At,
> 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.
I'm glad you did reply! I had indeed missed your contribution; it arrived
after I left for our U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, and I apparently didn't
get to all of my mail yesterday between "actual work".
In any case, if you continue to make such cases for the application of
your ideas to such practical issues as I brought up, I'm going to be
forced to go back and study your writings on the seven essentialities.
:-)
Seriously, your ideas have always seemed quite interesting, but I've
skipped some of them because I didn't think I had the time to delve into
what was clearly a well-thought-out philosophy that might not aid me
directly in my work. With this contribution, you're beginning to make the
tie to me in ways that I probably should no longer ignore.
Yes, I've read some of Prigogine's work a few years ago and found his
ideas illuminating. Unfortunately, I've forgotten too much of what I
read, although I still have those articles around.
So, question no. 1: do you have a pointer to a tutorial, if possible
paper-, not book-length, about your concept of the seven essentialities of
systems?
> Feel free to ask me any questions on it. I will mail it together with this
> contribution.
I've read it (your contribution on entropy) once, and I will study it
more, but a few questions come to mind already (perhaps answerable by
reading more about your concepts). While I never took thermodynamics (I
was an electrical engineer in school who managed to avoid that class,
thinking I wouldn't need it; I'm now reminded of a great EE professor who
once told us when asked if we should take a class in quantum mechanics if
we weren't going into semiconductor design, "The only way you'll know you
won't need quantum mechanics is if you don't _know_ quantum mechanics!"),
I do understand a few of the high-level concepts. Your arguments and
interpretations seem to make sense, but I'm having a bit of trouble making
sure I understand what entropy is in the real world.
> 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.
In other words, what was this entropy we were producing? How would I
identify it?
In some general sense, if it is the energy required for the present state,
then I may begin to catch on. We were indeed supplying a lot of "energy"
in the sense of mental and emotional effort to the task of figuring out
what and how we were going to be. We indeed were fortunate to have only
the most limited (but clear) set of external constraints, giving us
relatively large amounts of freedom within which to work.
> 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.
In other words, "leading by doing less" (at least less of what managers
normally do) is the prescription for generating self-organizing systems?
That indeed matches my experience from my work; the "less" I did, the more
we got. (Of course, in another sense, I really didn't do "less"; that was
the hardest work I had ever done. It just didn't involve producing the
work product or service, nor did it involve telling the rest of the group
how to produce it. I tended to view it as being a mirror to the
organization, as injecting certain ideas for them to consider, as serving
as a basketball coach (exhorting and educating but not setting much of a
plan in place), and mostly in talking with the group about how we were
going to go about deciding how to do the work. It sounds like we were
wasting time, but I believe we generated an organization that was
remarkably agile at self-correcting for bad decisions or changes in the
environment, at least up to some limit.
> 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.
Yes, that message comes from a number of directions. System dynamics
teaches a similar story.
Thanks for your help, At. I look forward to understanding this more. If
I can get to the bottom of how we generated (my terms, not yours, although
they may be identical in this case --- I'm still learning) an open
environment so that I can begin to transmit those ideas to others, I will
feel I've made important progress.
Why do I say that last bit? I think the ideas we've all been discussing
are important. I'm beginning to recognize that Geoffrey Moore's ideas of
the technology life cycle ("Crossing the Chasm" and "Inside the Tornado")
apply to the selling of ideas and concepts, as well. Part (but only
part) of his proposed key to success in getting mainstream adoption of a
product (or idea) is the creation of a "whole product". As important as
this stuff is, I don't think I can offer anything yet past my art (or
craft?) at doing it myself. For me, it's not yet science. As long as it
isn't, I fear that it is not yet a whole product, one that a "pragmatist"
(in Moore's terminology) can pick up and use with relatively low
perceived risk and essentially no invention left to do in the act of
getting a job done. In the past, that has sounded impossible to achieve.
After reading Moore's books, it begins to sound necessary.
Bill
--
Bill Harris Hewlett-Packard Co.
R&D Engineering Processes Lake Stevens Division
domain: billh@lsid.hp.com M/S 330
phone: (425) 335-2200 8600 Soper Hill Road
fax: (425) 335-2828 Everett, WA 98205-1298
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations
For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>