Replying to LO25160 --
Dear Organlearners,
Bill Harris <bill_harris@facilitatedsystems.com> writes:
>There's an interesting book (Winfried may know it) called
>_Management der Unternehmensentwicklung:
> Phasengerechte Fuehrung und der Umgang mit
>Krisen_ by Cuno Puempin and Juergen Prange
>(Campus Verlag, 1991) that categorizes organizations
>into 4 groups: pioneers, growth, maturity, and transition,
>all using the St. Gallen management model. The postulated
>desired path is from pioneer to growth back to pioneer, at
>most grazing the mature phase.
Greetings Bill,
Thank you for your most interesting comment. I will certainly try to get
hold of this book to study it.
The reason why it is so interesting for me, is that the four categories
they propose seem to concur with what I perceive as the four phases of
"entropy production" during the evolution of any creative system. The
"growth" and "maturity" categories are encountered on the path of
decreasing "entropy production" towwards equilibrium. The "transition"
and "pioneer" categories are encountered on the path of increasing
"entropy production" towads the edge of chaos. The "transition" entails
what I call a "creative collapse" (Heidegger -- "Abbau") while the
"pioneer" entails somethings which has been recently often discussed, the
"bifurcation".
An organisation which gets fixed into one of these four categories, i.e.
stop "becoming" from the one to the other, will be issueing its own death
certificate when explicating its "being".
>One interesting point from the book: if you start in the
>pioneer phase and grow heavily, by the time you cycle
>back to the pioneer phase, you've grown enough so that
>you need more than one new pioneer activity. Those will
>grow at slightly different rates, so that they won't be in sync
>at the start of the next cycle, and they'll have to spawn
>even more.
This "one-to-many-mapping is definitely strongly exhibited in the
evolution of biological species. Sometimes the expected "pioneers" along a
new branch could not make it because of an immergence so that the entire
rest of the branch with all its subsequent forkings is lacking.
>By the time a few cycles have passed, different parts of
>the company will be scattered in different parts of the cycle,
>necessitating a culture that supports the presence of all types
>at once.
I got the shivers when reading this sentence. What kind of culture is
needed? One that is sensitive and responsive to what we may call "deep
evolution". There is nothing in the articulation of a Learning
Organisation as Peter Senge dit it to prevent the LO from adapting is
Systems Thinking towards an "evolution friendly" version.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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