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THE LSE
STRATEGY & COMPLEXITY SEMINAR 17 December 1997 The Complexity
of Power Relations: Report on presentation by Dr Kim James,
Psi International London School of Economics and Political
Science,
A methodology developed by Psi International for solving human relations problems in industry has been based on three key theories which relate to complex adaptive systems: the biological autonomy of living systems (Varela 1979; Maturana and Varela 1980, 1988); dissipative structures (Prigogine and Stengers1984) and ecological psychology (Gibson 1969, 1979) The theories are internally consistent with one another, although they originated in the apparently disparate fields of biology, physics, chemistry and psychology. They have much to offer in helping to investigate systems involving complex social interactions, although their practical application to human problem solving has been difficult. This report explains how the Psi International methodology, which includes its Graphic Referencing Techniques©1995, enables managers to understand and use these theories to undertake effective organisational transformations. It explains the nature of the graphic activity involved in the methodology, discusses examples of its use in business and explores its implications for introducing new systems and methods in periods of turbulent change (see James 1997 for a more detailed discussion of these issues). The methodology was developed as part of a training course for the French National Training Institute (INFIPP) in Dijon. It has been used to assist many companies to build strategic visions, solve problems, improve performance, and sustain the capability to evolve and adapt successfully over a long period. Recent Psi International clients have included British Airways, Bull Benelux, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett Packard Research Laboratories, Northamptonshire Police, Oracle, Prudential Financial Services and 3Com Europe (Psi International 1997). Dr Kim James is a senior partner at Psi International, where he has helped to develop and apply the Graphic Referencing Techniques since the late 1980s. From 1976 to 1987, he specialised in the application of art in the treatment of mental illness when he was head of Post Graduate Studies at the Hertfordshire College of Art and Design, which later became part of the University of Hertfordshire. Before that, he gained a Doctorate in Cybernetics and M.Sc. in Brain Sciences at Brunel University, as well as an M.A. in the Psychology of Art at the Royal College of Art. He also worked for twenty years as a sculptor. This report was edited by
London-based Editorial Consultant Malcolm Peltu. Copyright Warning The methodology and techniques
discussed in this report are copyrighted by Psi International Ltd, who reserves the right
to vigorously pursue legal proceedings against any breach of this copyright. The need for a new paradigm to solve complex problems The world is in desperate need of a new paradigm to solve an increasing range of problems, so complex that they cannot be solved by fact-analysis and reference to past ways of doing things. This will be achieved only through the wide diffusion of knowledge and understanding of complex systems which enable difficult problems to be adequately formulated and solved, for example in terms of the way slow fluctuations suddenly produce a startling change (Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Nicolis and Prigogine 1989). A situation must be established where most people are able to think in complexity terms, in the same way that the idea of 'relativity' is now commonly accepted, whereas before the 20th Century a notion like 'everything is relative' would have been incomprehensible. One of the major difficulties with
developing avenues of thinking that break from previous paradigms is the manner in which
people often resist new ideas. William Trotter explained this phenomenon vividly in a
paper on 'Scientific Imagination': The need to understand a host of new
concepts, many of which seem strange and difficult to confront, is essential if serious
consideration is to be given to the interlinked notions of complexity and learning. Yet
there is usually great difficulty in understanding even the basic issue of what actually
constitutes a systems, as the artist Paul Klee (1924) explained: Gibson (1979) describes this in terms of systems being nested, rather than laid out in a straight line. Systems are also intermeshed, which creates a great deal of ambiguity within complex systems. Cognition and perception must also, therefore, be tackled on the basis of human systems being nested and intermeshed. Key characteristics of organisational systems Maturana and Varela (1980) have offered
important insights into complex systems using analyses of biological systems. Varela
(1979) also defined the constituents of a system in terms which avoid what he sees as an
anthropomorphic trap for any investigator of complex organisations of humans. He places a
proper emphasis on relations in a system, rather than the nuts and bolts used within it,
as indicted by the following summary of his main definitions: This perspective highlights the value of viewing a system as a collection of elements, such as people, with a set of 'qualities' or 'attributes'. These attributes are related in ways that mean any perturbation affecting one element will cause feedback among other elements, until the system readjusts itself. The relations within the system are adjusted, not the individual bells and whistles, nuts and bolts making up the system. The difficulties people often have in understanding complexity are rooted in a failure to grasp this novel underlying concept of a system being essentially a set of relations. However, Varela warns that theories constructed in biology cannot be transported wholesale into other domains, such as the behaviour of organisational systems involving human interaction For example, the self-constructing processes of autopoïetic systems derived from studying closed biological systems have been seen by some (such as Beer 1985) as being applicable to more open organisational systems involving congregates of people. Varela regards this view as a category