CL - Self Organising Movement in Complexity

Electrons, Corrosion, Particles, Water, Smoke, Population, Bacteria, Organizations, Societies, Nations, Human minds have one thing in common. They all move. All such movements grow and evolve, not through top-down direction and control, but through balancing of opposite forces or diverse ideas, changes in quantities that change the quality of movement and change of phase transformation of becoming through the elimination of previous states of being. But what changes situations are changes in relationships that, so to say, hold the 'organism' together.

We may say that social relationships are built around opposing or diverse ideas, apparently paradoxical, that mutually support relationships that are mostly non-linear lending the inherent 'complexity' in its movement and behavior that defies individual control of human beings. New ideas gain traction or lose it depending on their inherent appeal and utility and desire of people. Leaders in such movements give shape and flow to such collective desires. Individuals coalease spontaneously as do individual groups. Such spontaneous self organization helps new alliances to emerge rooted in the situation and the mutual needs of the groups (which I call as 'situatedness') depending on what works for those involved in the moment. What exactly would emerge is both difficult to assess and predict with great degree of certainty. While some alliances are fleeting; others endure; and some serve their purpose before they dissolve. Whatever, it might be, the states always transforming and changing. Such becoming is the nature of complex systems.

Therefore, in short, social systems self-organize around ideas and non-linear relationships. They are living, complex, dynamic, and constantly evolving as they and their members learn from shared experience generated by various leaders who emerge at different points of time and space.

This is because as social movements develop, multiple sources of leadership are essential since improvements and movements of complex systems affect the whole and never in parts. Any individual or group, however that presumes to be the leader of the whole or aspires to organize a central coordinating body to impose order on the chaos does not understand the process of self generated chaos itself which is nothing but directional order. Hence self-organizing chaos is integral to the movement building process and essential to its success of the whole of complex systems.

Those who understand the complexity of the self organizing, self sustaining process are creative leaders.

 

CL - stands for Creative Leadership.

IOU - The Dandelions

Mulla Nasrudin spent the entire autumn working his garden. Beautiful flowers blossomed next spring. And Nasrudin was happy and proud. But he noticed a few dandelions appearing, which he hadn’t planted. He wasn't much pleased with that emergence.

So, Nasrudin tore them up. He wanted his garden to remain as pure as possible -- just the way he wanted it to be. But the pollen had already spread and others began to grow. He tried to find a weed killer which only killed dandelions. A specialist told him any type of poison would end up killing all the other flowers. In despair, he went to ask a gardener for help.

- It is like a marriage – said the gardener. – Along with the good things, a few little inconveniences always appear.

- What can I do? – insisted Nasrudin.

- Learn how to love them . Although they are flowers you did not count on, they are still part of the garden. Peace does not lie in only getting what you want. It lies in understanding what to do when you get what you don't want.

Truth becomes a Lie

Naropa was a great scholar, a great pundit, with ten thousand disciples of his own. One day he was sitting surrounded by thousands of scriptures--ancient, very ancient, rare. Suddenly he fell asleep, must have been tired, and he saw a vision.

He saw a very, very old, ugly, horrible woman--a hag. Her ugliness was such that he started trembling in his sleep. It was so nauseating he wanted to escape--but where to escape, where to go?

He was caught, as if hypnotized by the old hag. Her eyes were like magnets.

"What are you studying?" asked the old woman.

He said, "Philosophy, religion, epistemology, language, grammar, logic."

The old woman asked again, "Do you understand them?"

Naropa said, "Of course... Yes, I understand them."

The woman asked again, "Do you understand the word, or the sense?"

Thousands of questions had been asked to Naropa in his life--thousands of students always asking, inquiring--but nobody had asked this: whether he understands the word, or the sense. And the woman's eyes were so penetrating--those eyes were going to the very depth of his being, and it was impossible to lie. To anybody else he would have said, "Of course I under-stand the sense," but to this woman, this horrible-looking woman, he had to say the truth. He said, "I understand the words."

The woman was very happy. She started dancing and laughing, and her ugliness was transformed; a subtle beauty started coming out of her being. Thinking, "I have made her so happy. Why not make her a little more happy?" Naropa then said, "And yes, I understand the sense also."

