R. Holloway wrote regarding Maturana & Varela's autopoietic systems:
>Respecting human individuality, creativity, autonomy and wholeness within
>the organizational context is paramount to realizing the model of a living
>human organization that I'm advocating. The intent is not to subordinate
>human social systems to organisms, but to raise the awareness and behavior
>of organizations and their autonomous components (us) from the context of
>Sparta to something more profoundly human (and individual, creative,
>autonomous and whole).
I beg to differ with your assessment of the key aspect M&V's work as it
relates to human organizations. I posit that the key concept of
Maturana's and Varela's "Tree of knowledge" for organizational design is
not that organizations are like autopoietic living systems, but rather
that human organizations are formed by biological beings (with all the
limitations and phenomena that this embodies) which create their world
(the coordination of their coordinations) in language. As they say:
"Everything said is said by someone(an observer)".
The key issues are language and embodiement. (see Varela's "The Embodied
Mind"). When working with human organizations you must remeber that
"knowing is doing and doing is knowing" (i.e. embodiement) and that
"everything said is said by someone" (i.e. we and our organizations are
the history of conversations that we are, our narratives). For
organizations to learn and change we must address their peoples narratives
and the possibilities they embody.
--R. Reichard emergent@sirius.com www.ezone.com/sos
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>