Part 1: Tuning Into The Evolutionary Dance of the Universe
Part 1: Clarity Makes All the Difference
This is the first of two articles on self-organization. Together, they are intended to offer greater clarity, stories from experience, and practical solutions for the journey into self-organization. I hope to offer a fresh perspective on self-organization and its practical implementation.
This first article is fundamentally about clarification. It offers a set of definitions, striving for shared understanding of concepts which can sometimes be described in confusing or contradictory ways. The second article helps us get clear on a key difference between the organization and the social context of the people who energize it. The third article will describe important aspects of my experience of self-organization over the last ten years, as well as some major learnings that led me to the clarity described in articles 1 and 2. The fourth and final article will bring it all together: sharing the outcomes from this intensive decade of professional and personal development, elaborating on the mindset shift required, and exploring a practical solution to which my road leads: the Symbiotic Enterprise.
Terminology: what’s right? What’s wrong?
You’ve likely heard some of the terminology around new forms of organizing and the new world of work. Agile. Responsive. Self-organization. Self-management. Teal. The list goes on. This can all be very confusing, especially considering the number of stories that circulate about each one of these terms.
It’s worth holding in mind that everything that we humans tell ourselves is a story, and that every story can be believed, challenged, or disbelieved outright. In this light, the discourse around what or who is right or wrong feels to me like a waste of energy.
The mysterious glue that enables millions of humans to cooperate effectively is made of stories, not genes.
Yuyal Noah Harari, Website
From new stories to applied practice
Don’t get me wrong — I love and respect different perspectives, and very often joyfully learn a great deal from them. Sometimes I read, hear or experience something that conflicts with or is entirely disconnected from my current story, and that’s just fine. My curiosity keeps me searching. When new stories pique my curiosity and stay with me, I will find a way to translate these new ideas into something I can use in my life and work. The explorer in me tests new ideas, improves them through practical application, learns through experience, and, eventually, moves into a way of being that no longer questions the foundational story behind whatever new practice I’ve adopted. In this way, ideas that work are woven into the fabric of life.
When something proves useful for myself and others in practical application I know I have a good story — not necessarily the only or the best good story, but a good one nonetheless! On the other hand, when my experience shows there’s something missing, or when the practical application of a new idea reveals that it might not be as useful as I’d hoped, the story may be let go. Seek, learn, practice, refine, repeat. This is the evolutionary process, and it is never long before I sense the emergence of a new story to translate into practice.
Ten years of practical experience
I have a story to share with you now, and I think it’s a good one. It has emerged over a decade of practical experience. It incorporates many perspectives and practices, it translates into various practical applications, and it is built on the experience of myself and others who continue to improve, integrate, and practice with it. It is the story of evolutionary development for organizations.
As my colleagues and I have practiced evolutionary development in our work, it has become ever-more refined, consistent, and cohesive over time. It has evolved now to the point where it is ready to be of wider service, and it is for this moment that I choose to “put it down on paper”.
Many in the field of self-organization take different approaches. I am not here to tell you that this is the way forward, but that it is a way forward — that evolutionary development is a useful and practical story for self-organization in practice.
Getting clear on terms
A shared understanding of the following definitions will serve us in arriving at a shared understanding of what I call evolutionary development and the Symbiotic Enterprise.
1) Self-organization
Self-organization has been a buzz word for quite a while, and many different organizational practices are called self-organizing. Most of them represent very useful steps in the general direction of self-organization, but are not self-organization in its full practical expression. Here’s a common definition found on Wikipedia:
“Self-organization is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interaction between parts of a system. The process is spontaneous, not needing control by any external agent. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized and distributed over all the components of the system.”
This means that a system (a group of interacting or interrelated parts that form a whole) has the ability to spontaneously (re)arrange its components or parts as needed. The system knows from within what is needed, without any external directing influences around the process of (re)arranging. Self-organization, understood this way, is the principle around which nature organizes: from cells and organisms to planets and galaxies, we see this play out everywhere.
Some definitions suggest that self-organized systems adapt in a purposeful, non-random way. While this might be seen as a bold assumption, one could say that all self-organized systems follow a purpose.
I think it is safe to say that self-organization is the oldest, most consistent, and most successful principle we can think of. What started with the Big Bang (who knows — maybe even before that) has guided the Universe to this moment. We can assume it will continue to prevail until the end of time, if there should ever be such a thing.
Here’s a definition which has emerged from the work I do, and which allows for a more holistic view of self-organization in organizational and business life, but also of its much broader applications:
Self-organization is the evolutionary organizing principle of the universe.
Wow.
This definition let me finally understand how deep the shift really is when we achieve self-organization in our human practices.
The evolution of the universe is driven by self-organization
2) Self-management
Self-management and self-organization are often used interchangeably, at the expense of clarity. I’d argue that their meanings are distinctly different. Merriam-Webster Dictionary offers a definition of self-management which I find useful:
Self-management is management of oneself or one’s affairs.
It goes on, “self-management is about finding the self-control and mastery needed to take control of one’s work (e.g., to manage one’s time, workflow, and communication), especially: management of one’s own care or well-being.”
