My buddy Tenneson, with whom I have been murmurating for a couple of decades, posted a quote today from Meg Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science that reminds me why I had walked a world of theory-informed practice for the past 30 years:
Organizations are living systems (not machines).
Living systems have a way of organizing themselves (Starlings as an example — don’t seem to have a boss or a planning committee).
If we learned more about how living systems organize themselves,
what would that teach us about organizing human endeavor?
It was basically that quote that first introduced me to the world of complexity and living systems and the implications of those metaphors and ways of organizing in human systems.
In 1995 I participated in my first Open Space and in 1996 I met Harrison Owen for the first time and heard him speak about how the phenomenon of self-organization could work in human gatherings. I was reading people like Kauffman (who Harrison knew and had been inspired by) and Gleick in tandem with Capra’s work first in The Turning Point which I read in university and then later reading the Tao of Physics.
I was – and remain – interested in complexity as reality, as shared by these scientists, and complexity as metaphor, which is what Meg was doing. That is, there are very real things that happen in the world that are complex and there are also ways we humans impose order on the world that rooted in the stories and images we tell about what order is and what it should be. A lot of times these are at odds. Sometimes we try to control emergent situations because we can’t handle the uncertainty and ambiguity and we bribe that control or efficiency or accountability will “solve the problem.” Other times we might turn away from the very real biophysical, or organizational constraints or indeed stable cultural patterns of a situation in favour of dreaming about different futures. Unrealistic “what ifs…” that take us away from possibility into dream land.
I am neither a scientist, nor a philosopher, but I instead identify as a practitioner, trying always to build coherence in my practice of working with people.
It was good to re-read Meg’s quote today because it is the unanswered question that inspires me. “If we learned more…” It’s an aspirational question that contains a hypothesis and an assumption. It implies that there is a new story emerging in the new inquires of biology and chemistry and physics that looks to emergence and self-organization that supports life. It invites us to expand our frames of reference about what organization means and what it could be. And it looks at a dehumanizing world structured around mechanistic metaphors of production and in it’s us to find how complexity offers us ways to bring more life to people, organizations, communities, ecosystems, societies and the world.
That question changed my practice forever and continues to send me adrift in the world with an abiding curiosity to always learn more. After thirty years I can say that I don’t have any answers to that question, because I keep learning. It is not a question to be answered. It is a question that offers a re-orientation, that guides the senses to different places and invites one to find new things there.