mistake, which confuses autopoïesis with autonomy. Nevertheless, the biologically-inspired descriptions of systems provided by Varela and Maturana describe a model which is so beautiful and consistent as a metaphor that it makes sense to use its concepts as a basis for practical actions in social organisations. Varela (1979) also pointed out that lessons offered by the autonomy of living systems can be converted into operational characterisations of autonomy in general, provided great care is taken when attempting to translate understandings from the behaviour of living systems into terms that are meaningful to the behaviour of human organisations. Power relations in complex systems Notions of power are important to complex systems because power is the basis of all relations. A valuable insight into the nature of power relations was provided by a Professor of Neurosurgery at Manchester University in the 1930s, K. W. Monsarrat (1937). He should be high in the pantheon of British cybernetics pioneers, although he often writes in an arcane nineteenth century style. Monsarrat argued that the 'power-to-do' is the basis of what a person is and that an individual's investigations are all involved in descriptions of the activity of expanding one's power-to-do. He said that power starts with the conjunction of constrained power-to-do forces, which come together to form the sub-atomic particles constituting an entity. All entities can, therefore, be considered as bounded power relationships, whether it is at the level of an atom, a virus, a human being or an organisation. These relationships are defined into existence by other powers-to-do for a limited period of time and within a bounded space. Monsarrat also pointed out that power manifests itself within the constraints of mutual interaction either positively or negatively. This explains how power can come from being bland and negative, as well as being forceful and positive. For example, a person in a group who rarely says anything, but who stubbornly refuses to move away from past attitudes, can be very powerful as a negative block on change. The idea that 'all is power-to-do' is a fundamental concept, indicating that power relationships are behind everything, and that everything is an effect of power on something else. We are constrained to exist in our atomic structure by the inter-relationships of power at the atomic level, with the power-to-do and the power-to-be the only things which follow through at each level of our being above the atomic. Such inter-relationships are also a vital systemic link between the work of Maturana, Varela and Gibson. However, 'power' is often misunderstood as being an autocratic force which comes down from the top. The importance of Monsarrat's insight is that it supports the view that everyone has power because each element in a system, such as a person, is power. This also recognises that the interaction of the power system within ourselves constitutes the power we have to operate. Learning to learn through the Psi International methodology Monsarrat's concept of power relations is one of the complexity ideas underpinning the Psi International methodology, which aims to facilitate human and organisational change and enable the better functioning of people in organisations. The methodology considers organisations and the people within them as autonomous machine systems, using Varela's definition of a complex system, as summarised earlier. It also builds on Monsarrat's acknowledgement that no single 'magic bullet' can make everyone happy and completely fulfilled, but that life inevitably has clashes when people interact with each other's power systems. The methodology, therefore, ensures these interactions create overall system operations which are satisfactory to all those involved, with everyone seeking to compromise upwards, not down, in their contributions to the system. This requires an ability to knit together knowledge from the wide range of activities that intermesh when people operate in social groups, such as the dynamics of interactions and transformations which constitute the organisation of an autonomous system. Psi International's methodology creates a self-organising capacity among the participants in a workshop, primarily through inter-relationships based on the drawing activity. The roots of this approach lie in my enduring interest for over thirty years in trying try to teach people to draw without a 'master' or teacher pre-determining which outcomes will be deemed 'good' or 'bad'. The alternative I have sought is to allow students to discover the joy of allowing the emergence of something that is derived solely from their own creativity. My personal involvement in a variety of other areas also contributed to the development of the methodology. A personal journey towards the Psi International methodology Chance has played a major role in my career. I became a sculptor shortly after the Second World War, when I wasn't sure what else I could do. About twenty years later, as I began to wonder what being a sculptor was all about, I happened to meet Robert Groves a Canadian psychologist who was doing his doctorate at the Institute of Psychiatry. We agreed I would teach him about drawing and he would give me lessons in psychology. That encouraged me to explore more deeply my interest in creativity and how the human mind works. In the late 1960s, I was lucky enough to read a copy of a classified and unpublished paper by Maturana. I found it tremendously exciting. Around the same time, I was also introduced to the work of James J Gibson (1969;1979), Professor of Applied Psychology at Cornell University. His ecological psychology treats the senses as perceptual systems and ranks alongside the complementary approaches of Maturana and Varela as pillars on which the new paradigm of complexity thinking should be founded. With the encouragement of friends, I
decided to formalise my knowledge at the Royal College of Art. But, eventually, I realised
I needed to gain a firmer foundation of biological knowledge before I could follow my
interest in art and psychology into more challenging territory. Chains of chance then led
me to successful studies in the Biology and Cybernetics departments at Brunel University