The woman stopped laughing, stopped dancing. She started crying and weeping and all her ugliness was back--a thousandfold more. Naropa said, "Why are you weeping and crying? And why were you laughing and dancing before?"

The woman said, "I was happy because a great scholar like you didn't lie. But now I am crying and weeping because you have lied to me. I know--and you know--that you don't understand the sense."

The vision disappeared and Naropa was transformed. He escaped from the university; he never again touched a scripture in his life. He became completely ignorant, he understood--the woman was nobody outside, it was just a projection.

It was Naropa's own being, through knowledge, that had became ugly. With this much understanding, that "I don't understand the sense," ugliness was transformed immediately into a beautiful phenomenon, which we now know as 'emergence'. 

 

Source: Ancient Indian story - retold.

The Power of 3 - Changes in Management Thinking.

This great story demonstrates a fundamental emergence in our lives. The old ways of thinking and managing simply wouldn't work any longer.

The 'science' and practice' of management as we know of it today were originally invented to solve two very important problems, which were:

a) How do we get ordinary folks do complicated and repetitive tasks to achieve a standard of efficiency and standardization to optimize profits?

b) How do we make our way through a complex web of processes to deliver goods and services to our clients? The complexity arose from scaling up of operations meant to generate ever increasing volume of goods and services that could provide more profits and subdue competitors.

In order to do that we created lot many logical rules and regulations. The number of rules increased with the degree of operational complexity. Then we trained and made people follow those rules to achieve the magic numbers that could produce more profits that are constantly under squeeze. 

With our present thinking we understand that such management thinking does not work well beyond a certain degree of complexity. Why is that?

So far we focused on objects that played any role within business cycles of production and consumption. Sometimes we focused on machines while at other times we focused on people or customers. And yet on some other occasion we forced our attention onto suppliers and quality or we looked at increasing inventory levels. We never quite saw the whole in one breath. What we clearly missed out was to observe the relationships between objects in a given context. What we chose to do instead was to focus wholeheartedly on objects and their functions and properties without taking into consideration the context in which they operated. We failed to realize the importance of interdependent relationships between all things that simultanteously arise and abate in the system in a "wholistic" manner.

What happens when we fail to see relationships?

Let us take two objects that are related to each other. Then the possible relationships that can exist between them are four [2 to the power 2 gives us 4]. As we keep increasing the number of related objects it keeps following the same power law [2 to the power of n, where n = the number of related objects].

It is then easy to imagine the exponential rise in the number of possible relationships as the system becomes more and more complex. How can such exponential behavior be controlled and regulated by a set of linear rules and regulations? Since that is clearly not possible to do so it exposes the unscientific nature of our so called 'scientific' management thinking.  

This flaw is clearly depicted in the video. As the number of cars increased along with the rise in the number of pedestrians and cyclists the system soon reached a critical point of complexity beyond which it was not possible to regulate the traffic flow, reduce the number of traffic jams and keep accidents in check. Even the logic of operating traffic lights represents a part of the growing rules and regulations to contain the menace of slowing traffic, snarling jams and terrible accidents without much success ofcourse.

So, what did the new management thinking do? They drastically reduced the number of rules and regulations to one simple rule - "give way to pedestrians and cyclists first". The result of such a brilliant move is amply demonstrated in the video.

What lessons management can learn from this? Probably these:

1. As the system becomes more and more complex reduce the complexity of the jobs ordinary folks are called on to do in all possible ways. One of the simplest way to do that is to reduce the number of irrelevant rules and regulations that bind and blind people from performing better. Forcing people to keep their eyes on so many rules is enough to make anyone crazy and make mistakes. For example, by simply enabling drivers not to pay any attention to the traffic signals and policemen but to keep in mind one simple rule greatly simplified their job of driving safely. This then left the drivers free to focus on their goals without getting distracted by a host of unrelated issues. Ease of traffic flow, reduction of jams and elimination of accidents are few of the by-products of making jobs easier and free of unnecessary clutter. 

2. Redesign the system so as to reduce the number of relationships one has to negotiate in order to achieve the desired results. This was done by redesigning the roads at critical traffic intersections.  By reducing the total number of relationships within a system we can easily convert complex processes to much simpler ones. 

3. Managers are then left to keep healthy communications going within the system and focus their attention to fine tune the existing relationships and also think of simplifying the processes further through redesign.

