The
Unshackled Organization:
Facing the Challenge of Unpredictability Through Spontaneous Reorganization
By Jeffrey
Goldstein
1994, Productivity
Press, Portland, Oregon
ABSTRACT - The author suggests
a new approach to organizational change based on the
theory of self-organization. He argues that the job of the leader who is interested in effecting
change, building more effective and relevant organizations is to create far-from- equilibrium
conditions which unleash the inherent creative capacity of the organization and its people.
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Chapter
1 - New Wine Skins
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Key Points:
Four features of self-organization challenge traditional notions of
organizational change:
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Feature #1 -
"Self -organization is a self-generated and self-guided
process." "What is radically new about the self-organization
perspective is that a work group or organization will spontaneously
know how to reorganize in the face of challenge, if the obstacles
hindering its capacity to self-organize are removed." (emphasis
added) This is contrasted to the conventional approach to change
which, even if it involves participation, is essentially driven by the
hierarchy.
- Feature #2 - "Self-organization
moves beyond the idea of a system
as an inert mass characterized by an innate resistance to change.
Instead, change is the activation of a system’s inherent potential
for transformation, i.e., its "non-linearity."" Consider the image of a
flower bulb - its contains the future flower that blossoms under the right
conditions of soil, air temperature, sunlight, moisture.
- Feature #3 - "Self-organization
results from the utilization, even
enhancement of random, accidental, and unexpected events.
Change, then, is not the suppression of chaos: it is order emerging out
of chaos..." In organizations we have been trained to view variation as a
problem, to control and eliminate unpredictable variations and maintain
the equilibrium.
Feature #4 -
"Self-organization represents a system undergoing a
revolution prompted by far-from-equilibrium conditions. This is vastly
different than a mere shift in system functioning and a subsequent return to
equilibrium."
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Chapter 2 - Growth in Nonlinear
Systems
"Difficult
things beneath heaven
Are made up of easy things
Big things beneath heaven
Are made up of small things
Thus the sage
Never deals with the great,
But accomplishes greatness."
- Tao Te Ching (63)
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Key Points:
The differences
between linear and nonlinear are presented. Conventional
approaches to organizational change assume the system is linear. Hence
management usually assumes that a major change initiative requires extensive
advance planning, that resistance to change must be anticipated, when
resistance arises you overcome it with persistence, determination and skill, and
that large change requires large-scale efforts. This approach is based on a
number of questionable assumptions, notably that organizations are "largely
predictable enterprises," that do not change naturally and are "inert masses"
which require a "proportionality between effort and results."
Many change efforts
fail, in whole or part, because linear methods are used to
try to change nonlinear systems. It takes a nonlinear strategy to unlock the
"evolutionary potential" inherent in a nonlinear system.
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Chapter
4 - From Resistance To Attraction
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Key Points
- "New research into nonlinear systems challenges the concept that
resistance to change is inherent to systems. The traditional conception, in fact, is
turned on its head - in nonlinear systems resistance shifts from being an inherent
property to being a temporary condition of a system currently at equilibrium."
Recent research
in psychology has shown in circumstances involving change,
resistance is "an attraction to an affirmative core that involves the need to survive
with dignity, autonomy and integrity....resistance simply indicates that the
organizational patterns that are operating are initially and temporally attracting
the system to remain the way it is."
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- "Change is a matter of transiting
into new attractors, a process brought
about by appropriate far-from-equilibrium conditions. This implies that
change does not overcome resistance, but that resistance is expected,
accepted, and respected. Resistance ceases to be an issue when it is no
longer the dominant attractor of a system."
Resistance then
indicates that an organization or work group is "under the sway
of an equilibrium attractor, which invites an exploration of the equilibrium-
seeking processes...which keep the behavior of the system within the accepted
setting, or culture, of the group by disallowing deviations from behavioral norms,
decision-making methods, work design, management styles, and so on."
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Chapter
5 - The Equilibrium Effect of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
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Key Points:
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"The nonlinear,
circular structure of self-fulfilling prophecies keeps an
organizational system at equilibrium. This nonlinear cycle creates a
barrier around work groups and organizations that keeps them isolated
and closed-off to new information or new ways of interacting with their
environments. The self-fulfilling prophecy has the power to do this
because it is self-confirming - its own beliefs reinforce themselves by
way of actions congruent with those beliefs." A run on a bank as an
example - concern that a bank is collapsing leads to frantic withdrawals,
which leads to a weakening position of the bank which confirms the
original fears and so on.
