Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Coming to life!

In an earlier posting we looked at organizations as a particular form of living system. Here we’ll go a little deeper into how this form of life comes into being.

The viewpoint here recognizes an interesting hybrid of a mechanistic view and an organic view of organizations. We recognize both the intentional creation and the natural growth of organizations. Or, another way to put this is in terms of the issue of design vs. emergence. However much organizations are carefully designed, it always seems that eventually they take on a life of their own. How does this happen? What is the mechanism? And how can we gain from a deeper understanding of this mixture of design and spontaneous emergence?

One thing we know for sure is that human life can hardly be found except within and among social groupings, or organizations. The lone hermit, the feral child, the persistent recluse provide the very rare exceptions that prove the rule, and are interesting exactly because of their rarity. Yet in spite of, or perhaps because of, almost total ubiquity, human organizations present tremendous challenges to human understanding. To invoke a rather well-known cliché, this is like the fish who wondered, “What the heck is water?” since he’d never known life outside the pond. We’re so completely immersed in and among organizational affiliations that it’s hard to gain the perspective to have a clear sense of the nature of this medium in which we swim.

The difference between human organizations and all other systems, living and non-living comes down to three related aspects, all three of which need to somehow be accounted for:

• Human organizations have an aspect of conscious construction

• These organizations take on lives of their own, often unexpected, often counter to the best laid plans

• What balances the planned with the emergent, the constructed vs. the independent growth, is the aspect of federated autonomies.

Living systems

What is the basis for the observation that human organizations constitute a special class of living system? It starts with a definition of life itself. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, two Chilean biologists advanced perhaps the clearest, most concise description of what it actually means to be living, via the term “autopoiesis”. Autopoiesis describes the process of self-creation and maintenance, from the Greek for “self” and “create”. Autopoiesis applies to biological cells and biological organisms.

Maturana and Varela wrote, “… the notion of autopoiesis is necessary and sufficient to characterize the organization of living systems.” Thus, according to this viewpoint, all living systems are autopoietic, and all autopoietic systems are living. Their formal definition of autopoiesis is:

An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.

It is easy to jump to the conclusion that human organizations meet this set of criteria. A fair number of authors do, in fact, contend that human organizations meet these criteria (even though Maturana and Varela themselves were actually divided on this question). There are important aspects of human organizations that seem to fit nicely within the formal definition of autopoiesis, and support the organic view of organizations.

As biologists, Maturana and Varela point to the living, biological cell as an example of what it means to be autopoietic[1]. Their definition states (and the example of the living cell supports) the notion that a biological system continuously creates the components of which it is composed, while the interactions among those same components create the system itself. The system creates its parts, and the parts create the system. This is what it means to be self-creating.

This raises two fundamental challenges in comparing human organizations to biological systems (as well as the ”social” organizations of other species). The first challenge is the issue of the dedication of components to the larger entity. In the case of biological organisms, cells are fully contained, completely dedicated components of the system. This does match the situation of human beings in relation to their organizations. Likewise in the case of organizations of non-human species, Maturana says: “The society of bees … is an example of a third order self-referring system”, where the bees are fully dedicated to the social system. Clearly a beehive is not a good model for human organizations. Bees don’t divide their time among the hive, a job, the PTA, and the Rotary Club in the way people typically hold memberships in multiple organizations at the same time.

The second challenge stems from the condition that autopoietic systems create their own components. But what are the components of a human organization? An immediate, intuitive answer might be that a component of a human organization is a person. However, a slightly deeper look brings the realization that this answer doesn’t actually satisfy the condition. The family may appear to create its components as newborn human beings. But a corporation does not create human beings. Nor does the church, the military, the government, the university, or any other human organization. And even the family, through adoption, marriage, or other extensions does not always create all of its components. That is, not if its components are considered to be complete human beings.

These two challenges suggest that a complete individual human being should not be regarded as a component of a human organization.

Non-living systems

As we have seen, the biological definition of life translates to “self-creating”. We have also seen that organizations do not perfectly match the biological definition. The parallel term from systems science is “allopoietic” system. In this case, again, the root “poiesis” stands for the concept of making. In this case allopoiesis designates a system that is being made. This describes a process of creation and maintenance of the system via some external agency. Allopoiesis applies to manufactured products, such as automobiles and computers, which do not continually create and refresh themselves (as much as we might wish they would!). The system (an automobile, say) does not create its own parts. Nor do the parts create relationships among themselves that self-create the automobile.

