from Accidental Conversations (DesigningLife Books 2002)
Emergence: Freedom To Self-Organize
When we sat in science class in the ‘60’s, we learned all about control. This
chemical controls emotions in the brain, this other one controls growth in plants.
Science as it was taught in schools at that point still reflected the closed-system machine
metaphors of the 17th century sciences. There was always the implication that hidden
inside things were tiny control panels run by cleverly scheming little men. When we
looked up from our books, we did notice that there were certainly a lot of little men
running things at that time, so the whole perspective seemed to make sense.
Maybe it was the politics of science and education at the time, but our virgin ears
were protected from what would have seemed like heresies from the new sciences that
had already begun revolutionizing our understanding of how things work. Today, our
whole way of looking at our world is dramatically shifting as we begin to learn about the
self-organizing, emergent capabilities of living systems.
As it turns out, our world is populated by a complex, dynamic, and dense web of
living systems. Living systems do not behave like closed, machine-like systems. They
are messy and non-linear, capable of unpredictability, self-regeneration, and learning.
They are not controlled or controlling. They co-evolve as wholes within larger and more
complex wholes and cannot be reassembled if disassembled. They are inseparably
nested within larger and smaller interdependent systems. They are no more intrinsically
prone to equilibrium than they are to change.
The list of living systems is long and covers a lot of territory on this planet.
Ecosystems, networks, communities, organizations, teams, human beings, physiological
systems and cells, animals, plants, microbes. Perhaps the most astounding capability
shared across the spectrum of life is the ability to self-organize.
Living systems have the ability to be self-organizing as long as there is enough
freedom in connectivity within the system. Self-organization is inherently efficient
because there is no time and energy wasted in contests of control and resistance.
Living systems begin to collapse and fail to thrive when their capacity for selforganization
is lost. We see this on the physiological level when cancer cells attempt to
dominate the self-organizing ecology of their living system by trying to force
conformance of all diverse cells to become like the colonizing cancer cells. At that point,
it takes expensive means to keep alive a system destroyed by an agenda of eliminating
diversity.
Living systems thrive again to the extent that interactions are liberated.
Accidental conversations are self-organizing events that support the possibilities of selforganization in communities of work. Accidental conversations express the practice of
love. In love, our aim is to unleash rather than control.
In self-organization, the behavior and learning of a system emerge naturally from
the dynamic interactions between the micro and macro systems inside and outside of
the system’s world. Nothing inside or outside directs, controls or dominates these
interactions. Nothing happens according to some clockwork blueprint or plan cooked up
by those tiny little scheming men.
Interactions are energized and organized simply by the dynamic flow of
information in the system. Information includes things like the system’s individual and
collective experience (memory), rules (learning), ideas (imagination), real-time
observations (impressions), and questions (curiosity). Self-organization is the coherent
behavior that emerges from an infinite number of conversations inside and outside the
system’s world.
As living systems, we are the confluence of an infinite network of dialogues. We
are rainbows, sparkling at the convergence of information and light.
One of the more popular examples of self-organization today is the termites of
Australia. Beginning with the random interactions of a few termites, others are attracted
until a critical mass self-organizes into a construction crew that builds immense and well engineered living structures. Without Gantt charts, matrix managers, or contracts, self-organization efficiently produces technically amazing structures.
This is just a fun example. The story goes on to include how brains organize
their own information management, how bodies facilitate their own healing, and how
fertilized eggs orchestrate their own development. Physicist Fritjof Capra likes to point
out from the latest brain research that brain development and functioning is a daily
miracle performed on the basis of the brain’s ability to sustain no central point of control,
no starting point, no localization of information, no vision of an “ultimate state”, no
independent functions. The brain’s functioning fails when connections fail to develop in
the first critical six months, or when scar tissue blocks freedom in the flow of information.
Danah Zohar indicates “there is nothing planned or orderly about the brain’s structure.”
With 10 billion brain cells and 1000 billion connections, the brain that loves, invents, and
appreciates the Infinite, is a self-organizing web.
According to Tufts University neurologist, Daniel Dennett, the brain operates as
millions of teams of information processors that simultaneously confer with one another
creating “multiple drafts of narrative fragments at various stages of editing.” Behold the
simple miracle of freedom in connectivity.
The lesson here is that conversations can be very productive without tightly
controlled and controlling agenda police and time keepers. In the amazingly effective
self-organizing conversations of Open Space technology, there are only four principles
people are asked to have in their consciousness: Whoever comes are the right people;
whatever happens is the only thing that could have; whenever it starts is the right time;
and when it’s over it’s over. Nurturing both bumblebee and butterfly interactions
between concurrent conversations, these principles powerfully unleash more new
possibilities in an hour than could be managed in a dozen meetings otherwise. I have
witnessed it countless times.
Some of our most significant conversations have been going on for millennia.
