As much as I enjoyed listening to Margaret Wheatley's rant of how everything is meant to be; even the biggest upsets, I couldn't help but think that this woman is just a little too optimistic for my liking. And that's saying a lot, because I am not the kind of girl who sees the glass half-empty. Ever.
But that's not to say that I do not identify with some of her assertions within her scientific rhetorical essay, "The Unplanned Organization." She asserts that, "In the world of self-organizing, we see change as power, a presence, a capacity that is available." I am continuing to learn to identify this in my personal changes and transitions.
Her third tenet of "Unplanned Organization,"was easy enough to identify with. Wheatley says, "We live in a universe that is alive, creative, and experimenting all the time to discover what's possible." I can agree with this particular assertion. For as long as we can remember, human kind have been constantly exploring what is possible within the world, from searching to the smallest microbes to the farthest away galaxies. In her opinion, Wheatley says, "The reason life seeks to organize is so it can explore its diversity, so that it can explore its creative potential." This declaration makes sense, and in my opinion, is not overly confident in our society. Life is indeed self-organizing and we do constantly seek to create patterns, structures, organizations, occasionally without any pre-planned directive. However, when she states that all messes and mistakes are us just experimenting and simply discovering what is possible...well I think she may be getting a tad bit overzealous. Yes, we do learn from our mistakes but does that give us permission to not try our damndest to get it right the first time? By her fifth tenet I began to think she existed in some ethereal land where everything is pretty and pink and we get to play all the time. I may be being too hard on Margaret. There were a few things within her essay that I really appreciated. For example, her appreciation of identity and the way in which life organizes around what is meaningful to us in one way or another. And her hint at community. She states that we cannot exist in isolation, we exist within a co-creative world. This all is inspiring, yet i'm still slightly skeptical.
In his book, "The Fifth Discipline," Peter Senge also speaks of societies mistakes and problems. But these problems arose from a once thought solution.
Within chapter four Senge gave many examples of the way today's problems come from yesterday's "solutions." One example he gave was the horse Boxer from Animal Farm. The idea of compensating feedback came into play. The harder Boxer worked, the more work he had. Not only do we see this in old texts but in the present as well. For example, our efforts to help developing countries prosper. As these countries gained agricultural support and food, death rates began to drop due to malnutrition; however, as the higher net population began to grow, so did the numbers of malnutrition. Therefore, no solution and progress was actually made.
What we forget sometimes is that cause and effect may not always be closely related in time and space. When we brainstorm a seemingly flawless solution to a problem we may not foresee any re-occuring effect from this "solution."
How can we anticipate such an event from happening? And how can we begin to cease the perpetual cycle of aggression our American society has become engrossed in?
Why are we at a stand still?
Answer: because "conventional forecasting, planning, and analysis methods are not equipped to deal with such dynamic complexity," says Senge in his chapter "A shift of Mind."
After all, the War on Terrorism is, most fundamentally, a problem of dynamic complexity. The type of insight required to look deeply into all underlying causes and all possible cures requires a perspective of interrelationships. And the US does not view interrelationships as a positive, rather, a threat. It requires seeing patterns of change, not just snapshots. In chapter four he spoke of how you "can have the cake and eat it too...but not at once." To translate, he is saying that sometimes our perceived dilemmas are not dilemmas at all. It's just a snapshot of a problem. The true dilemma needs a wide angle lens to view the issue as a whole.
So maybe that's what we need to do. Instead of honing in on the problem and trying to jump to the solution, we may just need to step back and do a primary assessment then see where we need to go from there.
In my medical training this was the first thing we learned when arriving onto a scene. We had it engraved in our brains, no matter how bloody or gorey the scene may be we need it just as a self preservation technique. When stepping back and looking at the big picture it gives us time to settle our hear rate down, get calm, and take a big breath before diving into the huge task at hand.
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