Replying to LO26385 --
Dear Organlearners,
Gavin Ritz <garritz@xtra.co.nz> writes:
>I am a real fan of Peter Senge (it was one of my highlights this
>year to meet him) but I am concerned about systems thinking.
Greetings dear Gavin,
I am concerned like you. Our very topic "The Proliferation of Junk" arises
when wholeness hits the dust in Systems Thinking.
Nevertheless, we have to so open-minded that we can see in this
"Proliferation of Junk" how organisational management is drifiting towards
the edge of chaos which will effect globally all organisations from as
small as families to as large as nations. It is the bifurcation at this
edge of organisational chaos which we should try to focus on in our
Learning Organisations so as to seek the path of constructive emergence
and avoid the path of destructive immergence.
I feel very sad because when people take notice of what is happening in
Africa south of the Sahara, they seem to think that this will not happen
to them. No, Southern Africa is rather the first to have reached this edge
of organisational chaos. The rest will surely follow.
Compare it with the chemistry departments in many a university. When the
excutive team of the university introduce a new management strategy, the
first department where it fails after a certain time, is usually the
chemistry department. Why? Because the essentiality liveness
("becoming-being") is the backbone for chemists in their search for
structures (molecular) and processes (chemical). (I think that many a
univeristy rector wish he had not chemists to manage ;-) Thus the
chemistry department will discover first how the new management strategy
lacks in liveness. (The engineering departments, for example, will be
first to crack open the lack of spareness in the new strategy ;-)
Let us now go back to Southern Africa. The reason why it has reached the
edge first is because there is so much "organisational chemistry" in
Southern Africa. With "organisational chemistry" I mean the "upwards and
downwards processes in the structures of organisations".
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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