every time I press the bar down, he drops in some food.”
At the time it appeared, we behaviorists enjoyed this cartoon as much as everyone else. We took two lessons from it: 1) that our behavior as humans is no less orderly than that of the organisms we study, and 2) that as experimenters, we probably learn more from our subjects than they do from us.
It was only many years later, after working in the “real world”, that I came to appreciate the cartoon’s larger message. It is that we are all – rat and experimenter, student and teacher – all of us are a part of a larger system. The notion that one controls the other is really an artifact of the narrowness of our field of view.
One domino causes another domino to fall, we say.
However, if we step back and take a larger perspective, we see that the falling domino, and that which is falling on it, are both just parts of a larger system of falling dominos. There is no true “causality” as all the dominos are just part of one system.
When, in my work with organizations, I look for “causes” of problems, I constantly come up against the truth of this simple lesson.
For example, if I go into a manufacturing plant and speak to a worker on the floor, he might complain to me about how poorly his machinery is maintained. “Ah-ha,” I say. “This sounds like there is a problem with the maintenance department.” When I speak to a member of the maintenance crew, he explains how short-handed his department is. “Ah-ha,” I say. “The Production Manager is not giving the Maintenance Department the manpower it needs.” However, when I speak to the Production Manager, he says his hands are tied. The head of the Finance Department ordered him to cut spending. He had to make a choice. “Do I attend to a very serious safety problem we have in the plant, or do I spend the money for an additional person in Maintenance? What would you do?” he asks me. “Ah, ha,” I say. And off I go to talk to the Chief Financial Officer … but you get the idea. When, finally, I talk with the CEO and determine that the real problem is with Wall Street and the world economy I am ready to throw up my hands in despair.
Perhaps if I were not so concerned with identifying ‘causes’ — if I were looking, instead, for order — I might discover more. Perhaps if I could step back a bit, I might get a better picture of the total system. Perhaps I’d be able to see a quite beautiful dance of falling dominos within this organization. I would not be so frustrated then. I might even discover patterns and ways to alter the terrible inevitability of the plant’s problems.
2. Relationships Matter
As quantum physicists searched for the basic “building blocks” of matter, they found themselves entering a world of shifting reality. This was a world where “things” were never stable or the same. As they experimented to find elementary particles, they found things that changed form and properties as they responded to one another. They changed form even in response to the scientist observing them.
Danah Zohar has described it this way: “In place of the tiny billiard balls moved around by contact forces, there are what amount to so many patterns of active relationship, electrons, and photons, mesons and nucleons that tease us with their elusive double lives as they are now position, now momentum, now particles, now waves, now mass, now energy – and all in response to each other and to the environment.” (1990, p. 98)
That thing we call matter is like a cartoon superhero. It can express itself as Superman — as discontinuous particles – or it can express itself as Clark Kent – as continuous waves. Like Lois Lane, who never sees Clark and Superman in the same room together, we cannot see matter as particles and matter as waves at the same time. These two identities of one existence cannot ever be seen or studied at the same time or as a unified whole. A major principle of quantum physics, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle tells us we can measure position, and thus get a fix on the particle aspect; or we can study momentum and then observe the wave. But we can never measure wave and particle properties simultaneously.
In the quantum world, relationships are not just interesting; they are all there in reality. Particles come into being fleetingly, in the course of interacting with other energy sources. We can name these sources – neutrons, electrons, pions and so forth – but they are just intermediate states in a network of interactions. This, at least, is the way many physicists are thinking these days.
This line of thinking has led physicists to consider matter as a potentiality. It may be a neutron, a pion, a proton or a meson as it meets up with other energy sources. It may be a wave or a particle depending on what the observer sets out to measure.
Taking these lessons from the world of quantum physics to the organizations of man, Wheatley suggests that we give up our belief in, and our search for, an objective reality. As she puts it, “The idea that we can pin reality down, that we can ever tease out the causative variables, that we can isolate cause and effect in our organizations is, if we’re honest about it, a great cosmic joke.”