Archetypal conversations about the origins of the universe, the making of bread, the
raising of children, politics, the nature of beauty, good and evil, and the secret to a long
happy life transcend time and space as they weave in and out of Internet chats, informal meetings, literature, talk shows, hallways conversations, and personal meditations. I
have found it easy to confine meaningless and futile conversations to single formal
meetings, but have yet to find a way to confine important conversations to any exclusive
mindspace or time. Important conversations self-organize into new possibilities, new
efforts, and new outcomes.
The reason why we so eagerly impose structure on seemingly chaotic
conversations is that we either fear unpredictable outcomes or we think that rigid
structure unleashes more possibilities. I see little evidence for this. What I see is that
constrained processes tend to nurture constrained outcomes that attract so little energy
that we have to “follow up” to keep such unsustainable efforts alive. Self-regulation is
life’s hallmark. Apparently, all living systems have this capability and exercise it unless
something interferes.
The history of 20th century organizations is the history of people interfering with
the self-organizing capabilities of living systems. We have tried to get organizations to
work by introducing just about anything you would never find in natural living systems.
With engineered precision, we have installed and maintained centralized controls,
punishment for self-direction, information filters, gaps, and bottlenecks.
Luckily, not all organizations picked up on this. Some have had founders and
stewards who had an intuitive bias for a simpler way, who tended to attract people with
similar perspectives. Not all organizations continue their reliance on machine metaphors
to guide their thinking about how people behave in organizations and markets.
Why do we keep expecting so much from centralized planning and control? Did
we learn anything from the Soviet experiment in communism that left a wake of
economic and psychological, technical, and artistic depression and repression that may
take generations to recover from? In their defense, the whole romance with central
planning and control was very supported and inspired by 17th century western science,
politics, and religion. Until the new sciences of this past century, the possibility of selforganization was virtually unknown and unpracticed in the “civilized” world.
Somehow, some of us here in the states have escaped the black hole grip of the
old patriarchal sciences, politics, and religion. Many of us believe that the influence of
Native American cultures played a very underrated role in steering the origins of the
American worldview to a more self-organizing democratic field of infinite possibilities. In
this tradition, we raise a different set of questions. How much hierarchy and big
governance in politics or religion or the sciences does it take to help people unleash their
self-organizing potentialities? What did we learn from the unprecedented fall of the
Berlin Wall, Soviet communism, and South African apartheid? In each case, new
possibilities emerged from new conversations.
There is a new breed of us who are breathing in as much wisdom as we can from
the new sciences. We are bravely tinkering with self-organization. Our intrigue with the
possibilities of self-organization is boundaryless. Those of us lucky enough to have
directly experienced self-organization have faith in its promise. Those for whom it is a
new idea embrace it not on faith but with durable, receptive curiosity.
My experience of self-organization goes back to grade school. The kids I hung
out with were, and are yet today as they run corporations, chaotic and industrious. In
the winters, we self-organized improvised ice rinks and snow condos. In the summer,
skits, tree houses, and camping adventures were self-organized from the diversity of
unsupervised minds. Only a few rules energized our process. Let the voice of the
situation decide what was most practical. Try to include anyone around—nonparticipants
were simply seen as whiners waiting to happen. Do whatever you can to
neutralize the kids who had aspirations of bullying the group with their leadership vision.
These rules weren’t written down anywhere or certified by an international
association of standards for neighborhood play. They emerged in our little community of
neighbors, never spoken but operating as all magnetic forces do, organizing the field of
energy and information that we were. Without knowing so, we practiced Thomas
Jefferson’s sage advice, “That government is best which governs least.”
Futurists Watts Wacker and Jim Walker talk about “unrules.” These they define
as “a form of corporate discipline built on the premise that in a chaos world the company
with the fewest rules wins.” We see this in the fractal geometrics of naturally chaotic
ecosystems where from just a few simple rules interacting with chance events, the most
awesome patterns in the plant leaves, cloud formations, and coastlines emerge.
In Mark Trodden’s work in particle physics, it had become clear to him that chaos
is emergent order that arises from fluidly evolving structures. The freedom that exists in
chaotic systems allows the natural discovery of new rules, patterns, and order.
I don’t remember fearing the chaos of play while growing up. I only recall the
amazing amount of inventiveness, unplanned community, and lifelong friendships
spawned by the freedom to self-organize. Our unrules allowed us to learn both the
ethics and esthetics of improvisation in living systems.
We instinctively knew what years later the new sciences writer Erich Jantch
would suggest, that “The more freedom in self-organization, the more order.” New
varieties of order naturally flow from every living system’s innate capacity for selforganization.
What if this perspective inspired our conversations when we’re talking about how
our organizations should look and feel and function? What if we kept this in the front of
our minds when we are mulling over questions about how many policies, job
descriptions, and hierarchical structures the organization needs in order to grow and
thrive?
