Replying to LO25722 --
At writes, in response to my:
>> In LO terms, this means that the parts of an organization
>> must be free to maintain a shifting local consistency,
>> doing articulation work across the boundaries to maintain
>> the global consistency at a different level. (At, does this
>> call to mind examples in the biological, chemical, or
>> physical realms?)
> Yes, definitely. It is something of which I painted a rich picture in the
> topic "Emergence and Efficiency" a couple of years ago. Your "doing
> articulation work across the boundaries to maintain the global
> consistency" is nothing else than a emergence, a situation in which the
> sum of the parts become a greater whole. Whatever gets used in an
> emergence, sustains that emergence and hence ought not be used for
> something else unrealted to the emergence. Your "parts of an organization
> must be free" is nothing else than these parts have to be dedicated to an
> emergence, something which is very unefficient for daily work in a
> digestive manner.
[...]
> Experiencing the emergence of an organisation into a LO will afford
> invaluable experience to create emergent solutions to bifurcation problems
At, this reminds me of something that I noticed in the discussion of
"boids" a year or so ago (see for example LO21774). There seem to be two
senses of "emergence" which the boids simulation highlights. One refers
to the flocking behavior of the boids, which is labelled as an emergent
attribute of of the collection of boids. The other is sense I've seen
most often from you: the result of a bifurcation at the edge of chaos,
which leads the system undergoing the emergence to become organized at a
higher level (oversimplying a bit).
To me at least, the first sense talks about characteristics of a whole
system determined by (not obviously related) characteristics of the parts.
(In Reynold's simulation, neither the individual boids nor the flock need
move far from equilibrium for the emergent behavior to occur.) The second
sense refers to the "journey" of a whole system per se.
It seems to me that the first paragraph in the quotation above uses the
first sense (except for the last sentence), while the second uses the
second sense. At least this is most consistent with the way "articulation
work" was used by Gershon, Starr, et al. They referred not to a singular
event (or a series of them) but to ongoing interactions ("mutual
digestions"?) that worked to keep the overall system functional.
Best of the season to all fellow learners,
Dwig
--Don Dwiggins <d.l.dwiggins@computer.org>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <Richard@Karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>
"Learning-org" and the format of our message identifiers (LO1234, etc.) are trademarks of Richard Karash.