Category: Articles
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Overview of organizing orders
This is a post in my series on organizing “between and beyond.” Other posts are here. The series is inspired by David Bohm’s and F. David Peat’s notion of “the order between and beyond”.1 I wrote in the 1st post that organizing “beyond” is a “deeper order” of organizing which transcends the compromises in “existing…
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Bioteams obliterate permission structures
Here is a post by Doug Kirkpatrick where he reviews Ken Thompson’s book Bioteams: High Performance Teams Based on Natures Most Successful Designs. Thompson notes that bioteams obliterate permission structures, which are so common in traditional organizations. Accountability is instead a natural consequence of the transparency and reliance on reputation in bioteaming.
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Is sociocracy agile?
Decision Making Systems Matter is an interesting article by Pieter van der Meché, Jens Coldewey, and Hendrik Esser, with Anders Ivarsson as additional contributor. The article is funded by the Agile Alliance and is a Supporting Agile Adoption publication. The authors describe how combining “Agile with ideas from Sociocracy provides … a way to create…
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Jaron Lanier on cybernetic totalism
Jaron Lanier writes in One-Half of a Manifesto that the dogma he objects to “is composed of a set of interlocking beliefs and doesn’t have a generally accepted overarching name as yet, though I sometimes call it “cybernetic totalism.” It has the potential to transform human experience more powerfully than any prior ideology, religion, or…
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Cybernetics is a poor metaphor for living systems
Here is how Elisabet Sahtouris defines ecosophy and why she thinks that cybernetics is a poor metaphor for living systems: Ecosophy “… I give the word ‘ecosophy’ (oikos + sophia = oikosophia) the meaning it would have had in ancient Greece, had it come into use there: Ecosophy: wisely run household of human affairs or,…
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Alfie Kohn on love, motivation, and self-esteem
Alfie Kohn is the author of Punished by Rewards, which is a book about the damaging effects of rewards. Here are his thoughts on motivation, love, and self-esteem (my emphasis in bold): Motivation “When we deal with people who have less power than we do, we’re often tempted to offer them rewards for acting the…
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Carol Black on the wildness of children
Carol Black writes the following in On the Wildness of Children (my emphasis in bold): When we first take children from the world and put them in an institution, they cry. … But gradually, over the many years of confinement, they adjust. … The same people who do not see themselves as “above” nature but…
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Beth Tener on working together
If you want to arrive at a shared vision and a plan that integrates and builds on the breadth and depth of expertise and perspectives of the group, it has to be developed together. The challenge is that in order to get to that, there is a time early on where you have to bring…
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George Monbiot on destroying autonomy
The workplace has been overwhelmed by a mad, Kafkaesque infrastructure of assessments, monitoring, measuring, surveillance and audits, centrally directed and rigidly planned, whose purpose is to reward the winners and punish the losers. It destroys autonomy, enterprise, innovation and loyalty, and breeds frustration, envy and fear. 1 — George Monbiot Notes: 1 Sick of this…
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Holding space
Heather Plett writes here what it means to “hold space” for people, and how to do it well. It’s something all of us can do for each other. She writes (my emphasis in bold). “[Holding space] means that we are willing to walk alongside another person in whatever journey they’re on without judging them, making…