To live in this quantum world, we have to cease analyzing everything into units and tasks. We need to focus more on encouraging growth, on facilitating the process. We should not waste our time trying to isolate cause and effect. We should not get overly involved in creating elaborate plans and timelines. We should give up the hope of ever predicting things with anything more than approximate accuracy.
If nothing exists outside of its relationship with other things, it tells us also that we should stop thinking about people as this or that. People are not leaders or followers, they are not introverts or extroverts, and they are not winners or losers. There is no profit in relegating people to one role, or to one personality type or another. What is critical is the relationship created between the person and the setting. That relationship will always be different; it will always evoke different potentialities. It all depends on the person and the moment. Each of is different in different situations. Wheatley points out that this does not make us less authentic, it merely makes us quantum!
When we accept that our organizations and the people in them are not machine-like, it does not need to trouble us. They go from being predictable to being surprising. Perhaps we’ll find that surprise is not such a bad thing after all.
3. A Field of Dreams: Nature’s Invisible Hand
There is something a little creepy about a field. It is sort of like a dream or a ghost. You cannot see it. You cannot taste it or feel it. You can only observe it indirectly, envisioning its presence through the influence it exerts on material things. For example, Newton, according to popular legend, was bonked on the head by a falling apple and then went on to invent something called a ‘gravitational field,’ which he imagined as a line of force extending outward from the center of a mass such as earth that drew other objects to it.
Other fields are conceived in different ways, depending on the theory. Einstein’s conception of a gravitational field was of a curved structure in space-time.
Maxwell and Faraday’s magnetic field was elastic lines of force that emanated from the poles of an electromagnet. Anyone who might doubt the existence of an electromagnetic field could be convinced of its reality by watching how metal filings, as if guided by an invisible hand, arrange themselves in orderly bands between the poles of the magnet.
In quantum mechanics, atomic particles create fields. When the fields of two particles intersect, new particles appear. These new particles spring to life, often for only very brief instants in time, there where the fields come together.
We cannot directly observe quantum fields, and they have no substance. They are real yet they are non-material. They have a demonstrable influence, but they are invisible. Paradoxically, atomic particles, which we used to think of as the ‘building blocks’ of the universe, are oftentimes transitory. They are just a brief flicker of observable matter, a fleeting effect of non-material fields.
Are there such things as fields within organizations? Probably most of us who have experienced many different organizations would quickly say, ‘Yes.’ It would be hard not to. To even an inexperienced observer, organizations ‘feel’ different from one another for reasons that are very difficult to express. The management literature discusses these fuzzy qualities of organizations. It describes them as the organization’s culture, its values, its ethics, or its vision. Each of these words describes a quality of organizational life that we can sense yet find hard to define.
Perhaps I can give an example that might help. It was January 28, 1986. I remember the date because it was the day of the terrible crash of the space shuttle, “Challenger.” I was quite new to consulting then, and I was working with a country-music radio station. I had only just arrived at the station when I noticed an employee’s desk in the hallway.
“Whose desk is that?” I asked.
“Oh that’s the desk of Tom Delaney, our Promotions Director. He’s the guy who runs all our contests and promotions,” they said.
“Why is his desk in the hall,” I asked.
“Well, we’re using his office for all the prizes and promotional material. We didn’t have any other place where we could keep it safe.”
It didn’t take any great amount of consulting experience or any particular insight on my part to know what this company’s culture was like. It was one that valued T-shirts, bumper stickers, and baseball hats above its employees. Two days of employee interviews simply confirmed this 30-second first impression.
All our business gurus emphasize how important it is that companies have a clear purpose and direction. We need a clear and unified vision, they tell us, so we can lead our employees and show our customers where we stand. These consultants lead workshops with senior managers to develop a company vision statement. They have been so successful in this effort that in the US you will find a company vision statement hanging prominently in the entrance lobby of most companies that are large enough to afford the consultants. Typically, companies write the statement in Old Gothic-style type and sometimes they even print it on yellowed parchment so that it gives the impression of great antiquity, substance, and permanence.
This way of thinking about vision arises from a Newtonian view of the universe. It considers vision as thinking into the future, as creating a destination for the organization. If we present a clear image of the destination, the theory goes, it will draw employees to it, just as gravity draws Newton’s apple to the ground.