As we grew up, many of us had the good fortune to be members of teams who
lost their leaders to downsizing or corporate ineptitude for long enough periods of time to
allow us to experience the magic of self-organization once again. We struggled and
stumbled through new questions, eventually discovering the kinds of strategies
supporting collaborative leadership. Of course from the inside and outside it was chaotic
as new structures emerged. From messy, unfacilitated conversations, work was
assigned, problems were solved, communications occurred, and the group achieved its
highest levels of harmony and productivity in their tenure together.
Three key ingredients support self-organization: freedom, connectivity, and
diversity. People need to feel free to interact, think, propose, take initiative, and learn.
Informational connectivity needs to occur across the skin of disciplines, shifts, functions,
positional levels, genders, races, loyalties, agendas, and relationships so that feedback
loops can close and generate new learning continuously. The group’s ecology thrives if
there is enough diversity of passions, talents, ideas, personalities, and backgrounds to
give the system enough self-organizing chaos, uncertainty, and imbalance. As long as
the system supports these ingredients, it can cook up its deliverables with more
efficiency, innovation, and joy than ever.
I do not include leadership (as a power and knowledge monopoly) on the short
list of requirements for self-organization. Even leadership, like its patriarchal alter ego,
management, has too much baggage of inferences to the kind of centralized direction
we simply don’t find in complex adaptive systems. In self-organizing systems,
leadership is a function rather than a position—shared, decentralized, and dynamically
coordinated.
The basic assumption behind the debate about how much or what kind of
leadership we need is the assumption that hierarchical leaders are needed at all. As I
get around to companies and firms across industries, the teams who seem to need the
most management are those who have never had the opportunity to develop their innate
capacities for self-organization. Other teams who have somehow developed or hired in
self-organization capabilities thrive with less supervision and external controls. And as
long as they sustain enough freedom, connectivity, and diversity, they learn to thrive
without dependency on patriarchal management, leadership, or external controls.
In a Fast Company interview Harriet Rubin, founder of Doubleday/Currency,
makes the observation that “Freedom is actually a bigger game than power. Power is
about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash.” What would
happen if in your community of work, the word “unleash” replaced every use of the word
“manage”? People would walk around knitting their brows with admonitions like, “You
know, we’ve really gotta start unleashing these projects better”, and “We’ve got to get to
the point where that shift is much better unleashed!.” Imagine the newly emerging
patterns…
I think Peter Block hits the nail squarely when he says that “We are reluctant to
let go of the belief that if I am to care for something I must control it.” Fortunately, we are discovering daily how care without control is possible. I think it starts with a deep
understanding of how living systems naturally work, grow, heal, and coevolve within their
ecosystems.
If groups needing to develop their self-organizing capabilities require anything, it
is someone who can be a mentor, teacher, and facilitator/connector. Certainly, we can
redefine any management or leadership role in these terms, as many organizations are
doing today, but in my work I remain highly sensitive to how people in work groups
respond to positional labels in their environment. I am careful to refer to anyone as
being “in charge” or “ultimately accountable” if our aim is to cultivate as much selforganization and innovation as possible. It has nothing to do with the inherent meaning
in these terms. I belong to the school of people who tend to think of meaning as
contextual. Things have meaning mediated by the context of our personal experience.
Translation: how any label ultimately affects people’s behavior has little to do with what I
intended for that label, but by how people respond to it based on their experiential
references and associations.
The new sciences are beginning to provoke us to radically rethink our
expectations as they manifest themselves in the language and models that shape our
behavior together.
Over the past several years, Wall Street Journal writer Tom Petzinger has been
researching and interviewing enterprises, looking for themes in emerging organizations
and fast companies. After scores of interviews and thousands of emails, he concludes:
“The new model for organizations is the biological world, where uncontrolled actions
produce stunningly efficient and robust results all through adaptation and selforganization.”
More of us are being inspired by the metaphors and practical realities of selforganization.
At this point, the question is not whether but how to leverage the possibilities. In my consulting work, I am asked regularly for “the formula” for getting people, groups, and organizations to be more self-directed. Sometimes the motivation is less than out of an enlightened enthusiasm for allowing living systems to do what they seem to do naturally and best. Sometimes the motivation is simply that we are busy managers tired of being distracted by the tasks of managing people who can’t organize themselves.
Author Mitchel Resnick highlights his research with the observation that “In many
self-organizing systems, random fluctuations act as the seeds from which (new) patterns
and structures grow.”
Meg Wheatley’s spin is that you cannot understand, control, or manage a
system—you can only provoke it. As my friend Rose Bator, founder of Common Ground
renewal center, reminds me, the wisdom is in the group and must come from the group
as a living system. If one of the key ingredients is “random fluctuations”, perhaps the
only thing we can do is facilitate, inspire, educate, encourage, and nurture the conditions
for as many accidental conversations in the system as possible.
Accidental conversations are not only elegant examples and reminders of the
power and magic of self-organization, they are the clearest indicators that we are
beginning to cultivate self-organized communities of work. Their messy, chaotic lack of
hierarchical control creates the perfect conditions for the emergence of new
relationships, new opportunities, and new possibilities.
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