and to becoming the head of post-graduate studies at Hertfordshire College of Art and
Design, where I specialised in Art Psychotherapy. Over time, my interest in the
closely-linked studies of complex systems, learning, and art came into focus around the
cybernetic activity of the drawing process. As the American educationalist Frank Beitel
(1970) has explained, drawing is a first class example of a cybernetic activity: In the late 1969, together with Carole McKenzie and Bob Groves, we conducted a series of experiments to see whether we could construct a form of activity where students teach themselves to draw to a standard which the world outside would appreciate. This self-teaching process would use only feedback from their own work, without any teacher intervention. We discovered that this was possible and have been developing these ideas ever since, through the French National Training Institute and Psi International. We use the term 'graphic referencing', instead of the more common 'drawing' or 'painting', to highlight our interest in drawing as a cybernetic system, rather than primarily as a means of producing a work of 'art'. Graphic referencing focuses on all the issues at the heart of complexity theory, such as: structure, organisation, change, chance, relations, self-organisation, and entity/environment coupling in systems. It is, therefore, concerned mainly with helping individuals as participants in organisational change to understand how complex organisational inter-relations affect their own personal role in the change process. Creating teams through self-learning and self-organisation A key objective of the Graphic Referencing Technique is to generate a capacity which enables the participants to build a team through the self-organisation that emerges from self-learning by individuals within the group. The transformations which take place through this process enable the people involved to continue to use their knowledge about self-learning, even after the original team breaks up. This is achieved by employing a practical model that changes workshop participants from a typical initial state of ignorance, or disbelief, to an understanding of complexity through their own drawing-based activities. Our workshops are not concerned with team building through the development of leadership skills. Team building is a shibboleth, as teams inevitably disband at some point. That's why we believe it is more important to help people acquire the individual power-to-do which enables them to re-create similarly cohesive group relations, for instance when the members of the original group change or when they move somewhere else to work with an entirely new set of people. In a sense, we are creating a 'virtual team' through a process that makes each virtual team member aware of what it takes to build a team anywhere, with anyone. Graphic referencing also helps participants to become comfortable with ambiguity, which is intrinsic to the understanding of complex systems as a lived experience. A key part of this, based on insights gained from psychotherapy, is to increase the solidity of a person's identity. That identity can then remain intact during periods of turbulence and change, when ambiguity increases. The strength of an any element in a system is also increased by enhancing its set of attributes and its range of relations with other elements. Our workshops, therefore, seek to enrich the attributes of all participants through the process of building a systemic group. This is essential to the creation of thriving and sustained team work, in contrast to the dampening down which often occurs in organisations. Sometimes, this outcome is achieved only after working through difficult and emotionally-charged tensions in the personal dynamics of the group. In one instance, a person revealed he had antagonisms towards the managing director of the company, who was also in the group. These feelings dated back to a period many years before, when they had worked together on an equal footing. In other cases, initial antagonisms have taken the form of resistance by some participants to the very notion of being at the workshop, which means they started out not being ready to learn. Once these kinds of antagonisms are released and the positive experience of the workshop lived through, the participants lose their negative feelings by building a much more secure sense of identity. This allows a tightly-knit group to emerge. Releasing full human potential From our earliest experiments, we have found that the creation of an appropriate workshop environment allows people from all walks of life to become highly motivated to learn from their own activity and interactions within the group. This environment must enable participants to inter-relate in ways that make them consciously aware of themselves as autonomous entities capable of working together as a group to achieve something, without interference from a tutor. Phenomenal change can then occur in individuals, and in their relationships within the group, through processes that create both autonomous group behaviours and release a great deal of previously hidden potential in the individuals. 'I wish I had known about this a long time ago!' is a frequent response to one of our workshops. The most remarkable results come from the way the process motivates participants towards a whole range of new life opportunities. For example, a participant in our original experiments in the self-teaching of drawing was a bar tender when he became involved in our research. The fresh motivation he gained from the methods we used started him off in totally new directions. He eventually became a leading lepidopterist. Many enterprises have failed to appreciate the value to the organisation of helping people to learn about themselves in this kind of way, so as to achieve their full potential. Most people have a much richer range of attributes than those they are allowed to present within the modified and limited range of social interactions deemed to be acceptable in a particular organisational context. Everyone has multiple abilities and richly-faceted personalities. Yet, organisations generally allow people within them to operate at much less than a fifth of their full potential. Individuals at work are