Too often, comments are made about organization and management practice - supposedly offered from a complexity perspective - that position self-organization and emergence as the opposite of so-called “command and control”. The resulting prescriptions then present these as superior design, development and delivery options to those top-down approaches that have come to dominate mainstream management thinking and practice.
The irony of doing so, though, is that this fails to take seriously the inherent complexity of organization that supposedly underpins the prescribed way forward. Most particularly, self-organization and emergence are not design options at all. Instead, these are natural dynamics of everyday human interaction; the process through which we are all perpetually creating the future together - in all of its manifestations.
What might be viewed as a “command and control” approach to organization and management practice has itself emerged from, and is being sustained by, these same dynamics of self-organization and emergence. And all of this is occurring within a particular social, temporal and situational context; itself an expression of the widespread interplay of these same interactional dynamics.
The same argument applies, of course, to organizational forms and practices that emphasize, say, empowered self-management. The ways in which these dynamics play out in practice will be starkly different in these two cases, of course. As they would be in every other expression. But these diverse ways of doing, being and becoming are all emergent outcomes of the complex social process of everyday human interaction.
What might be viewed as a “command and control” approach to organization and management practice has itself emerged from, and is being sustained by, these same dynamics of self-organization and emergence. And all of this is occurring within a particular social, temporal and situational context; itself an expression of the widespread interplay of these same interactional dynamics.
The same argument applies, of course, to organizational forms and practices that emphasize, say, empowered self-management. The ways in which these dynamics play out in practice will be starkly different in these two cases, of course. As they would be in every other expression. But these diverse ways of doing, being and becoming are all emergent outcomes of the complex social process of everyday human interaction.
First published as a post on LinkedIn on 23 April 2022
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