"In the self-organization
approach to system change, however, resistance as self-
fulfilling prophecy is not a fortress to be stormed; it indicates the presence of an
attractor - precisely the point where self- organizing transformation is unleashed.
Therefore, whatever maintains a condition of resistance at equilibrium is the
same process that leads to change at far-from-equilibrium conditions. The
nonlinearity will need to be unleashed so that its evolutionary potential can
become manifest...Whereas the self-fulfilling prophecy creates stability in a
system under equilibrium conditions, under far-from-equilibrium conditions,
when the inherent nonlinearity of the self-fulfilling prophecy is revealed and
released, the same effect can lead the system to transform itself."
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Chapter
6 - Generating Far-From-Equilibrium Conditions
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Key Points:
To foster far-from-equilibrium conditions:
Allow new information
into the system - "Information ...refers to knowledge
that is available to a system of its own functioning, or the arrangement of its
parts, where each element is and what it is doing. Whereas data is a set of facts,
information in a social system goes beyond facts about the system to the
relationship between the facts, or among the people in the system who know the
facts. For example, if the husband in a family says "I am depressed," it is data,
since it is a report about the person himself rather than in relation to another. But
if the husband says, "I am depressed when my wife looks at me with an angry
face," this is information because it is about the relationship between the
members of the social system."
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- Work with organizational boundaries -
"...arenas demarcated for
change must be characterized by firm boundaries....structural
boundaries between an organization and its environment, as well as the
internal boundaries between functions inside the organization...If the
boundaries in an organization are too weak, the system will not be able
to withstand the increase of information that the far-from-equilibrium
conditions generate."
- Connect systems to environment -
The firm boundaries "must also be
permeable enough to allow vital exchange with the system’s
environments. Therefore, a crucial phase of facilitating far-from-
equilibrium conditions includes connecting work groups and
organizations with their environments."
- Question differences - in attitudes,
purposes, expectations, perceptions
is a way of "churning up the underlying foundation of self-fulfilling
prophecies....When members of a group question
differences...they...generate the new information."
- Challenge assumptions - Identifying
and challenging self-fulfilling
prophecies and the assumptions which underlie them brings new
information into the system.
Take advantage
of chance and serendipity - "...information in organizations
can reside in organizational "noise" or random, mostly neglected, departures
from an organization’s equilibrium. Far-from- equilibrium methods enable the
organization or work group to notice, use, and amplify this noise, and thereby
turn it into new information."
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Chapter
7 - Working With Boundaries
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Key Points:
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"Self-organization
only occurs within a firmly bounded arena. This
firm boundary limits and channels the nonlinear processes that occur in
the system...In human systems, boundaries provide a safe holding
environment for anxiety and other uncomfortable experiences that
accompany the emergence of novelty..."
- "...new boundaries need to be demarcated
in the following four
organizational areas: authority, task, political (what is in it for us),
identity."
"A far-from-equilibrium
condition can...be generated by connecting a system
with an environment from which it was previously isolated."
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Chapter
10 - The Magic Theater
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Key Points: "Consider
these features of nonlinear systems: orderly patterns
emerge out of random events; small events have huge effects; huge efforts have
negligible effects; and, mistakes can lead to profound new directions. Indeed,
the behavior of nonlinear systems can seem strange, bizarre, and even
counterintuitive...Nonlinear systems, them, require a kind of nonlinear intuition..."
"Nonlinear
change requires nonlinear methods, so self-organization requires an
appropriation of disproportionality, unpredictability, complexity, and
randomness. Generating far-from-equilibrium conditions, then, is like establishing
a magic theater where the necessary ingredients for self-organization can be
concocted and enacted."
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- "A change agent must take advantage
of accidents, crises, and fortuitous
events. A change agent needs to apply a bit of the absurd, the strange,
and the complex, then find a key role for play, paradox, accidents, and
fun."
- "Serendipity is the key. The creative
spirit lunges at the serendipitous
chance event, the fluctuation, the accident, the fortuitous circumstance,
the mutation prompted by a difficult and challenging situation."
"A crucial
ingredient in the self-confirming cycle of a self-fulfilling prophecy is the
inherent sense of being right. Because the outcomes resulting from the action are
self-confirming, they contain a sense of their own righteousness, that is, they
justify themselves. Consequently, the members of the group caught up in the self-
fulfilling prophecy take these beliefs, actions, and results very seriously...If
seriousness maintains equilibrium then one remedy for equilibrium is the opposite
of seriousness - that is, play. Play, not hard work, can bring about deeper
transformation."
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1. Thoughts
