Please excuse the delay in my response. I have been on vacation and
have just begun to catch up on the accumulated mail in my box.
On Friday, March 17, you said:
> Here is a fine example coming from your world of experience to test
> the idea of eidetic reduction. Is a leader essential to any human
> organisation? (I would love to see how you handle this one). And just
> to give your paradigm a slight bump, here is another example. Is the
> element carbon essential to any human organisation?
As I look at these two questions, I can easily visualize how the
essentialities come to bear. First, there are many ways in which the
questions may be considered, from the narrow to the broad. What I mean
is from the linear restrictiveness of one's mental models and paradigms
to the richness created by allowing the openness of lateral thinking.
By restricting thinking to organizations (systems) that include the
physical presence of humans, consideration must be expanded from, lets
say, the single individual to small units of people (home, circle of
friends, neighborhood, business) to larger combined units (city, state,
corporation, country) to the eventual ecosystem containing these units.
In all cases, except possibly at the two limits, it appears to me there
is a specific human need which is involved. The need to follow or to
lead. I guess in the terminology used in systems theory an attractor,
which drives us to conclude these systems require a leader.
Consider now the two limits, a single entity and an ecosystem. Can we
find an exception here. That depends on how open our mind is to
alternate definitions of what a leader is or isn't. Certainly, in a
living system, as I understand it, one of the essentials is cognition.
In the case of a single individual, if the brain ceases to function,
cognition is lost and we no longer have a living system. I would then
define the brain as the leader of a single entity. It certainly acts
like one. One can argue that even when the brain ceases to function
there are certain lower level responses that remain and the heart will
continue to pump life throughout the body. But without the ability to
breathe and feed oneself, I do not believe the body can retain another
of the conditions required of a living system, autopoeisis, in this case
self renewal of the body's cells. To do so oxygen and food must be
supplied artificially from outside the system. When this action is
taken, the system changes and expands to include the processes of
breathing and feeding. Certainly someone needs to be responsible for
that and, I conclude, this act is technically one requiring a transfer
of "leadership."
So lets look at the other end of the spectrum, the ecosystem. An
ecosystem would be one that develops in reaction to its components. It
would not, as I see it, require a leader. It is self organizing. But
what makes up the ecosystem. All kinds of subsystems. And each of
these subsystems requires leadership. Thus, I would have to conclude
that even an ecosystem would require a leader, but in this case many
leaders.
Finally, what if I open my mind to a virtual system on, lets say, a
computer. That requires programming, setting of boundaries and
observation and control from the outside. Is that leadership? In the
sense I defined leadership for a single individual whose brain
functioning has ceased and is being kept alive by the use of respirators
and external feeding systems, I would have to say yes. So my answer to
the first question is, at least for now since I have not yet perceived
of additional situations outside the existing paradigm of a human
organization is, a leader or leaders are essential to all human
organizations.
By applying the same type of thinking, I would have to answer the same
way to the question of carbon. Given that humans are considered to be
living beings and given that carbon is an essential ingredient in all
known living systems that are human, I would have to conclude that all
organizations, living or nonliving, that involve humans must also
require carbon as an essential.
David Novick
David T. Novick e-mail: david.t.novick@boeing.com
Mail Stop: GE99 Phone: (714)762-5522
The Boeing Company Fax: (714)762-6222
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Anaheim, CA 92803
--"Novick, David T" <David.Novick@West.Boeing.com>
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