Phil Henshaw wrote: >>The basic mechanism is evolution. Fit organizations survive >>and weak ones do not. >> >> > >Except you leave out the long list of 'control' mechanisms where >weakness is the enduring strength. A manager who knows when to let >things develop unhindered is a far more useful person to have around >than one that thinks the whole world needs to be micro-managed, for >example. > > A manager must provide control over certain dimensions (i.e. navigate a class of disturbances) or their job is unneeded. Ways in which work is individualized can be healthy for the organization and in those cases probably should be ignored or encouraged by its managers. That's another reason I'm skeptical that decision making is getting that so much more complicated as a function of growth. The dimensions for control don't cover the details of all of the work, just important ones, and esp. those that relate to interactions with others. Meanwhile, technology itself encapsulates a lot of complexity in our world. For example, I don't need to know how SMTP relays works to send this e-mail.
>>As organizations become more fit, they control more of the ecology. >> >> >As we've been discussing about civilizations, it's frequently the diverse >cultures able to follow the lead of any part with a useful point of view that >survive environmental change by adapting without replacement. Is that >Darwinian selection?, or something else? > > If one organization gets overextended trying to soak up the resources of an ecology, and another organization survives in that ecology, or one nearby with a strategy as you describe then, whether or not there is conflict, there is a fitness advantage to the stable group relative to the overextended group. If the overextended group breaks up, it doesn't necessarily mean people die, but the organization does. >Sure, what survives is not necessarily what's 'fittest' in any holistic sense, >and prospering by restraint of trade (or holding power by slandering other >people's ideas) produces a sick business. > If there is a notion of the welfare of the whole, someone has to arbitrarily define it and then work to keep people persauded of that idea. If we refuse to accept such an essentially religious foundation, then what we are left with is organizations interacting, where the organizations have many degrees of freedom and different fundamental characteristics (e.g. corporations, governments, religions, non-profit advocacy groups). We don't have to think about humanity as a `host' and the organizations akin to retroviruses rewiring its DNA. That's a model biased by a definition of goodness. We can simply say that organizations draw from finite pool of human resources, and the organizations can fail and then stop interacting with others. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
