Dear Organlearners,
Carlos Neves, as a journalist, asked the following very
important questions in LO 15431:
> Do you believe in happiness at work?
> How would you define happiness at work?
> Could you tell me some experiences about it?
> How HR and/or T&D could provide this kind of environment at work?
> Could work at home help people to find happiness at work?
> Anything more to tell me? Feel free...
Carlos, all your questions were concerned with work. I will go further and
answer your questions for all our cultural activities.
Happiness is a quality which humans experience when they have participated
in an emergence. Emergences can happen in the material world or the
abstract world. An emergence happens when a lower order gives rise to a
new higher order. This emergence cannot happen without saturating the
lower order with chaos. Unfortunately, this very chaos may also lead to
immergences. Thus we may call the point of saturation of chaos also a
bifurcation point. In other words, our happiness as an adjoint of
emergences cannot be separated from our sadness as an adjoint of
immergences.
Humans often try to prevent immergences and the adjointed sadness by
avoiding the conditions necessary for saturating the lower order with
chaos. Thus, unfortunately, they also prevent emergences and the adjointed
happiness. This is wrong. What they should have done, is to ensure that
bifucations lead more to emergences/happiness than to immergences/sadness.
But why are they not doing it since it seems to be the obvious thing to
do?
The answer has to do with creativity and complexity. The things sufficient
or essential to ensure that a bifurcation will result in an emergence
rather than an immergence, are the very things which we have to use to
measure/express complexity. For example, Stafford Beer once noticed that
variety is a measure of complexity. But variety is also essential to
emergences by which complexity increases. Should we shy away from
complexity, then it is abvious that we may shy away from that which ensure
emergences and thus complexity.
What things are essential to emergences and thus its adjoint happiness?
Most thinkers on complexity have a very distressful answer: " Be happy -
we cannot ever be sure." What they do not realise, is that we cannot be
happy with such an answer because happiness is an adjoint of emergences -
happiness cannot precede the emergence. Neither was Socrates happy with
such an answer 2500 years ago. His quest to find the answer led to the
birth of the golden era of the Grecian civilisation. Our quest to find the
answer will also lead to a golden era - golden by the very quality of its
emergences.
I have discovered seven things essential to all emergences. I have
mentioned that variety is one of these seven essentialities. How sure are
you of variety essentiality?
Best wishes
--At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>