How would New Science deal with this? Instead of thinking of vision as a force pulling us to it, New Science would probably suggest we think of it as being like a field that fills the organization. It’s not something “out there” attracting us to it; it is something “right here,” surrounding us all. It is the values we live by, the unique way we do things, our shared beliefs, and our shared purpose. It aligns us and helps us work together as one. Viewed from this perspective, vision is an invisible geometry, an unseen hand that holds and guides us.
4. Organizations as Living Systems
When James Watt invented the steam turbine, he had a problem. If steam in the boiler were not allowed to escape, it would build and eventually blow the boiler into a million pieces. Therefore, Watt invented a clever device that released steam when the pressure built to dangerous levels, while it retained sufficient pressure to do the work of the turbine. He called this device a “fly-ball governor”, and it worked like this:
An early control system, the fly-ball governor
As the pressure in the boiler builds, the steam turbine turns faster and faster. As the turbine speeds up, it spins the balls around, and centrifugal force carries them outward. When they move out, they release steam from the boiler. As steam escapes, pressure drops, and the turbine slows. The balls then fall, thereby again shutting off the escaping steam. In this way, the fly-ball governor maintains a useable, yet safe, amount of steam pressure to drive the turbine.
The fly-ball governor keeps the system running at a regular speed. Engineers refer to the fly-ball governor as a control system that employs negative feedback to hold the system at equilibrium.
Organizations have their own forms of fly-ball governors. Like the steam engine’s governor, these control systems restore equilibrium. A company’s quality control processes are this type of control system. So, too, are internal audits and union grievance hearings. These are just a few of many, many types of regulatory, negative feedback loops that companies have devised to maintain control and to avoid spinning out of control.
Feedback can be positive as well as negative. Whereas negative feedback is restorative, positive feedback is intensifying. With positive feedback, the system’s output is fed back into the system. This then amplifies that output, and it can result in the output rapidly rising to a troublesome level. Think of the ear-piercing shriek that results when a microphone gets too close to a loudspeaker. The system, when asked to deal with so much magnifying information, squeals out in protest.
For many years, scientists paid relatively little attention to positive feedback. They were focused mostly on closed systems and on ways to reduce wasted energy and maintain system stability. Positive feedback had a rather bad reputation as a creator of chaos and decadent waste.
Ilya Prigogene, the Belgian Nobel laureate, has expanded our awareness of how dynamic, open systems are able to handle positive feedback and disequilibrium. Unlike closed systems, like Watt’s steam engine, these living systems deal with disequilibrium constructively. For example, after a forest fire there follows a period of dramatic increase in the forest’s diversity and vitality. In the same way do many living systems respond to disequilibrium with dramatic growth and renewal. Prigogene showed that disequilibrium is actually needed for a dynamic system to grow and transform itself.
He called these systems dissipative structures because they dissipate energy in order to reorganize themselves into new forms. However, the energy that they lose is recoverable. For, unlike closed systems, these dynamic systems are able to import new sources of energy to replace what was lost. They are able to postpone entropy and deterioration.
The research on dissipative structures has had a profound effect on scientific thinking. Scientists have had to give up their views on decay and dissipation. They have had to transform their ideas about disequilibrium. They have had to develop a new relationship with disorder. (Wheatley, p. 88)
The central point is that positive feedback plays an essential role in a system’s self-organization. With positive feedback, small effects become large when conditions are right, instead of dying away. Mild tropical winds grow into a hurricane. Seeds and embryos grow into fully developed living creatures. Ants form complex colonies. And droplets of water coalesce to form clouds.
Positive feedback used to be viewed with fear, as a threat to system stability. It was the motorcycle gang outside the door, about to rob and plunder, to rape our wives and take our children hostage. Nowadays, systems theorists see positive feedback as a bringer of change and growth. It is more like an eccentric and magical uncle – Sinter Klas perhaps — who comes to visit. It is hard to predict what he will bring, but you know that you and your family will never be the same again. Positive feedback is a creator of change, of a reordering of things. It is at the heart of surprise, of life itself.
