Replying to LO29561 --
Digest this reader, Hello Morty,
Thank you for your suggestions. It reminds me of "Paths of Change" by Will
McWhinney who also proposes third order change. As i try never to quote
without looking up the source i also found this: And - remarkable, or not
- he calls it "evolution of meta-praxis". The third order change he refers
to is the transcendence of realities / paradigms. He goes on to describe
the co-evolving of the system and its environment. In third order change
you'll be able to make a change to a system and let the system stay
unchanged. Of course this "is" the way that entropy is produced. Entropy
production changes the way entropy is being produced without disrupting
entropy production.
So in third order change, an organisation would be a Coevolving
Organisation (CO), or beCOme for short ;-).
Some preliminary axioms about the CO:
- "all behaviour is change and organising", we cannot not-change, cannot
not-organize and we cannot not-evolve
- "all behaviour has a contents aspect and a relational aspect", so
change always changes the organisation (= content) and its relations with
its environment. This implies that we have meta-change, as the changes
from the environment will be fed backe into the changing organisation.
- "all conflicts have to do with a misunderstanding of cause and effect".
The processes of change have no clear cause ("chance"), nor are the
effects clear ("change 2"). There are just continuously interacting
processes. We have been taught ("programmed") differently. We have certain
expectation of reality. When our expectations are met, it is a
"self-fulfilling prophecy". And when these are not met we tend to try to
change reality and not our expectations. As it is no use fighting reality,
we frequently start to fight each other. That doesn't solve anything
either, but we're slow to realize that. A controversy is a sign that we do
not understand the lack of cause and effect.
- "we are unable to change a "not", a "negation" in reality". We can talk
about not changing, but nobody can not not change. Change is ambivalent.
Even when we change something back into its former shape and content, we
cannot undo the fact that it had been changed in the first place. Forget
it.
Lemma of coevolving:
- "all change processes must produce entropy and will - on the long run
- cocreate (= organize) more order that is able to create entropy faster"
There exists a non-zero change that these processes become self-aware.
We have it COming,
Jan
Morty Lefkoe wrote:
>I like the term "evolving" organizations. I have been looking for a good
>word for a long time.
>
>I've distinguished between three types of change:
[..snip by your host..]
--Drs J.C. Lelie (Jan, MSc MBA) facilitator mind@work
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