Replying to LO27711 --
Dear Organlearners,
Leo Minnigh <l.d.minnigh@library.tudelft.nl> writes:
>This series of At ["Constructive creativity and leadership"
> LO27524, 27528, 27553, 27590, 27603, 27633 and
> 27642) was another master piece of this/our/my teacher.
Greetings dear Leo,
Thank you for your kind words. Many books and many more papers have been
published on leadership. Despite this massive collection of information,
very little is available from the view point of creativity with complexity
as its outcome. I simply felt the urge to picture the plight of the leader
in terms of this view point. Our country is much in need of leaders who
can promote constructive creativity and avoid destructive creativity. And
of followers who have to become constructive leaders.
Masterpiece? Like Beethoven I already feel that a lot of changes have to
be made to improve on them. Your question nr 7 is one of them. Let us then
do it by way of the LO-dialogue.
Also thank you very much for your deep questions. They require careful
answerd. As a result my reply have become very long. I will have to break
it up in two sections. Should you study these two replies and the
relationship to each other, perhaps you will then understand why I call
the first section digestion and the last section bifurcation.
>This series reconfirmed a lot of ideas which developed
>in my mind after some years of following the products of
>At's free energy.
I put so much free energy into this series that afterwards I was in a
serious bout of depression. But more importantly, your sentence is a great
confirmation once again for Polanyi's concept of tacit knowledge. You
have, in terms of your own experiences, tacit knowledge on the topic. I
merely have articulated some of your tacit knowledge.
>This series has also generated some new questions
>and meandering in my mind. And I like to put these
>into our space of dialogue.
Yes, yes, yes. Questioning is the most powerful way to delve into our
tacit knowledge so as to articulate what we previously could not tell. The
LO-dialogue is the natural way to shape our articulated answers until they
become master pieces.
>1. Could we imagine an organisation without a leader?
>Is such situation possible?
I can imagine such an organisation, but it will be purely fictive. To have
a leaderless organisation, all its members must be equal in all respects.
This means that we will have to deny at least otherness
("quality-variety") in favour of equality. Otherness is one of the 7Es
(seven essentialities of creativity).
Even more striking to me, since otherness has been denied none of its
members will have any constructive creativity. All their creativity will
be misused for destruction. (It reminds me very much of Robespierre and
his gang during the French Revolution -- freedom, equality and fraternity.
At last even he was guillotined.) Thus it seems that constructive
creativity implies leadership. Perhaps this is the answer to your next
question.
>2. Why is a leader necessary?
You then ask:
>3. Is the leader the member of an organisation with
>the highest available amount of free energy?
I cannot answer this one definitively. For example, the leader will need a
vast amount of personal free energy to maintain the status of the
organisation when its members lack learning. I know of several leaders
doing it and where I can I warn them on the futility of it. I also know of
several leaders who do not have so much free energy so that their
organisations are slipping backwards. If I were one of them, I would focus
my free energy on improving the culture of learning in the organisation.
In other words, I would encourage the organisation to become a LO.
Another point to consider is that the leader need not to be the most
creative (bifurcative as well as digestive) person in that organisation.
Such a creative person will use up the highest amount of free energy. The
task of the leader is rather to guide such a maximally creative person
wisely so that the whole organisation can benefit. But trying to curb
rather than to guide such a person will need much more free energy from
the leader. This is where many leaders waste their free energy, so much so
that their organisations begin to slip backwards at an alarming rate.
North of our country's border is a case in the making.
>4. Could the emergence of a leader be the result
>of entropy production by the organisation?
Yes, indeed. The past weeks a vivid example happened here in South Africa.
The coach of the national rugby team resigned, saying that he could not
take the criticism any more. On the field the captain of the team is the
leader, but otherwise the coach is the leader. The organisation is not
merely the team and its coach, but all rugby fans in South Africa. Since
then vast entropic forces and entropic fluxes have been manifested in the
news media.
One morning, while reading the letters section of a newspaper, I perceived
vividly how these entropic forces and entropic fluxes are used to produce
entropy. Its first outcome is "diversity of becoming" which we know better
as chaos. Thus the rugby fans are pushing the selection of a new coach to
either the ridge or the edge of chaos.
It is most interesting how, when someone wrote something which concerns
one of the 7Es, readers would respond with "brilliant". For example, one
person wrote that the fifteen best players should be selected for the team
rather than potentially good players or providing for affirmative action.
This concerns spareness ("quantity-limit"). Another person wrote that all
rugby fans have the right to the best team and not merely the rugby coach,
selectors and board. This concerns sureness ("identity-categoricity").
>5. Should we make a distinction between 'muscle
>free energy' and 'brain free energy'. Is a balanced
>situation of both the ideal situation?
Distinction -- yes, but division -- no. The brain is as much an organ of
the body as any other organ like the muscles. To starve the brain from
free energy is dangerous. When the brain dies, the rest of the body surely
dies (without any external support system).
Perhaps you use "muscle" and "brain" as metaphors for the physical or
spiritual realms. This distinction (but not a fragmentation) is also
crucial.
I think that we have to maintain a harmony between physical and spiritual
free energy. I do not use the word "balance" because it signifies for me
to much "being" and too little "becoming". For example, many sports people
train their bodies to utilise its physical free energy for maximum
performance. But they neglect training their minds to utilise its
spiritual free energy for maximum performance. They have little, if any,
respect for the harmony between both. Thus they are often prone to
physical injuries or cannot sustain the pressure of a big event. Sometimes
their coaches realise this and then calls in a physiotherapist or a
psychiatrist or both. But these two specialists seldom, if ever, work as a
harmonious team. Because of this lack of wholeness
("unity-associativity"), the team still does not benefit much from them.
