Closer to Real
In organizational development, the dominant discourse is if-then thinking and a deterministic planning culture. If we plug this in, we will get this effect. We are constantly trying to create a basis for certainty, order, scenario planning and predictions we can trust. Prediction work in an ordered domain, when you can make if-then propositions, derive hypotheses, and test them. Trouble is that this doesn′t work with complex adaptive systems, where hindsight doesn’t lead to foresight, the domain Dave Snowden talks about.
My colleague Bonnitta Roy puts it this way: “With complexity, if-then propositions don't work, not only because they are not refined enough, but also because the definition of complexity is that even if you knew all the starting positions of all the actors and agents, each effect produces environments that create new environments, hence new effects. Even if it were all deterministic, you would have to make as many new if-then propositions as there were new moments. Which is precisely what life is doing all the time.”
Now about organizational development: The real complexity is with people, in their needs and everyday subject to subject interactions. Instead of trying to manage people like resources, with fixed routes and roles, organizational constitutions that put invariant exo-structures on them, can we deal with people in a way that respects the complex adaptive nature of them, life, the universe and all the rest? How can we get closer to real?
Bonnitta Roy has come up with governance structures that can work with ‘real”, with the finger on the pulse, applying that whole new mind to adaptive structures and responsive processes navigating high complexity contexts. Instead of relying on predictions where predictions can not be made in order to act, her OPO, Open Participatory Organisation works with constantly renegotiated starting positions, self-organization, templates, fluid concepts of roles (‘locations”) and is committed to a realist stance to work rather than an idealist one.
I would love to have some deeper engagement about this in real time... write back, join us in the October Think Tank with Bonnie or stay tuned. We are also working with Dave Snowden on these things.
Links:
- Bonnie's recent Medium article about this.
The October Think Tanks with her:
- Perspectives from Complexity Science
- The Open Participatory Organization- Emergent Themes in Organizational Life
- our own practical work with complexity
- Dave's recent work on working with constraints