There are at least four other characteristics of self-organizing systems that make them intensely interesting to cellular biologists, economists, ecologists and others who study dynamic systems.
1. As it matures and becomes more resilient, a self-organizing system gets more efficient and better able to coexist with its environment. It develops a structure that is less reactive and better able to absorb episodic events.
Wheatley draws an important conclusion from this finding. “What occurs in these systems is contrary to our normal way of thinking. Openness to environmental information over time spawns a firmer sense of identity, one that is less permeable to externally induced change. Some fluctuations will always break through, but what come to dominate the system over time are not environmental influences, but the self-organizing dynamics of the system itself. High levels of autonomy and identity result from staying open to information from the outside.”
We are used to thinking just the opposite. We usually think that in order to maintain our personal identity – or that of our organization – we must protect ourselves from outside forces — that we must have our own “fly-ball governors” in place and clear boundaries and walls to defend us. Self-organizing systems teach us that useful boundaries develop through openness to the environment. Quoting Wheatley again, “As the process of exchange continues between system and environment, the system, paradoxically, develops greater freedom from the demands of its environment.”
2. A second characteristic of all self-organizing systems is that of self-reference. When there is a disturbance to which it must respond, the system does not respond in a totally novel way. Instead, it remains consistent with itself. It does what is necessary to maintain its own integrity and its capacity for further change. Its future form will be consistent with its already established identity.
Self-reference facilitates orderly change and adaptation. It allows a system to adjust and adapt to change in a coherent way. In human organizations, a clear sense of identity – of the organization’s values, traditions, purpose and culture – is the real source of independence from the environment. When the environment requires a company to set out in a new direction, self-reference provides the compass for the voyage. If a company truly knows its values, traditions and competencies, it is less likely to vacillate in the face of change, or to engage in a wild and disorganized search for new markets, new ventures, new customers and new products.
3. A third characteristic of self-organizing systems is their stability over time. In their mature state, they are stable at a global level. This is not to say that there are not a great many fluctuations and instabilities at local levels within the organization. There are.
The self-organizing system does not set out to control all these local fluctuations and changes. There is no central control mechanism, no ‘fly-ball governor’ to dampen or deny them. Yet out of this lack of local oversight, comes a highly stable system at the global level. Here we have another paradox embedded in the dynamics of the self-organizing system. Erich Jantsch describes the paradox this way: “The more freedom in self-organization, the more the order.” (1980, p. 40).
4. One more quality of self-organizing systems relates to human organizations. It is that when they are in a period of great flux and instability, they are unusually sensitive to small events and the influence of critically placed individuals. Positive feedback amplifies small disturbances. They grow exponentially to become a major lever of organizational redirection.
It is moments like this – when an organization’s guard is down, when it is off-balance and vulnerable – that consultants love because they can have an unusual amount of influence. I have only experienced a handful of such moments in my career. At that moment I knew I was at the very center of the organization’s dynamics – I felt like Archimedes with my hands on a lever and a solid place to stand. I knew that my effectiveness at that moment was not because I possessed any exceptional insight or skill as a facilitator: I was doing pretty much the same things I had done with other organizations, with far less impact. It was just that I was in the right place at the right time. It all felt so effortless and the effect was electric.
5. From a Few Simple Rules … Order
Living systems are a type of machine, but they are different from Watt’s steam turbine or other machines we are used to. An engineer designs a system from the top down. Nature designs living systems from the bottom up.
As researchers began to use computers to simulate complex living systems, they discovered a very important fact: complex behavior does not need to have complex roots. Very interesting and complex behavior can emerge from collections of extremely simple components (Christopher Langton, as quoted by Waldrop, p. 279).
