Lessons from the Edge

“Self-Organization Opportunities”

In which participants got practical, and began to examine ways to bring complexity to life in their own organizations.
Facilitated by Jeff Goldstein, Gareth Morgan, Brenda Zimmerman, Paul Plsek, Perry Pepper, President, Chester County Hospital,
and Birute Regine, Consultant, Harvest Writer

• Perry Pepper had been introduced to complexity science by Curt Lindberg. As he learned more and more, he soon began asking himself some difficult questions:
  • What should we do with all of this complexity information?
  • How does one lead with this complexity awareness?
  • Does knowledge of complexity science have different usefulness depending on your function in the organization?
  • Can an understanding of theory encourage emergence of adaptive behavior?
    
    
• An awareness: Some have found that simply talking about complexity helps to lower the anxiety in an organization!

• Zimmerman noted that the “Omniscient CEO” is a myth. The CEO doesn’t have all the answers. Simply admitting this is a myth will cause change in boundaries.
  
  
• Paul Plsek noted: “Everything you do changes the system. You can’t put your foot in the same stream twice. The organization is constantly changing. By teaching complexity classes, Perry Pepper sent a message that changed the organization. The important questions are: Whatever you’re doing, is it consistent with something new or reinforcing the old myth? Is what you’re doing playing into them or creating something new? As for the outcome... you just can’t predict it.”

• Hard question: How much of the theory is it necessary to share at all levels?
  
  
• How does one make complexity understandable at all levels? One of the best ways is metaphor – but you can only take a metaphor so far.
  
  
• Another participant suggested that managers don’t have to teach complexity science for people to adapt: “They’re already adapting. We just have to get out of the way and facilitate the process.”
  
  
• One participant observed that people are CASs, no matter what system they live in. As a result, they will exhibit adaptive behavior. The question, then, is have you been able to identify and celebrate examples of emergent behavior that others can appreciate?

• A questioner asked, “How do we entice command-and-control CEOs into this new way of thinking?” Perry Pepper replied, “You can’t tell anyone. Some may try to fake it. But it’s hard to do anything with it until they buy in. You can entice them, but not much more.”
  
  
• Another participant added, “We CEOs tend to be traditional and have superegos that make it difficult to try really new things. Those of us who have had a smattering of this excitement realize the release it creates when we don’t have to have all the answers and begin to explore how we can involve the whole organization in the change. Loneliness at the top can be alleviated by this approach.”
  
  
• The powerful “sucking attraction” of command-and-control is the belief it would work “if only they did what I told them to.” You keep coming back to the attractor that says “if only.” That can be hard to overcome.
  
  
• An exercise helps illustrate why command-and-control doesn’t work. The facilitator tells participants (who can’t see the facilitator) to fold and tear a sheet of paper in a certain way. Even though the directions sound specific, each piece of paper produced by the process is very different. Command-and-control personalities insist on doing it again with even more explicit directions. And of course it doesn’t work.
  
  
• Gareth Morgan pointed out that “you’ll never get a religious conversion” with a CEO. Rather, the complexity approach must first deliver a lot of value. CEO’s may join the conversation if they see successes.

Copyright © 1999, VHA Inc. Permission
to copy for educational purposes only.