generally constrained to present only the facets of themselves which get them by, such as the ability to 'deliver bottom-line results'. This leaves little room for other qualities, like a person's imagination, warmth and generosity. This dilemma was vividly encapsulated by a senior manager who participated in one of our workshops: 'Why do I have to take off my creative coat and put on my company coat when I step into the office?' Bringing out the full richness of a person's qualities should be a core goal of all Human Relations (HR) departments. It is an important way of providing information as behaviour and of changing behaviour to make organisations, and the individuals within them, more flexible. In practice, however, the role of HR is frequently downgraded and tolerated only as a means of dealing with functions like union negotiations and staff recruitment. Instead, HR departments should be regarded as the nervous system of an organisation and given due priority. Achieving balance and harmony in organisations Creativity can be assessed and measured only using judgements based on the kind of aesthetic which the French chemist, biologist and philosopher Henri Laborit (1968) defined as 'the science of the search for new structures of relationships'. This is made manifest in the sense of fit achieved through the lived experience of a Graphic Referencing Technique session, which enables individuals to produce painting that become increasingly beautiful as they feel strong enough to reveal the more creative and exciting facets of their personality. They create this in the process of achieving a more rounded aesthetic through their relationships with each other. People with a more highly developed sense of this aesthetic are likely to make more accurate assessments of complex situations and problems. The essence of Laborit's aesthetic concerns the way one lives in balance and harmony, which is very different from the aesthetic used to judge a work of art. For most companies that have been successful over a long period, this balance has been achieved through the process by which organisations have evolved forms of interactions that enable people in the company to survive in their own lives. The prime reason why companies come into being and thrive is this need to sustain the life of the people who work for it, rather than just the goal of making money. Of course, companies also exist in wider social contexts, where other aesthetic values may dominate. Laborit's view of aesthetic judgements has also formed the basis of some of the world's most important scientific achievements. For example, Einstein said any solution other than e=mc2 would have been 'ugly'. One of today's leading mathematicians, Roger Penrose, talks of solutions which are 'beautiful' and 'elegant'. The mathematician Dirac has suggested that the main criterion for pursuing a scientific investigation should be to ask whether the topic being studied is 'beautiful'. Marcel Dassault, the best designer of fighter planes, would scrub any design he regarded as ugly because he wouldn't allow something that wasn't beautiful to be produced by his factories. How a 'self-learning through drawing' workshop operates A Psi International workshop typically lasts about two and a half days. Highly-skilled facilitators set the framework and provide some prompts, but never directly intervene in the evolving group interactions. One of the most fruitful exercises starts with a blank sheet of paper on the wall, with each participant being given a piece of charcoal and an eraser. The facilitator starts the session by stating the basic rules to be followed, without explaining why this particular set of rules is being imposed. Nobody is allowed to speak. All communication takes place only through the making of charcoal marks on the paper. Participants make marks on the paper in turn. No time limit is set. The activity is deemed closed when everybody decides to forego their turn. Drawing is the only form of communications permitted because words can trap us by becoming a mould into which we continuously pour ourselves. No individual achieves meaning on their own, as the next person could turn the paper around or rub out something which seemed essential to a particular reading of the emergent meaning. The series of fluctuations involved in this process usually generates its own a rhythm. After much initial activity, gradually more and more people may pass. Then someone who hasn't made a mark for ages suddenly gets up and does something that re-starts the flow. At some point there may be a flurry of activity. Then it might suddenly stop, ending the session. This generally occurs after about an hour or hour-and-a-half, although it can go on much longer. One group was upset to be told to end after six-hours. The value of a graphic trace The physical act of making a charcoal trace on paper is used in a workshop to strengthen the relationships that are essential to the learning-to-learn process. The charcoal mark is a signifier of the event which caused it, in the same way that a graphic trace is left by a wind-blown tree branch rubbing on a wall, or a footprint is left in the sand. Traces refer to the act that brought them about, including informational value about the state of the maker of the trace. This information can be 'read'. For example, an experienced horse tracker can tell a great deal from a set of hoofprint, such as the horse's activities and physical condition when it left them. Gibson (1979) points out that the instruments used by a person to make a trace becomes a prolongation of that person. When a blind man taps on the floor with his white stick, he feels the surface beneath him. When I tap a desk with a pen, I feel the table through the pen. The trace I leave on a piece of paper when I draw a line with charcoal is a signifier of an action made by a conscious human being and takes the value of the action directly. A mark not only signifies my state at the moment I made it, but it stays as a record of that state. It is impossible to make a trace which is a value lie. The graphic referencing process is driven by an acquisition of surplus value as the marks move towards a new structure of relationship, independent of the aspiration of any individual in the