Craig Reynolds developed an elegant simulation of a complex system that beautifully demonstrates this point. He set out to simulate the flocking behavior of birds, or as he said with the accent of a New Yorker, “a flock of boids.” Reynolds might have tried to do this by writing many very complex specifications as to how the flock should behave. On the other hand, he could have choreographed the movement of a “leader boid” and directed the other birds to follow. However, what he did was a lot more clever. He gave each bird in the flock just three simple rules of behavior:
1. Try to maintain a safe distance from other nearby objects including other birds.
2. Try to match velocities with the other birds in the area.
3. Try to move toward the perceived center of mass of birds in the area.
The remarkable thing about Reynold’s approach is that none of the rules say, “Form a flock.” Just the opposite: the rules are entirely local, referring only to how an individual bird is to behave. Yet flocks do form, every time. In addition, their movement is quite lifelike. The flock flies around obstacles, and it even splits apart and re-gathers again on the other side.
Astrid Lindenmayer, the Dutch biologist, developed a similar bottoms-up simulation of plant growth. Lindenmayer’s program does not simply draw the plants on the computer screen; it actually grows them. They start as a single stem, and then use a few simple ‘grammatical’ rules to direct each branch how to make leaves, flowers, and additional branches. Once again, the rules say nothing about the overall shape of the final plant. Lindenmayer’s formulae are able to produce a whole host of different and very lifelike plants.
| The Barnsley fractal fern is a variation on Lindenmayer’s. Note the self-duplicating nature of this and other fractals. If you were to magnify a single leaf, it would duplicate the shape of the entire fern. |
These simulations demonstrate an important point for human organizations. They demonstrate, once again, the importance of simple governing principles. A small set of basic rules guide the behavior of each individual, and they result in an organization with exquisite order, form and shape.
Positive feedback, as contained in the models just discussed, takes a system on a journey that visits both chaos and order. Perhaps the most wondrous result of such feedback is the artistry of fractals. Fractals are computer-generated drawings that are made by the iteration of a few equations. The equations change as they are fed back on themselves.
After millions of iterations, the tracks left by these computations begin to reveal a form. What we discover are highly detailed shapes that replicate themselves at finer and finer levels. Self-replication is everywhere. The shape we see at one magnification is the same we see at all others.
Fractals, we have since discovered, occur in nature with great frequency. The way that clouds are formed, or the structure of our body’s circulation system, or the structure of the tiny sacs that collect air in our lungs, are all fractal in design. By repeating the same basic structure over in successively smaller sizes, Nature has devised an amazingly simple design technique for squeezing a great deal into a very little space.
Benoit Mandelbrot, the discoverer of fractals, once asked his students and colleagues what seemed like a simple question. “How long is the coast of Britain?” The question, we discover, is unanswerable. For when we go to measure the coast, we find there is always a still finer magnification that would yield a greater length. Fractals are the same way. Because the formations go on forever, there is no way we can ever measure them. We could increase our magnification, and there would still be a higher magnification where we could measure a still longer coast (Mandelbrot, 1977).
The Koch Snowflake, an early fractal. The shape has a finite area but it is bounded by a perimeter of infinite length!
There is an important management lesson we may take from this research into fractals. It is this: the search for ever-finer measures of discrete parts of the system is a dead end. We can improve our measures, recording at higher and higher resolution, but our answers will be no better or no worse than before. There is never a satisfying end to this reductionist search, and we will never reach a point where we can say we truly understand even one part of the system. Just as there is no “correct” answer to the question, “How long is the coast of Britain?”, there is no level of measurement in an organization that is any better than another.
Fractals remind us of the value of qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, measures in organizational research. They remind us, as well, of the importance of a holist perspective. For if we focus only on quantitative measurement, we will be continually frustrated by the incomplete and never-ending information we receive. What we are able to know, and what it is most important that we do know, is the plan of the whole organization — how it develops and changes, or how it compares to another system.
References
Jantsch, Erich. The Self-Organizing Universe. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980.
Mandelbrot, Benoit. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. New York: Freeman, 1977.
Panda, Nrusingh C. Maya in Physics. Delhi: 2005.
Prigogine, Ilya and Strengers, Isabelle. Order Out of Chaos. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.
Waldrop, M. Mitchell. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1992.
Watson, John B. Behaviorism. New York: The People’s Institute Publishing Co., 1924.
Wheatley, Margaret J. Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1992.
Zohar, Dana The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by New Physics. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1990.