In business organisations there is often a shocking ignorance to this
harmony between physical and spiritual free energy. For example, imagine a
job which has to be done fast, needing many temporary manual labourers .
Hence the jobless are hired at a place where they usually wait for any
job. But after a few hours of work they are fired because of incompetency.
The reason? A jobless person usually did not had enough to eat for several
days. Both the physical and mental powers of that person is at a low
point. By buying that labourer a breakfast and giving her/him time to eat
it and digest some of it, the person will become much more competent.
When any organisation employs people, each is employed as a person -- a
whole which is more than the sum of its parts. Should the organisation be
ignorant to this person's personality as the wholeness of his/her body and
mind, the organisation will be ignorant to wholeness in its main
activities too. Thus constructive creativity and authentic learning will
dwindle away. The organisation will waste its free energy on petty issues
and partisanships while inventing solutions for problems which cause just
more problems.
>6. Was the top stone of the pyramid of Cheops in
>Egypt carried by the leader (the strongest) or was
>the leader the conductor who managed the slaves?
> (If you are not strong, be smart). I have noticed the
>sentence of At: "Since the spiritual is higher than the
>physical...", although that was mentioned in another
>context.
Leo, I found your mentioning of the cap stone (pyramidion) of the pyramid
of Cheops in Egypt most curious. The Great Pyramid (GP) is the oldest of
all the pyramids. Even its accurate construction is vastly superior to
the rest. It is as if the rest were merely copies of the GP, beginning
almost a millennium afterwards. This GP is shrouded in mysteries. Even the
assumption that it was the burial place of the pharaoh Khufu is based on
only two dubious inscriptions (hieroglyphs) inside the whole of this GP.
Literature on the Great Pyramid (GP) began to appear more than 3000 years
ago. But the first memorable account of it is by the Greek
historian/traveller Herodotus who saw it in 440BC. For him it was the
greatest of the seven wonders of the world which he eventually described.
It is the only one which still exists today. Already in his time the GP
and most of the others pyramids did not have any pyramidions. But in
modern times many pyramidions have been uncovered by archeological
excavations. But none even matches closely the pyramidion which the GP
supposedly had. The pyramidions of the other pyramids were removed because
they had holy inscriptions on them or sometimes were even clad in gold
foil.
Calculations on the various measurements of the GP's dimensions and
finding ratios between them support the idea that the GP itself never had
a pyramidion. If this is the case, then the absence of the pyramidion
signified an important message by its builder. Who exactly planned and
oversaw the construction of the GP? Carbon dating of the age of the GP is
impossible because no organic material exists on which such dating could
be based. To connect it with the reign of Khufu is also dubious.
Calculations on its orientation to the North Pole and how much the latter
has shifted through the centuries, as well as the orientation of its
internal passages and their orientation to stellar constellations (Orion
and Dragon), point to a construction about 5000 years ago. Another curious
thing is that should we determine the centre of the distribution of the
earth's crust above sea level, it comes close to the locality of the GP.
Adjust this for 5000 years of drifting continents and it comes even closer
to the locality of the GP.
The Great Deluge happened some 5000 years ago! If we want to think about
who planned and oversaw the erection of the GP, then we have to focus on
personalities of close before or after the Great Deluge.
One of the many legends going around is that it was Enoch who planned and
oversaw the construction of the GP. Enoch specifically left the pyramidion
out so as to symbolise that among humankind a person will come with
sufficient high spiritual free energy to act as the pyramidion of the
"pyramid of humans living according to the ten principles like he did". In
terms of this legend Jesus would fit the best. Bear in mind that the
pyramidion has the highest gravitational energy of all layers of stone
used in the pyramid.
Also bear in mind that Enoch became 365 years old. During that time he
would have learned incredibly much, especially if he was a genius. Imagine
the great Leonardo da Vinci becoming as old as Enoch. Leonardo would then
have lived into the 19th century. Or a Goethe would have lived up to now
with still a hundred years to spare. Would a Leonardo or a Goethe have
wanted to make a fortune with his knowledge or would they have encouraged
humankind of today to create something constructively which would fill
later generations with awe as the GP have been doing for 5000 years? What
about creating something like the "DNA of Love"?
The other pyramids might have been built with slavery, but should Enoch
oversaw the construction of the GP, then it was not done with slavery. It
is staggering to calculate how much food and water were needed during the
construction of the pyramid. The overall statistics of the GP is:
Original height: 146.6 m
Present-day height: 138.75 m
Base length: 230.4 m
Angle of inclination: 51° 50' 40"
Estimated volume: 2,521,000 m^3
We can only imagine how many workers were needed. Some
40 000 for a time span of some 40 years. Imagine feeding all those
workers in a desert. This infrastructure was a greater
accomplishment than the GP itself!
Perhaps fellow learners might want to have a look at the following
sites for more interesting information on the GP:
< http://www.khufu.org/ >
< http://www.hunkler.com/pyramids/pyramid_symbolism.html >
Many secret societies had their own versions for the absence of the
pyramidion. A common theme among these versions was that the pyramidion is
the "all seeing eye of big brother". Do the US$ still have that picture on
it of the GP with an eye for its pyramidion?
Here I have to divide this contribution into two parts for mailing
purposes.
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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