group. To paraphrase Spencer Brown (1979), this comes about because 'the value of the trace is the trace made again'. Faced with a blank sheet of paper, there is no constraint on the kind of trace made by the first mark maker. Once a second mark is made, a value relationship proper to that surface is created between the two marks. This relationship constrains, to some extent, the positioning and nature of the next mark. How graphic referencing illuminates complexity ideas The group drawing process involved in a graphic referencing session exemplifies the way a system with an autonomous, self-generating structure can come into operation through evolution. Such a structure has two key attributes, as defined by Prigogine (1984): distinction (being able to distinguish the structure from what it is not) and dynamics (which result in organisational closure). At the start of the workshop, the group has no closure or dynamic organisation. These are generated entirely by the group's own interactions through their graphic mark-making activities. As this process continues, what we call a drawing eventually evolves. After a while, this moves towards closure as the value relationships built up between many marks determine the emergence of an entity so constrained that it is closed to further new relationships. Using Prigogine's terminology, this is the point where the next perturbation you make indicates you can't do any more to the drawing. The closure of a drawing is often explained by participants in terms like: 'The drawing didn't let us do anymore, although we wanted to go on.' When the group starts to behave as an autonomous, self-generating, self-closed entity, it has become a team. Such 'teamness' can be achieved only by having a common activity which enables individuals to change themselves in the process of forging the team, but not through instruction from someone outside the team. That is essential because it conforms to the autonomy of a living organism, which is an open system moving towards increasing flexibility in response to its environment. The methodology has proved to be a wonderful way of helping to achieve a deep understanding of many basic complexity concepts, like closure and perturbations. This comes from the way the complex system operating between a participant and the group's drawing allows individuals to change their value relationships with an external environment, which those individuals are themselves changing. The environment, in turn, modifies the individual's possibilities for reaction, until closure is reached. Meaning in complex systems At the end of a session of group 'taking-in-turn' mark making, we ask participants to name the final drawing. It is very interesting to see how individual responses generally tend to be grouped around a domain of closely-related possibilities, such as 'Thunderstorm'; 'Wild Party'; and 'Destruction'. Both an individual and group meaning is achieved. This illustrates Varela's contention that a whole system can work as a unified process, although individual elements within it are pursuing their own purposes. It also illustrates the view of Gibson (1979) that meaning is perceived, rather than being 'made in our heads' out of disparate stimuli as is claimed by classical psychologists. The classical model can never be more than an analogy. It may work in developing machines to simulate perceptions and recognise objects by performing various data processing tasks on what is assumed to be meaningless input data. But computer vision systems cannot 'see' in the way a human or animal does because their perception works in very different ways to the computerised model. Trying to find answers to questions of human perception and learning by studying computer vision is as unrealistic as suggesting that vets should be trained on motor bikes because these machines are analogous to a horse. Gibson's approach to perception argues that it is very difficult to get a new idea just by thinking about it. It is more usual for an idea to come to someone, who then has to work out what it means. For example, Albert Einstein (in a letter to Hadamard quoted in Koestler 1964) has noted that when a new idea first came to him, he experienced an uncomfortable body feeling, like a hunch. Then he began to get images in his thoughts. He let those images play in his mind for a while, before he would start to put symbols on the images that come again. Eventually, he would realise he had written down something which he can set about proving. If he got too excited about the image and tried to associate symbols with it too soon, it disappeared. Systems operate in a similar way. Creativity is killed if closure comes too soon. In our workshops, you know from the amount of meaningfulness reported from the graphic referencing process how much of a group the participants have actually become. Jorge Wagensberg (1997) explained this by pointing out that the quantity of information in a source depends on the potential diversity of its behaviour. That potential depends on the complexity of the system. A rock, for example, has access to fewer diverse states than a tree, which has less than an earthworm, which has less than a monkey, and so on. Gibson (1979) agrees on the same definition of information. If the final drawing from a workshop session has a high degree of meaning, it indicates an adequacy of interactions within the group as an organisational relation. An outcome with little or no meaning, which has never happened in one of our workshops, would indicate the group had remained a collection of disparate individuals. This helps to explain the complexity principle that systems can be understood only in relation to their environments. It also indicates why people must behave meaningfully towards themselves in order to allow each member of the group, and the group as whole, to learn how to learn. The role of information in complex systems Achieving meaning through self-organisation is not the same as trying to create something like a 'mission statement'. It is closer to the concept of 'culture' and the definition by Maturana of a fully autonomous living organism as being one which is cognate with its environment. This also fits with the description by Ross Ashby (1952) of the need for an