Thursday
24Sep2009
There's no such thing as a non-self-organising system
Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 1:20PM Many moons ago, when I worked at the BBC, I used to say that the real organisation existed at the bottom or at the edges and that a group of deluded people in the middle and at the top thought they were running things. The degree that they allowed their delusion to influence their decision-making determined their negative impact on the organisation.
In his notes on a video of Harrison Owen, the creator of Open Space, Johnnie Moore confirms my suspicions:
There's no such thing as a non-self-organising system, only people deluded that they are organising it.
Reader Comments (8)
...and the degree to which their strategy documents are ignored
Indeed :-)
"The degree that they allowed their delusion to influence their decision-making determined their negative impact on the organisation."
Wonderful!
It's a nice line, but it's just not true.
You can re-organise a business very dramatically very quickly using top down control. Take out 20% of jobs from any business and you'll see its organisation change.
OK, it may be fairly dysfunctional as a result, and need some self-organising to sort out. But it's clearly had an effect.
You need both approaches, that's all. Perhaps at different levels. I think this relates to Beer's Theory O / Theory X as well. And to my comment I've just left on your Social Business post, where I suggest businesses can be corporate and managerial as well as personal and social.
Oh, and I think there's a good description of this in a post at my blog (also about the Social Business) at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2009/03/controlling-social-business.html.
Jon.
I think you confirmed the correctness of my original post with "Take out 20% of jobs from any business and you'll see its organisation change."
@Euan,
Great post, and thanks for the quote from Johnnie Moore, very useful going forward.
@Jon,
Simply put, if you take 20% of the system and throw it away you just changed the system (sorry, business). If that happens, similar as with termites or ants or bees who get their nest or hive decimated, the system (or hive or nest or business) will self-organize again around the new model.
And yet people persist in the belief that the great state can make everything better. Really, these principles apply across all of life, not just in the enterprise.
You would love my current reading Jackie Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective by Kevin A. Carson