Reading some of the references on At's recent Google list (in LO27997)
connected a couple of things in my mind:
I remember some time ago reading that in a marriage, quarrels will always
have either a win-win or lose-lose outcome. In the short term, one party
may feel like a winner and the other like a loser, but the result of such
an outcome will be damaging to the marriage.
Also, I remember reading recently (wish I could remember where!), that in
a marriage (or other strong two-party relationship), there are actually
three entities present: husband, wife, and couple. This helps understand
the point above: a (supposedly) win-lose argument has left the "3rd party"
a loser, no matter which of the disputants is nominally the winner.
This way of looking at the relationship is directly tied in to the
associative pattern of wholeness: the marriage relation as the associator
(umlomo in At's term) between the spouses, creating the larger unit
(fruitfulness is at work here too). It also suggests a "thinking tool"
for conflict resolution: at crucial times during the process, someone (or
both) must speak for the 3rd party.
Now consider applying the same kind of thinking to organizational
relationships, and particularly to conflicts. There's complexity lurking
here: consider the marriage again, and imagine that a baby enters the
picture. Now there are 7 entities whose "health" must be considered! To
see this, draw a triangle with husband, wife, and child at the vertices;
count the vertices (individuals), the lines (two-person relationships),
and the triangle as a whole (the family).
Next, imagine a 2nd child joining the family: draw a square, including the
diagonals; count the vertices, the lines, the 4 triangles each containing
3 of the vertices, and the whole square: 15 entities to be nurtured. No
wonder raising a family is a major undertaking!
Now consider the situation in even a small company (or large family): for
N people, there are 2^N - 1 (2-to-the-Nth-power less 1) entities
(exercise: where does the "less 1" come from?). Each entity that suffers
has a degrading effect on the company.
Of course, we can reduce this number to "manageable" proportions by
partitioning the company. Consider an 11-person company (thus having
2,048 entities). If we partition it into two 5-person "departments" plus
a separate "CEO", and assign a "VP" in each department to relate to each
other and the CEO, we have many fewer entities: 31 in each of the
departments plus 7 in the "executive suite": 2 x 31 + 7 = 69 (actually 67,
since the VPs were counted both in the departments and the executive
suite). Further, from the CEO's standpoint, the departments are unities,
so he/she only needs to be concerned with the 7.
It's easy to see what's gained by this arrangement, but what might be
lost? Of the almost 2 thousand entities that have been "pruned", are there
any that are important to the company? In fact, in a real company, unless
it's micro-managed, many such entities arise, and are often crucial to
maintaining the effectiveness of the company; typically, these entities
are sustained by the people directly affected, and are thus vulnerable to
such events as people leaving the company, being reassigned, or new
managers unwittingly (or uncaringly) degrading or destroying the entities.
I think I'll stop here, to see what reactions people have to this model.
What other aspects of organizations can usefully be viewed in these terms?
(For example, I haven't mentioned liveness; what does OL do to/with the
"composite entities"?)
With best wishes for all your entities,
--Don Dwiggins "Solvitur Ambulando" d.l.dwiggins@computer.org
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