Dear Organlearners,
Bill Harris <billh@lsid.hp.com> writes in LO15975:
>> Rol and At have started something interesting (again). I wonder
>> if it's related to a puzzle I struggled with for a long time until
>> I saw it work (but I'm still not sure I could describe to someone
>> else how to replicate it). A few years ago, I was intent on
>> moving a group towards self-direction and towards the use of
>> certain 'action science' techniques (I was their manager). Chris
>> Argyris writes somewhere that part of the ethical application of
>> action science involves not using closed (coercive) methods to
>> create an open environment. He seemed to argue on two levels, one
>> ethical and one pragmatic. On the pragmatic level, the argument
>> seems to be that you'll not eliminate coercion from an environment
>> if you use coercion as the tool to purge it.
In my reply LO16006 to Bill, I write:
> It is as if "self-organisation" and "manipulation" exclude each other!
> Is not your "working puzzle"?
> I have not yet explained this "working puzzle". I can only do so
> after you have evaluated my attempt to articulate it. But for this
> explanation I will, unfortuantely, have to pull in that hairy,
> slimey monster called "entropy".
I seldom reply to my own contributions. In this case Bill might have
failed to see the bait quoted above after I have articulated his "working
puzzle", or it may be a matter of synchronisation.
Why do manipulation and self-organisation exclude each other? (Let us
exclude self-manipulation from manipulation and rather include it with
self-organisation.)
In order to explain this question (Bill's "working puzzle") you will have
to do some homework. I have prepared another contribution entitled
"Entropy and its production." Study it carefully, eventhough it is long.
Feel free to ask me any questions on it. I will mail it together with this
contribution.
Here now is the explanation for Bill's "working puzzle". The system can be
saturated with extra entropy either by producing the entropy self or by
inundating the system with entropy which have been produced in its
surroundings. When the system has to produce sufficient entropy itself,
the seven essentialities have to be fully operative. Thus emergences will
happen. The system will self-organise by manipulating itself.
But when the surroundings produce the entropy needed, the seven
essentialities of the system itself need not be fully operative. In fact,
they are very seldom fully operative. Thus emergences will almost never
happen. Consequently the system will almost never self-organise when
manipulated by the surroundings.
The more complexer systems become, the less they will respond favourably
to manipulations from the outside. In other words, the more complex they
become, the less they will behave as expected if such behaviour results
from coercive manipulation. The sooner we realise this, the better for all
of us.
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/>