effective control system to contain a 'requisite variety' of flexible states within itself, capable of responding to the changing states in the environment. Brian Goodwin (in a private communication) expresses the quality of being cognate with an environment in terms of the unique rhythm each company develops in relations with its environment, through a fluctuation of power from element to element that resonates like a crystal. This is how companies learn to achieve their own meaning, lived in dynamic equilibrium with its own environment, without anyone really being able to describe it. It is also vital to understand that the self-organising capability far from equilibrium of an autonomous system, such as a business company, is based on the system's closure to inputs of information, in the sense with which IT specialists understand the word 'information'. In the theories of complexity put forward by Maturana and Varela, there is no transmission of data in the process of maintaining the autonomous organisation's endurance as a structure. In addition, Wagensberg (1997) has explained that behaviour is information in closely-coupled systems. Such information is meaningful in a closed system, for instance in the operation of a central heating thermostat system controlling a home's temperature. Information should, therefore, be understood as part of a cognate system. It should not be left solely in the hands of IT specialists, who generally have a more limited understanding of the nature of information. The passing of information from the environment to the system, and from the system to the environment, are the sources of fluctuations that eventually lead to a system moving from a steady state to one far from equilibrium, where change takes place. A circular exchange of energy maintains internal autonomous structures and their interactions with the system's external environment. The achievement of a balanced state in this interpretation of information can be seen in terms entropy involving non-physical forms of energy. Internal restructuring for long-term success In order to have long-term success, organisations must have a capability for effective restructuring on the inside, in order to provide an appropriate response to a push from the outside. Strengthening the capabilities of internal structures ensures the company keeps going so that its members are able to earn money to live. Customers will be won by creating a relational structure that makes its better and more efficient as a self-organising, self-learning company, rather than by being obsessed with a strategy focused on becoming 'more customer directed'. The behaviour of a system, like an organisation, when perturbed constitutes its information state. The relational state inside the organisation constitutes its perception of the outside world. The system adjusts itself in response to a perturbation without relying on any internal information flows. This explains the important principle that a cognate system, as defined by Maturana and Varela, is closed, making it impossible to put knowledge directly into someone else's mind. The Psi International methodology is based on this principle, so our workshops assume that deep-level, perceptual learning (as opposed to mediated perceptual learning from a 'teacher') takes place most effectively when an individual or organisation restructures itself as the result of an external perturbation. The prime objective of a workshop is to enable such perturbations to occur in an environment which supports participants in achieving their own comprehension of how organisation flexibility can be achieved. This requires an understanding of the intermeshed nature of relations in complex systems. In our workshop environment, people can learn for themselves, and become at ease with their ability to manage the complexity in their own lives and in the organisations where they work. Chance and creativity Chance plays a vital role in creativity (Prigogine 1995). This becomes clear when any attempt is made to get a complex system to interact with itself to learn to produce something else. Creativity can't be learnt from a book or taught. People need to be put in situations where they have to be creative in order to move forward. The unexpected perturbation from outside which can't be coped with easily is the real change maker that can grab an organisation and transform it to another plane. When the expected happens, the lack of surprise means nothing changes. But a surprise perturbation demands that an organisation must be able to think on its feet. A company can deal successfully with the unexpected, make giant leaps in performance, and come out intact after going into a catastrophic situation only if it has creative people throughout the organisation. An enterprise has no future if its overall culture is not creative, or is there are merely a few creative people in the company. That is why it is so important to enable everyone in an organisation to feel comfortable about using their full creative capabilities at work. Psi International workshops have demonstrated that it requires just a short time in the right environment to release everyone's creative potential and to free them from linear thinking. The unexpectedness involved in constraining workshop participants to non-verbal communication are designed to encourage chance interactions. Graphic referencing enables the activities of participants to coalesce gradually through their interactions in doing things which maintain themselves as a group, while producing outputs for the external world. This has always avoided the explosion that could results from the degree of chaos which exists at the start. A group mark-making session also embodies the continual challenge that is a basic characteristic of complex systems. The self-organisation required by companies to meet this challenge is similar to the autonomy achieved by a colony of termites, which is founded on strong and flexible structures of relations. With such structures at its core, an organisation will have maximum flexibility of response to ensure it can push itself back after an external perturbation to roughly where it was before. It can never get back precisely to its original shape, as this will have shifted at least