Does this term help in the process of classifying organizations? Surely it is apparent that people try to create organizations to perform certain functions, in business and in the public sector. It is equally apparent that organizations are not composed of passive parts, nor can we say in any reasonable sense that they are “manufactured”. Clearly something is going on that is different from biological life, and different from a manufacturing process. In other words, we are seeing neither autopoiesis nor allopoiesis, but a different process that is unique to human organizations. Let’s step back and ground ourselves in some additional concepts.

Memetics, Mimetics, Mirror Neurons, Commitments, and Agreements

As a step toward understanding the mechanisms of creation and maintenance of organizations, it helps to introduce the concept the meme. The meme, as introduced by Richard Dawkins (Dawkins, 1989), is one of two kinds of replicators (genes and memes) that execute the evolutionary algorithm of universal Darwinism. That algorithm holds that, over time, within a large population of replicators, those replicators that produce more surviving offspring leave their lines of descendents better adapted to the environment (Dennett, 1995).

Dawkins stated that is that the gene is the basic unit of evolution, and the propagator of change and variation. The successful gene is the one that has characteristics (fidelity, fecundity and longevity) that make it successful in the competition to replicate. Fidelity means that the genome pattern of, say, a cat, reproduces cats that have all the important features of a cat, and not sometimes a buffalo, and sometimes a mosquito. Fecundity means that the cat genome leads to a rate of reproduction that produces enough offspring to continue the cat life form. Longevity means that cats live long enough, on average, to actually exercise their ability to reproduce. Among the cat population, any improvement in any of these factors means that the cats genomes who experience these improvements will be at an advantage in perpetuating themselves.

Memes, on the other hand, are ideas or behaviors that also have the ability to replicate themselves, to change over time and to reproduce changed forms in a kind of cultural evolution. “Memes are replicants with the three pre-requisite properties for producing an evolutionary system, replication, variance, and selection.” (McNamara, 2011) The successful meme, like the successful gene, is the one that has characteristics (fidelity, fecundity and longevity) that make it successful in the competition to replicate. Memetic theorists base the operation of memes on the observation that human beings, of all species, exhibit the most pronounced propensity for imitation. (Blackmore, 1999).

The basis of this memetic viewpoint is actually not as new as it might seem from the work referenced above. To some extent, it seems that the memetic thinkers have reinvented or rediscovered the unique propensity of we humans to mimic each other and the world around us. An earlier term for this ability to mimic was “mimesis”. Mimesis refers to the ability unique to humans, to take on multiple personas, literally investing themselves in multiple roles. Plato, for instance, distinguishes between narration or report (diegesis) and imitation or representation (mimesis). Tragedy and comedy, he goes on to explain, are wholly imitative types (Wikipedia, 2014) Actors, of course, are people who focus on this talent, and thus we have performances in roles as the basis for the entertainment industry. This natural human ability also seems to be the very basis of the functioning of human organizations. When a government needs armies, it creates soldiers out of “raw recruits.” When a society needs firemen or doctors or surveyors, it provides the incentive and the conditioning, and takes the relatively undifferentiated candidates and literally invests them into the roles--the componentry it needs for the challenge at hand.

The mechanism at the individual cognitive level may arise from so-called mirror neurons. “In the field of cognitive neuroscience imitation is recognized as a fundamental human skill. Neurons have been identified which match action perception with action execution. … The mirror neuron system (MNS) appears to be the biological motor component permitting … ‘mimetic skill’ required for the evolution of culture and cognition.” (McNamara, 2011). This provides a bit of a pointer to an even deeper discussion of cognition, upon which the micro-architecture of organization seems to be based. For purposes of this book, that deeper discussion will be left as an item on a future agenda!

This abbreviated discussion leads to the idea that our observation and experience with ongoing patterns of behavior within organizations can be explained with the help of a particular type of meme, which we might want to call the “commitment meme”. This particular mechanism draws strongly on the natural tendency for people to mirror each other’s behavior. As they participate in organizations they have an opportunity to observe and mimic behaviors that exemplify and support those organizations. Like all memes, the commitment meme stimulates imitation of behaviors. In this case the behaviors are associated with commitment.

Once a commitment meme has become incorporated into a person’s thoughts and behaviors, it increases its survival potential if it does two things: 1. It brings additional parties into similar commitments, and 2. It expands the set of related commitments so as to dominate more of the attention of all hosting individuals.

