Organizing retrospective 6

This is a post in my series on organizing “between and beyond.” Other posts are here. This is a retrospective of what has happened during the week. The purpose is to reflect on the work itself. Here is my previous retrospective. Here is my next retrospective.

What has happened? What needs to be done?
I have spent the week reading Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order by Paavo Pylkkänen. Here is my book review. Pylkkänen’s aim with the book is to explore David Bohm’s ideas on mind, matter, time, and conscious experience. Pylkkänen was a collaborator with Bohm and is therefore in a great position to comment on Bohm’s work. Pylkkänen writes that mechanistic explanations cannot be used to describe the more fundamental levels of the physical world. He suggests that the failure to come to terms with consciousness is related to a tacit overcommitment to mechanistic order. I think there’s a tacit overcommitment to mechanistic order in organizing as well. Deeper generative orders for organizing are non-mechanistic.

• Next week I will write a book review of The Systems View of Life: A Unified Vision by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi.
  

What was good? What can be improved?
I had a discussion with a young woman during the week. She asked what I was doing and I told her that I was reading Pylkkänen. After a while she got upset and said that she was so tired of people searching for answers, when they already have the answers themselves. She said the focus is always on middle-aged men, although women have had the answers for thousands of years. In hindsight, I realize I became defensive. Lessons learned: You’ll miss information if you don’t listen (in other words, you’ll become misinformed) . Questioning assumptions (especially your own), including the limits of those assumptions, is difficult.

Jon Husband (@jonhusband) had an interesting comment on my previous retrospective. Here is his comment on Facebook: “Any time existing ordered and structured systems break down, it’s always fascinating to watch how quickly and effectively people begin sorting out what needs to happen and what to do. There’s a lot to learn / take away from that observation, I think. Including acting on purpose to get something done that needs doing.”

• As I mentioned last week, I need to spend more time on free flow thinking and writing.
  

Related posts:
Organizing in between and beyond posts