To Congregate or to Proliferate Information LO26366

From: AM de Lange (amdelange@gold.up.ac.za)
Date: 03/16/01


Replying to LO26345 --

Dear Organlearners,

Gavin Ritz <garritz@xtra.co.nz> writes under the old topic

Psychological aspects of LO's LO26345

>> Organizational theories have no limits from where I stand,
>
>That is absolutely true. But the proliferation of junk is what
>concerns me.

Greetings dear Gavin,

I perceive your comment not as a judgement, but as a sharp observation of
what is happening predominantly in the intellectual world of today. Why is
so much information junk to us? When will information not be junk to us?

The seven essentialities (7 Es) of creativity affords us a way to
determine whether information is junk or not. For example, when
information is devoid of wholeness, we will first have to transform that
information into a more wholesome form before we can use it better. Let me
explain it by a metaphor.

Imagine that you are in a desert. Imagine that you are very thirsty so
that you need to drink water. Imagine that water is nowhere to be found.
Although it seldom happens, imagine how a seemingly barren cloud rushes
over you to shed for a few minutes some precious drops of rain. The
downpour will be typically 1mm or less. In other words, should you have
opened your mouth as widely as possible for the raindrops to fall into it,
you will get only about a teaspoon of water to drink. This will not do.
You will have to bring together many more raindrops to get sufficient
water to quench your thirst. Wholeness is like having the container with a
surface area large enough to collect the raindrops with. Although only 1mm
thick, water spread over 1 square meter is quite a lot of water, namely 1
liter!

Information proliferates when there is a lack in one or more of the 7 Es
when producing it. Because of lacking self in one or more of the 7 Es, a
person will not be able to recognise proliferated information and thus
avoid wasting valuable resources on it. It becomes most tragic when an
entire organisation cannot recognise and avoid proliferated information. A
few members usually know what to do with proliferated information. But
when none of them has any role to play in the management of that
organisation, that organisation will always be information thirsty. It may
eventually die of that thirst.

>I was talking about the discipline of management and
>business models.

I will be submitting a contribution soon on the ambivalence of this
discipline of managment under the topic Learning and Disciplining. You may
think of this ambivalence in terms of your algedonic signals. However, as
I have explained before, I recognise only one
algedonic-dialectic-ambivalent signal, namely that on the path of
creativity.

>I can't wait to see the outcome, watching and waiting with
>anticipation. This might even save Systems thinking , who
>knows, from the junk heap of business models.

In my opinion all thinkers on organisations will have to choose on the
path of creativity between going upwards into the constructive direction
or going downwards into the destructive direction. Since not all systems
thinkers will choose the same direction, there will inevitably be junk
among Systems Thinking.

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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