Your idea of using “the percentage of consensual adoption of a collaborative decision” as a trigger for a group to move forward is an interesting one. I can see how that might be a useful technique in what I would call “joint problem solving” situations.

Here, though, I want to respond to you suggestion that organizations are best thought of as complex adaptive systems and living organisms.

A person working in an organization is undoubtedly a living organism! However, the ‘organization’ – or so I would maintain – is not. Those who see organizations as “living systems” often draw an analogy with the behaviour of colonies of ants or flocks of birds. And it was the attempt to simulate this behaviour in the laboratory that led to the notion of the Complex Adaptive System (CAS). There, ‘agents’ interacting locally, according to a few pre-programmed rules of interaction, were seen to self-organize to form coherent ‘global’ patterns of behaviour. This has led to the idea that managers could set a few simple rules of interaction for staff and ‘allow them’ to self-organize; rather than seeking to impose detailed order from on high.

To treat an organization as a CAS would require those same conditions to be fulfilled. That is, a set of rules would need to be imposed by someone outside the system boundary (as with the ‘programmer’). And those rules would have to be followed precisely and without exception. Unfortunately (or fortunately, perhaps) these conditions don’t apply. First, managers (the presumed programmers) are not external observers and controllers of other people’s actions; they are involved participants. Secondly, people don’t tend to follow rules, simple or otherwise. Issues of power, ideology, self interest, emotion and identity etc are always in play. Thirdly, organizations are not systems, in the sense that this is usually meant. Amongst other things, they don’t have boundaries. And, whereas a hand, say, (as part of the human body) can’t function if it is cut off from the body as a whole, an individual can – and does – function independently of ‘the organization’.

At the same time, as Ralph Stacey and his colleagues point out, the work on CASs provides a useful source domain of analogy for what actually does go on in organizations. In particular, outcomes do emerge from people’s self-organizing interactions – as they make sense together of what’s going on and decide how they are going to act. Importantly, this happens in all organizations, whether managers govern by so-called “command-and-control” or are enthusiastic disciples of empowered self-management. That is, self-organization isn’t a designed-in function, it is a natural dynamic of local, conversational interactions.

Also, as I outline in Informal Coalitions, the more that people make sense of things in particular ways, the more likely they are to make similar sense going forward. That is, coherent patterns of response arise, which manifest themselves as tendencies to think and act in some ways and not in others. These ‘global’ (i.e. widespread) patterns enable people to continue to function together, by tending to channel their ongoing sensemaking and action taking down mental, emotional and behavioural ‘pathways’ that are ‘culturally acceptable’.

The potential always exists for novel outcomes to emerge from this interactional process and for patterns to shift spontaneously. The likelihood, though, is that existing patterns will be repeated and further reinforced.

Other outputs that emerge from this ongoing process of conversational interaction are the formal trappings of ‘organization’ itself; that is the ‘official’ strategies, structures and processes etc. These similarly both enable and constrain ongoing interactions – though not wholly in the ways that managers intend them to, because they are always subject to local perception, interpretation and evaluation in the light of the particular circumstances that people find themselves in.

So I would argue that what we talk of as “organizations” are complex social processes of people in interaction (or complex responsive processes, as Stacey would say). Nothing (i.e. no ‘thing’) exists outside of this process of everyday interaction. That is, there is no overarching body (an “organization”) that thinks, feels and acts independently of these local interactions. So organizations cannot be living organisms, or living systems because, in terms of the dynamics I’ve been describing, they don’t exist as an entity. The self-organizing dynamics of people interacting together simply generate patterns of meaning and action that we (have come to) think of as “organization”.

Cheers, Chris.

Read the comments in this post
http://www.changingorganisations.com/2009/08/what-does-it-mean-to-be-self-organising/

And these posts
http://informalcoalitions.typepad.com/informal_coalitions/2009/08/on-selforganization-and-emergence-1.html
http://basreus.nl/2009/07/27/self-organization-defined/
http://basreus.nl/2009/10/23/complex-adaptive-systems-my-understanding/

Life is not predominantly linear — our solutions need to embrace this reality.