With the autonomy it offers, a self-organized context not only offers but requires a high level of self-management and such skills as time- and stress-management, decision-making ability, healthy self-esteem, and self-care. I propose that self-management is a skill set, while self-organization is a natural principle.
3) Evolution
To understand self-organization as the evolutionary principle of the universe, we need to be clear on the definition of “evolution”. The search for a scientific definition of evolution leads to varying perspectives from many different disciplines. The value of research is undeniable, but whatever we come up with must also resonate with our actual experiences. The definition that I like to use is very similar to that found on Wikipedia:
Evolution is the gradual development of something from a simpler to a more complex form.
To the best of my knowledge, this definition doesn’t directly contradict other definitions of the term. In the context of biology, as in the example of the findings of Charles Darwin, this definition lets us understand that, in response to the demands of a changing environment, an organization adapts via gradual development from simplicity to complexity. If the process of adaptation doesn’t match the requirements of the changed environment, the organism can’t survive. This leads us to the famous quote that is attributed to Charles Darwin:
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
4) Complexity
What is the meaning of the term “complex” in the definition of evolution? Complex, as defined in Lexico Online Dictionary, means “consisting of many different and connected parts”. As for the word complexity, I like the definition of Cambridge Dictionary:
Complexity is the state of having many parts and being difficult to understand or find an answer to.
To understand the term complexity in the field of self-organization, we need to look at it in connection with a system. To understand a “complex system” is, in some fashion, to understand an organization.
Wikipedia says, “a complex system is a system composed of many components which may interact with each other. Complex systems are systems whose behavior is difficult to model due to the variety of dependencies, competitions, relationships, or other types of interactions between their parts or between a given system and its environment. Systems that are complex have distinct characteristics that arise from these relationships, such as nonlinearity, emergence, spontaneous order (aka self-organization) and adaptation.”
“Examples of complex systems are Earth’s global climate, organisms, the human body, the brain, infrastructure such as the power grids, communication systems, an ecosystem, a living cell, and ultimately the entire universe.”
Our neurons — a highly complex system
Due to its characteristics, a complex system is impossible to control. The continuously changing variety of connections and relations can not be predicted or determined by any directive. Intervention into a complex system will cause an unpredictable sequence of reactions, due to the complexity of connections, dependencies, and relationships among the system’s parts. A complex system functions based on its own nonlinear, self-organized emergence.
A world hungering for change
The fast growth of global movements for self-organization shows the deep need for a fundamental shift in the way we organize and do work in service of people and planet. The world has become too complex for old ways of doing business.
The continuous growth paradigm is limited by a) its profit orientation and the resulting disconnect of employees, and b) the resulting harm to our planet. These are only two of many phenomena that clearly point towards the need for new approaches to organizing. Corporate environments are changing too fast and the conventional management hierarchy is increasingly incapable of accomplishing the dynamic responsiveness needed to ensure long-term survival. Self-organization, with its capacity to dynamically develop in service of a purpose, appears to be a useful answer.
In order to bring the success of self-organizing in nature into reach in the context of an organization, let’s look at a possible definition of “organization”, rooted in nature and the behavior of organisms:
“An organization is a complex, self-organized system that develops and adapts to its environment in an evolutionary and purposeful way.”
A missing perspective
The above definition of an organization sounds promising and has been tried for decades, in different forms and with varying degrees of success. One common point of criticism for those trying to run a company like an organism is that the parts of an organic, natural structure are atoms, molecules, cells, etcetera — not humans, with their own will, psyches, and relationships. Trying to mirror nature’s emergent, decentralized, and distributed dynamics discounts the dynamics of a social system, with all its relational, emotional, and psychological aspects.
Systems Theory’s perspective on organizational development has been extremely valuable in shifting the general view of what an organization is, away from mechanistic paradigm (cause and effect) to a systemic paradigm, often summarized by the quote, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”. Systems Theory has been the basis of one of the world’s most successful business consulting practices. Now, with the demand for self-organization increasing, we see evidence that the systemic approach also creates an obstacle for the practical application of self-organization. Why? Because it defines an organization as a complex social system.
In reality, we see time and time again that looking at the organization as a complex social system while at the same time trying to use processes modeled by organic self-organization leads to tremendous friction. This combination has led to many hybrid forms of self-organization. Sometimes, parts of a company are declared as “self-organizing teams”. Sometimes, the processes useful for supporting social dynamics are applied to govern the organization while the foundational structure of the power hierarchy is left in place — because in social systems, power is a factor that cannot be ignored. Power hierarchy and self-organization simply don’t go together, and organizations that don’t fully implement distributed authority — in both processes and in mindsets — don’t fully succeed.
We can’t ignore the social aspect of humans who work together, and yet we repeatedly run into trouble when we understand an organization through the narrow definition of “a complex social system.” How can we move forward, toward self-organization that supports people and organizational purpose, without discarding the value of what we’ve learned and practiced thus far?
This is the question you can explore in in part 2 of this article.