The replicating power of a commitment meme increases as it externalizes in the form of verbal or recorded agreements. An example of an agreement might be a person asking a stranger for a favor. Another example is the eye contact and subtle movement of head or hand that lets another motorist merge in traffic. Other examples include terms and conditions of business contracts and clauses in laws and regulations. There are special kinds of formative agreements, such as charters, constitutions, by-laws, which declare the very existence and initial aspects of the organization. Textual and electronic representations of commitment memes provide both fidelity and longevity – key characteristics of successful replicators. Notice that in all cases, the commitments involve some services, performed or received via the commitment relationships.

Fedepoiesis

As we have seen some systems are grown, and some systems are designed. Some live, and others do not. Living systems include cells, organs, and organisms. Designed systems include machines, buildings, and software.

We have also seen that human beings have a special ability to learn from each other, in a form of mimicry that variously goes by the terms memesis and mimesis, and may be hard-wired in the form of mirror neurons, but also formalized into contractual agreements. Human organizations (unlike bee hives, ant colonies, wolf packs, whale pods and slime molds) are both living and designed. However, the design of human organizations is a matter of degree and is often elusive. Participants in human organizations have a high degree of autonomy, and it’s not possible to focus their full and undivided attention on a single group to the exclusion of all others.

As a final technical point, then, let’s introduce our own term “fedepoiesis” to represent this hybrid of designed systems that exhibit unmistakable features of life. This term follows on the terms autopoiesis and allopoiesis, which indicate the form of creation and sustainment of a system in question. Fedepoiesis combines “poiesis” (making) with the Latin “foedus” (covenant, league, or ally). In this way the term denotes the creation of a system that achieves autonomy through the merger of entities that retain much of their own autonomy, even though joined together. This is the classic meaning of federation, as used in the Federal system of the U.S. government.

Successful and enduring organizations do not simply happen. The founder(s) and leaders of organizations design and redesign them for definite purposes. Such purposes give rise to structuring of assets and actors into an entities that start to function, and then continue to function over time. Any observer of the development of any human organization witnesses this federation, or merger, of autonomous entities. The structure of an organization brings together the participation of human beings, who are clearly autonomous systems in their own right. The entrepreneur who starts an enterprise for a specific purpose commonly discovers at a certain point the company has taken on a “life of its own” and has escaped the direct control of the founder.

This concept of fedepoiesis, the making of a federation, provides the mechanism for creation of human organizations. Through the powerful attracting and replicating mechanism of the commitment-fostering memes, humans, as autonomous beings, federate themselves into supra-human organizations. These organizations themselves become autonomous beings, with lives of their own, that have the ability to continue beyond the participation of their founders, and indeed, any of their human participants. Through the replicating power of the meme, human organizations create their components. The components of organizations proliferate to arbitrary levels of complexity, as networks of role-players become integrated with other role-player networks. In other words, a role-net is the federation of related commitments that seeks to replicate and expand itself, in cooperation with or competition against other such structures.

[1] 'The production of constitutive relations through the production of the components that hold these relations is one of the defining dimensions of an autopoietic system. In the cell such constitutive relations are established through the production of molecules (proteins, lipids, carbohydrates and nucleic acids) which determine the topology of the relations of production in general.' Maturana and Varela, 1980, p. 91

Janet McIntyre-Mills McIntyre Janet McIntyre-Mills McIntyre 2nd Honorary Professor at UNISA happy birthday , may 2015 be an excellent year LikeReply6 months ago

Doug McDavid Doug McDavid AUTHOR 1st Senior Consultant at Cutter Consortium Jack Ring asked me to post this comment, when the big blue button failed to work for him: 'Excellent articulation of excellent ideas. TKU. Perhaps machines, buildings, and software are not systems but simply configurations, the distinction being that a system does something. (the exception being that some current nanomachines can generate new nano machines if given a sufficient pattern (set and sequence of rules)). Perhaps the key unit is not person but persona, a variety of which any one person can exhibit or 'be' particularly in response to or in tension with another persona. So is it mimicry or resonance? Jazz musicians do not mimic one another nor even a riff laid down by one. They adjust the gradients on their relationships, adapt to new relationships and adopt new persona as their reward structure urges. Please say more about Prof. Bruce Lipton's claim (Biology of Belief) that our genes are morphed by our thoughts --- we each continually replace (with some degree of error) our physical being but also our persona. Encore!' Like(1)Reply(1)6 months ago

Doug McDavid Doug McDavid Doug McDavid AUTHOR 1st Senior Consultant at Cutter Consortium Thanks Jack. I will definitely give some thought to the idea of 'persona', and I'm right in the middle of working on a long piece that follows up on this one with a focus on role structures that I am seeing as the micro-architecture of organizations. As you say, jazz is not all mimicry, but actually can form the starting point for new memes. The coolness factor help determine which ones spread, and the instigator of viral memes is the new top dog in the global culture we're participating in. Will also check Prof. Lipton. Like6 months ago

