ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, I proposed that the complexity sciences could serve as a productive domain from which we could take some abstract relationships to serve as analogies for relationships in organizations, with the intention of providing ways of thinking that are more in accordance with organizational reality than the currently dominant discourse. I claimed that potentially the most fruitful analogy was that of individual digital agents interacting locally with each other in the medium of digital symbols to produce emergent population-wide patterns. The process is one of transformative causality in which agents form population-wide patterns while at the same time being formed by them. This analogy is particularly important because it demonstrates that local interaction can produce coherent, emergent population-wide patterns which at the same time form that local interaction. If, in the human domain, it turned out that population-wide, that is social, patterns emerge without design in local interaction between individual human agents who form the social patterns while individually being formed by them, then the logic of the dominant discourse will be turned on its head. The dominant discourse is built on the assumption that global, population-wide, patterns of organizations and societies can only change through global plans and redesigns which are to be implemented by individual human agents. If the analogy from the complexity models were to apply to humans then it would not be possible to change human social patterns in a chosen way simply by implementing plans, because actual global change would be emerging in the interplay of intentions in local interaction. Furthermore, many management disciplines, such as Organization Development, would lose their fundamental basis. Clearly, then, I am talking about much more than some fi ne theoretical point – there are major practical consequences in what I am claiming.