slightly. Overcoming organisational constraints on autonomous behaviour Groups within a company often get enthused by a drive towards complete autonomy, say through a management buyout. In most organisations, however, a more complex situation exists. For example, we have realised from our work with Bull Benelux that it has achieved a very high degree of autonomy. Yet it still remains part of the wider organisation constituting the whole Bull organisation, within which Group Headquarters in Paris can set overall limits and controls, such as on financial strategy. This raises the important question of just how autonomous any group can be before becoming an autonomous organisation. Some companies encourage as much local autonomy as is possible, within a consistent corporate framework. Yet senior management in many other organisations are extremely wary of any autonomous team building, although complexity theory has shown that self-organising autonomy should be the foundation of any strategy to manage change. The wariness comes from managers who fear that autonomous teams would look for problems which the managers would like to leave undiscovered and unsolved. This kind of management prefers to see more disciplined behaviour that adheres strictly to corporate guidelines. There are a number of other constraints on introducing complexity ideas into organisations, caused mainly by the paradox that the people who should be sponsoring change are often those with the least incentive to do so, because they have been in their position longest. The tremendous results that can be achieved by breaking away from this way of thinking were demonstrated by Ken Lewis, head of the British company Dutton Engineering. He decided, one day, that there must be a better way of running the company. Until then, it had followed standard industrial norms. He changed just about everything to make the organisation as flexible as possible. There is no longer a sales force. Engineers and other skilled staff now go out and get their own orders and build their own teams. Employees set their own wages and hours. Accountancy is expected to do no more than present information to tax inspectors. The payoff from the new organisational structure has been enormous, for instance in cutting project lead times from around six months to a week at the most. We need more of this kind of flexibility. However, there are also many managers who see training mainly as a means of being updated on the latest buzzword or gizmo. They aren't interested in developing a learning-to-learn culture, as that would create too many teams of innovators and adaptors capable of generating their own reasons for being. These kinds of teams would frequently result in the design of much better ways of doing things, but that could threaten the vested interest of people in key positions in the existing organisation. Helping companies to manage complexity more effectively Psi International has worked successfully with many companies in using its self-learning methodology to bring about as more effective approach to the management of change. For example, we assisted British Airways Engineering to rethink its organisational structures a few years after its privatisation in 1987. The company had been divided into nine departments, each with about 1,000 people. The departments worked on the 'smokestack principle', by which each unit could see just its own little patch of sky. Departments tended to try to blame any failures on the activities of other groups, rather than work together. When the nine departmental managers attended one of our workshops, the non-verbal communication mark-making process threw them into some confusion initially, leading to some negative reactions. However, the interaction and feedback they gained from the group drawing activity helped them to appreciate, in a way they couldn't have articulated in words, the value they placed on relationships. This contributed to a growing self-taught understanding of the nature of relationships in complex inter-departmental structures. As a result, the management team was enabled to create a new inter-departmental structured which fostered effective collaboration. According to senior management at British Airways Engineering, it was due in large measure to the work of Psi International that the team was turned into a 'solid, united unit' where 'openness replaced hidden agendas' (Psi International 1997). The proof of our pudding has been shown best in the way many of our clients have come back for repeat helpings. For instance, we first worked with Brian Gunn in 1994, when he was a director of Bull UK and we helped his company's Executive Committee to create a strategic managing vision. Later, he asked us to help him develop the management team and vision at Integris UK, the services business of Bull UK, when he became its Managing Director. In 1996, he asked us to help him to do something similar when he moved to head up Bull Benelux. One reason he asked us to assist at Bull Benelux was that he had found the use of the Psi International methodology at Integris UK had enabled members of the groups we had worked with to achieve and maintain an ability to have their own vision, which has seen them through thick and thin. There have even been occasions when Integris managers who have been on our courses have taken time off work to talk at one of our meetings, because they so appreciated how much they and their company had benefited from thinking in complexity terms. Brian Gunn says that the programme delivered by Psi International has resulted in substantial performance improvements. For instance, he notes that the benefits to Integris UK in 1995 and 1996 in terms of good business results were not coincidental, but can be related to the work done by Psi International and the leadership qualities developed in the company during its programme (Psi International 1997). Similar success has been achieved with Bull Benelux, which was the top performing unit in Bull in 1997. What is done before a Psi international workshop The preparation we do before a Psi International workshop depends on whether it aims is to be primarily a general educational programme, or is targeted at solving a particular problem. A group which has a specific