Roy Roskilly Roy Roskilly 2nd Retired I only read a short part of this from the beginning (I gotta to bed!), but it reminded me that in my observation over the decades that a basketball team (a type of organization), such as in the NBA, takes on it's own personality that is independent of that of the players. Who knows how this happens or how the players are melded together to create it? I think some coaches may be on to it, at least in some degree. Like(1)Reply(2)6 months ago

Doug McDavid Doug McDavid Doug McDavid AUTHOR 1st Senior Consultant at Cutter Consortium Roy, I thought I would add that the work we did for Tymnet, back in the day, all contributed to the ideas that I've been posting here (which also should appear, in one form or another, as part of the book I'm under contract to write). You were the most responsive developer I ever met, acting as a true partner with people and teams in the business. I actually took your behavior as a role-model for how IT support for the business could be a highly interactive and integrated part of the business. It was only after I got pulled away from the joint work we did that I learned there was such a concept as 'the business/IT gap'. And since I had already been following an intuition that organizations are a special kind of living system, this gap that was actually expected already everywhere I got involved, seemed to be a cruel and painful torture of those living organizations. After working with you on systems where we would change and release changes on a daily basis, if needed, it was actually quite astonishing to live in the Bellcore/Pacific Bell environment, where semi-annual releases of software were seen as a big improvement over annual releases! Like6 months ago

Doug McDavid Doug McDavid AUTHOR 1st Senior Consultant at Cutter Consortium Nice example, Roy! Like6 months ago

Tom Graves Tom Graves 2nd Principal Consultant at Tetradian Consulting Hi Doug - reading your article reminded me straight away of a tag-line from my own work, that _people_ are not assets, it's the _relationship_ with the person that is the asset. If we then take the core 'component' of an organisation not as the person, but the relationship which (for whatever appropriate time applies) binds the person to and with the organisation, then Maturana and Varela's definition of autopoiesis would fit perfectly: the organisation creates, maintains and destroys those components to maintain itself as itself. This would then also fit with your point about organisations as designed-entities, because the element which brings people into relationship with the organisation is that overall self-purpose of the organisation ('vision', purpose, 'promise', or whatever - often typified by the intent and personae of the organisation's founders). The decay of that promise into Stafford Beer's POSIWID ('the purpose of the system is what it does') is one element that can cause fragmentation and dissolution of the relationships that hold the organisation together; and likewise Shirky's(?) dictum that 'an organisation attempts to maintain the problem to which it purports to be the solution'. Just some insights that came up for me as I read the piece, anyway - hope it's useful? Like(1)Reply(1)6 months ago

Doug McDavid Doug McDavid Doug McDavid AUTHOR 1st Senior Consultant at Cutter Consortium Hi Tom -- Very helpful points. The decay into POSIWID is a great description of a lot of the pathologies of organizations. This is clearly a kind of descent into social entropy. I am so glad you mentioned the Clay Shirky quote. So much so that I want to capture a reference herehanks: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” as quoted by Kevin Kelley here: http://kk.org/thetechnium/2010/04/the-shirky-prin/ Thanks! Like6 months ago

Ben Gray Ben Gray 2nd Consulting Business Architect, Designer & Builder Another fascinating post, Doug. But I'm afraid you lost me at: '... a complete individual human being should not be regarded as a component of a human organization.'. Are you saying that a 'human organisation' is an organisation that (a) is created by humans; or (b) comprises humans; or is something else? And is a 'bee organisation' an invalid construct? [note: individual bees play a number of roles within a hive depending on environmental conditions.] One might then ask whether an organisation is, of itself, an entity or concept? For me, whether comprising humans or bees, I would say that the defining aspect of organisation is the nature of the relationships between concepts and entities. Where these relationships are specific and purposeful, then you have an organisation. Like(1)Reply(1)6 months ago

Doug McDavid Doug McDavid Doug McDavid AUTHOR 1st Senior Consultant at Cutter Consortium Hi Ben, thanks for the feedback. Maybe this is a clarification to say that a human is not the component, or element of an organization, but rather the participation of the person is the element. It's not the number of roles played, but the fact that the person is a role-player at all that determines the participation, and of course a person usually participates in many organization (whereas a bee doesn't participate in many hives). And I agree when you say, 'Where these relationships are specific and purposeful, then you have an organisation.' Like(1)6 months ago Ben Gray