Aren't these three universal management lessons simple enough?

Let me know what you think.

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Observing from Antumbra space

What is the first step of learning?

Observation.

What is the first step of solving any problem?

Observation.

What is the first step of discovering anything?

Observation.

What is the first step of invention and innovation?

Observation.

What is the first step of designing?

Observation.

What is the first step of training our minds?

Observation.

This tells us why we need to observe. We need it for anything we do in life, if we want to do it well enough.

There seems to be no doubt about the fact that 'Observation' is a basic skill we need to use skillfully in anything we do. It helps us to learn, create, sustain survive, become wiser and enlightened.

But there are two more questions that need to be answered:

1) What do we observe?

2) How do we observe?

The answer to 'What to observe?' is not very intuitive. It is easy and difficult at the same time.

Why?

Nothing exists independently. All phenomena that goes on around us are interdependent on so many other things. 

Such interdependence creates patterns and relationships between different objects that determine the emergent behavior of any system.

What makes things more difficult is the element of uncertainty. We are simply not sure whether a particular relationship would emerge at a particular time under a particular condition. It then becomes a matter of probability. Under certain conditions and time it is highly possible that a pattern might exist or emerge. Hence it is also possible that it does not emerge at all. And it is also possible that the phenomenon might emerge simultaneously at different places (like vibration or wave or light or wear or heat or behavior patterns). This is a simplified understanding of System Emergence, which is a property of any system.

So, what we actually observe is the possibility or probability of various possible but inherent relationships between different elements emerging at different times under a various conditions. Such relationships are seen in form of patterns. Hence observation is the basic skill for pattern recognition.    

We can then express the nature of such relationships in form of equations, laws and principles like scientists, engineers and doctors do. Or express them in poems, stories, art like poets, writers and artists do.

What makes observations very difficult is that such relationships are always invisible. We have to apply our senses (or extend them through instrumentation) and our mind to see such invisible probabilistic relationships.

The other difficult question is 'how to observe?'

It is now somewhat obvious that we must observe in such a manner that we might see the possible relationships in form of emerging patterns clearly. It is also apparent that there must be at least two elements in the system between which a number of possible relationships can develop. So, to observe the relationship, which is our objective, we must not only see the elements simultaneously but also make the invisible relationship between them very evident and obvious.

To explain the technique the metaphor of an eclipse proves to be very useful. (refer: image)

In the umbra region we are too close to one of the elements. It is pitch dark and we can't see anything at all not -- denied of the faintest view. Obviously, this is a mistake to observe anything from this region. Surprisingly, we do commit this mistake too often in real life. We simply creep up too close to the object of our interest or we observe a failure too closely and fail to get any idea of what to do next. We simply don't see anything.

When we move to the penumbra region observation improves slightly but is still not very effective. Though we get to see parts of both elements we clearly don't see the relationship that emerges from the interaction of the two elements. So, we see the elements but not the relationship, which incidentally is the objective of our observation.

Things become quite different when we start observing from the antumbra region. It is here that we not only get to see both the elements of interest but also the relationship that exists at that point of time under certain specific conditions. We understand the phenomenon of an eclipse. We also understand that an eclipse is one of the possible relationships, appearing in various states that exists between the sun, moon and the earth. The pattern varies over time. And it is not happening every day of the year.

So the important conclusions that we may draw from our discussion on observation are the following:

1. Why we observe? -- To learn, understand, gain insights, become wiser, be illuminated and enlightened.

2. What do we observe?  -- We observe probabilistic relationships between different elements that appear in form of varying patterns at different points of time under different conditions.

3. How do we observe? -- We observe in such a way that the elements of a system and their possible relationship at a particular point of time and condition becomes evident. The

Antumbra space provides us the best possible view. 

This discussion also brings up the next important question: What to do after an observation is made?

Ref 1: http://rapidinnovation.org/general-theory-of-emergence-essence-imperfect

Ref 2: http://rapidinnovation.org/creating-operating-maintaining-systems-nature

Ref 3:Image of the eclipse taken from Wikepedia (eclipse)

Acknowledgment:

The use of Antumbra as a metaphor was suggested by Mr. Vlad Kunko during one of our playful discussions in the Design Thinking forum on Linkedin. Grateful.

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