problem to solve is likely to know each other beforehand, although they might not initially have any shared understanding about corporate policies affecting the problem. In the weeks before the workshop, we try to spend about an hour with each participant to find out their different perceptions and attitudes, particular about the problem we will be dealing with. This means we don't have to waste time at the beginning of the workshop finding out what people are like. As part of the preparation, we also like to get a good idea of what participants expect from the workshop. We try to avoid telling them what will actually happen so that it comes to them fresh, although word sometimes leaks out from people who were on earlier courses. When faced with a specific problem, most people usually accept that something has to be done 'to get their act together' and change towards a new direction. Very few people want to return to a previous way of doing things. A typical problem dealt with by such a workshop is to develop a unified vision among senior managers, as we did at British Airways Engineering and Bull UK. This would use the lived experience of a learning-to-learn process to try to get the management team to achieve a state of being that allows them to both verbalise an agreed strategic vision and have the strength gained to make that strategy successful, despite the unforeseen circumstances which must inevitably arise. This lived experience goes far deeper, and produces a more innovative and enduring vision, than trying to produce a superficial, off-the-cuff 'mission statement'. For a more general educational programme, the prime objective is to improve the participants' general capabilities for solving problems. As this is not focused on addressing a particular situation, participants generally have a less clear idea of what kind of result to expect. Some people come to such events because they have been chosen by their organisation, while others volunteer. We again try to find out as much as we can beforehand about the individuals and their perceptions of what they want from the workshop. Participants at this kind of a workshop are likely to be from disparate backgrounds and may not have met before. They could come from different companies, or different parts of the same company. By the end of the course, they will have got to know each other very well, in addition to learning about complexity. Improving and extending the Psi International methodology The key results from our workshop depend on the Psi International methodology, rather than the role of the facilitator. The approach used varies greatly between facilitators. But the methodology can be applied effectively only if the facilitator has a deep knowledge of complexity theory and Gibson's ecological psychology, plus a certain amount of expertise in psychodynamics and the art process. All facilitators can draw on our shared stock of knowledge, or can choose to invent something completely new in order to get a group interacting as a proper team. A fundamental principle for all workshops is that the facilitator should intervene as little as possible. The workshop is there to provide a safe environment within which people can learn through their own interactions. We record all our workshops on video to help our own learning and to assist our quality control. The issues we analyse when reviewing a video include discussions of what might have happened if the facilitator had done something else, or why the same process had different effects in other situations. This kind of review continually enriches our facilitators knowledge, thereby helping their flexibility and effectiveness in future sessions. Nearly all Psi International's work is now with managers in industry. We see business as being a vital driving forcing in helping to devise and spread the new paradigm based on an appreciation of complexity thinking. I am a zealot for change towards flexibility. The PSI International methodology has demonstrated that the new paradigm of flexibility in complex systems, including the crucial insights provided by complexity pioneers like Varela, Maturana and Gibson, can be understood and enthusiastically adopted by most people. References Ashby W Ross "Design for a Brain" London: Chapman and Hall, 1952. Beer Stafford "Designing the System for Organisations" Chichester: Wiley, 1985. Beitel Frank "Sketches Toward a Psychology of Learning in Art", in Pappas, 1970. Einstein Albert "Letter to Hadamard", quoted in Koestler, 1964. Gibson James J "The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems" Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Gibson James J "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception" Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. James, Kim "The Complexity of Power Relations: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Complex Systems Thinking" Wollaston, Northants: Psi International, 1997. Klee Paul "Théorie de l'art moderne" Paris: Editions Gonthier, 1924. Koestler Arthur "The Act of Creation" London: Hutchinson, 1964 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). Laborit Henri "Biologie et Structure" Paris: Editions Idées - Gallimard, 1968. Maturana Humberto R "The Neurophysiology of Cognition" Biological Computer Laboratories, Illinois University, 1972 (unpublished) Maturana Humberto R and Varela Francisco J "Autopoïesis and Cognition" Boston: Reidel, 1980. Maturana Humberto R and Varela Francisco J "Tree of Knowledge: Biological Roots of Human Understanding" Boston: Shambhala, 1988. Monsarrat K W "Human Understanding and its World" Liverpool/London: University Press of Liverpool/Hodder and Stoughton, 1937. Nicolis Grégoire and Prigogine Ilya "Exploring Complexity" New York: W. H. Freeman, 1989. Pappas G, ed. "Concepts in Art and
Education" London: Macmillan, 1970. Prigogine Ilya and Stengers Isabelle "Order Out of Chaos" London: William Heinemann 1984. Psi International "Case Studies" Wollaston, Northants: Psi International, 1997. Spencer-Brown George "Laws of Form" New York: Dutton, 1979. Varela Francisco J "Principles of Biological Autonomy" Amsterdam: Elsevier North Holland, 1979. Wagensberg. J. "L'ame de la Meduse: Idées sur la complexité du monde" Paris: Editions Seuil, 1997. |
