A classic example given is one where a series of children all had liver conditions. All would have been prescribed the same medication, but in Eastern medicine each would have been given a different treatment because the conditions were different.

Western medicine lacks the context necessary for relevant diagnosis and treatment — again, except in the case of abject failure that can be ‘measured’ or ‘seen’. This accounts for about 5% of all medical care needed.

I’d be willing to jump to an analogy to business here and apply the same.

I posted excerpts of this in my last comment, but forgot to include the link
http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/2006/10/a_return_to_manege_rather_than.php

Simply saying ‘organization’ gets us in trouble because it can bring to mind a static ‘organization chart’ which is clearly hierarchical, somewhat fixed (not adaptive) and less of a system than it is an abstraction of relationships. I even made reference to organization charts and hierarchies, which reinforced that view. I shouldn’t have gone there.

More typically, and certainly relative to CAS, when I say ‘organization’ I mean it as ‘a team of people working together to solve a problem’ which is probably better described as a ‘work group’. In this light, the CAS aspects become more clear. (C)omplexity exists in the emergent value that may be produced, the parts can self organize, and for practical purposes, the actors/agents can’t see the macro effect of what they’re doing. Any assembly of humans that interact can produce (A)daptation (aka learning) which I believe is what produces the emergence, and the flow of inputs, addition of value (useful work) and outputs qualifies it as a (S)ystem. So I think where Snowden and Senge are wanting to take us is in the direction of CAS as a functioning ‘Learning Organization” comprised of work groups .. not a static hierarchical abstraction.

My interest in making the CAS linkage to Learning Organizations is that Scott Page (U.Mich) outlines 4 control variables that create conditions for emergence to occur, as I outlined above. These are diversification, connection, interdependence, and adaptability. If work groups as Learning Organizations can be tuned to produce what he describes as a “sweet spot” or “interesting in between” (not too much of the 4 variables, and not too little) then we might gain important insight on how to optimize such work groups to maximize innovation.

If there are issues with these conclusions, let’s revisit definitions first, to make sure we’re talking about the same thing.

If you know of authoritative sources on CAS, please share them.

I’m no expert on CAS .. I’m a student of it .. but I truly want to drive a fuller understanding, so that work in collaborative innovation can be both informed and optimized. I’ve been fighting silo-thinking and dysfunctional work groups for a very long time. CAS (in context of ‘systems thinking’) as a way to optimize work groups truly resonates with me .. I think there’s something here ..

Thanks again, Bas, for teeing this up ..

“Common perceptions of the work world as machine-like and ordered, and thus subject to the rules of order, are cultural legacies of the industrial revolution that still blind us to the fact that organisations are in fact complex adaptive systems.”

…whereas the comments in this blog post would say that orgs are complex, people having conversations (interactions) are self-organising, good or bad emergence occurs, but given all this an org is not a system, let alone adaptive.

I understand this, but what do you call it when you take an approach as Snowden does to create conditions for an org to become more adaptive.

Here’s a great excerpt from the same post:

“In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present, and seek to close it. This is common not only to process-based theory but also to practice that follows the general heading of the “learning organization”. Naturalistic approaches, by contrast, seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted. The organization thus evolves to a future that was unknowable in advance, but is more contextually appropriate when discovered.”

So what are the defining characteristics that don’t make an org a system?

Stephen can you elaborate on this post http://www.changingorganisations.com/2009/07/systems-thinking-about-change/#more-1894
When you say a change in the macro causes changes in the parts of the system is not true in an org, as there are people involved…we are not just robots. Management wonder why changes don’t filter down or take effect, as they are not taking into account the people. As mentioned before Snowden says this ideal future state approach is idealistic, or not realistic anyway.

Can you give an example of a system compared to an org, where a change in one part will not be resisted by another part?

The systems thinking page on wikipedia says:

“component parts of a system can best be understood in the context of relationships with each other and with other systems, rather than in isolation.The only way to fully understand why a problem or element occurs and persists is to understand the part in relation to the whole”

To me this describes organisations (even though it is said here they are not systems), as what one department does may affect another department. So to understand what’s happening in one department and why it’s happening, it’s good to look at other departments as what they are doing is having impact on the department in question.

And this comes back to silos in orgs and lack of awareness, therefore not as agile.

I think social computing tools like networks, microblogs, blogs, forums, wikis are enabling more silo busting, transparency, communication…so we can be more aware and therefore adaptive.

Stephen Billing always says that the key is conversation, closing that gap between management and workers, and I think these social tools amplify this idea.

Gordon, I’m still thinking about your reply, and totally agree that aggregated solutions to the parts will not solve system problems.

I guess what I was saying is that to solve a problem with a part may not be effective by just looking at the part, you have to look at it’s relationship with other parts.

I think this applies to both “complexity” and “complicated”

A car is not complex, it’s complicated…you can take it apart and put it back together, you can look at a part and fix it. But at the same time this part may break again, as you need to fix another part that is causing it to break. So things that are complicated still have relationships between the parts.
But what I read from Snowden is that what makes it “not complex” is that all the parts are known.
http://www.cognitive-edge.com/ceresources/articles/37_Intranet_as_complex_ecology_final_.pdf

Whereas a gardeners environment is more complex, she can do everything to make her garden grow effectively, but their are always unknowns like bad weather, etc

Snowden goes on to say:

“For a complex system we need to create an ecology; this is achieved by drawing boundaries between spaces to reduce uncertainties and intervening to encourage growth, such interventions are best if they take the form of simple actions that organically evolve into complex and hopefully desirable forms of behaviour.”

More http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/2009/08/chess_to_go.php

Maybe the gardener can create a permaculture environment to best cope
http://smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2009/06/natural-organization-the-rules-part-2-the-design.html

Gordon, when you mentioned aggregated parts is not the same as the whole, it reminded me of something Clay Shirky said that describes “more is different:
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/78212659/here-comes-everybody-clay-shirky-p28

“sociology is not just psychology applied to groups; individuals in group settings exhibit behaviours that no one could predict by studying single minds”

“no one has ever been bashful or extroverted while sitting alone in their room, no one can be a social climber or a man of the people without reference to society, and these characteristics exist because groups are not just simple aggregations of individuals”

As I interpret you correctly, a CAS is complex and adaptive on all levels by nature. Therefore we cannot speak of relative complexity. Probably that’s another discussion.

I’m curious what you think of ‘learning cells’ that Chris (sourcePOV) is referring to in the first comment. Can these be compared to CAS? He uses Twitter as an example.

There is a sense in which complexity increases with scale*, but this sense is not relevant for CAS, because of emergent patterns. This fits with the idea of constant intelligence across levels of organization. Management does not know/control all that is going on in the organization, but also does not need to know/control everything.

* Specifically, for an outside observer. What we are looking at here is the actor’s perspective.

That said, the systems that operate within organizations tend to be programmatic, driven by reactive as opposed to generative thinking and thus not adaptive. What Senge calls the “learning organization” essentially embraces CAS thinking at all levels. From this perspective, Stephen has it right when he calls “relative complexity” a red herring.