fractal8

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"Like synergy, tensegrity is another powerful framework for meta-design for leadership and organizations. Imagine all the facets of an organization achieving tensegrity and being led by an authentic leader who understands how to lead through the autopoeitic enactment of centripetal coherence throughout the organization!"

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"The 21st Century Organization is a complex hybrid (human and non-human) organism that enacts multiple hybrid objects through the 5 generative processes, striving toward synergy as the organism advances into the near adjacent future through the multiple teleological streams of their tensegral relationships."

Meta-Design Process

In order to see through the complexifications of a large organization operating in a global theatre at numerous scales and across multiple fields of expertise and domains of experience, the 21st Century Leader must employ some sophisticated epistemic tools to act from a vantage point that can resolve the complexity into larger wholes without compromising the dynamic processes that generate them. Our first-order orientation, therefore, is to design around the principles of generative processes, while our second-order orientation is the meta-design of a generative design process.

A generative process is one that creates order, pattern, structures or objects through its own internal dynamic operations, without recourse to external factors, although generative processes can be linked through various kinds of process dynamics and scalar relations. The order, pattern, structure, or objects that a generative process creates, can “stand in for” the underlying process. Therefore we can refer to a hurricane as “Hugo”, instead of having to formulate the infinite variety of forces that account for its appearance. Similarly, a generative design process involves the intentional creation of order, pattern, structure, or objects that can “stand in for” all the dynamical operations of an organization. The highest level pattern, structure, or object we can name is the organization itself—so when considered in this way, we can easily “see” that the organization stands in for all its underlying generative processes.

Our design process entails determining which of the 5 generative processes under lays each level of order, pattern, structure, or object, we can identify at different scales and domains. Furthermore, we can identify object-domains according to the form, membership, relational aspect, agency, and a teleological dimension related to the way that object-domain “strives toward” tensegrity. These object-domains provide us with a systematic way of developing “rules” for constructing “objects” that can “stand in for” all the relevant dynamics of the underlying generative processes. Our meta-design project is to design a process that is generative of second-order “objects” that enfold all the relevant information of the underlying first-order dynamics which are themselves enfolded in the organizational object.

Our meta-design process is a kind of reverse-engineering of how the human mind reifies processes into “ontically real” structures, or things. We do this intentionally, in the way that object-oriented software designers intentionally work with constructed “objects” that stand in for packets of programming code. Alfred North Whitehead famously warned of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness – the tendency for the human mind to mistake the abstractions of thought for actual entities in the world. Therefore, our meta-design process must remain completely intentional and aware of the design choices we make in constructing our object-domains and their members. It is therefore critical in our process to assure that actual entities inform constructed objects rather than the other way around. Now for sure, when constructed objects obtain the attention and imagination of people, they also inform actual entities, like people—and the feedback loop will most certainly change first-order dynamics, which in turn may change the object-domains. In any event, the feedback loop must be such that the lower, actual order informs the constructed one at the meta-design level, not the other way around.

To capture the orienting principles of a generative meta-design process, we add four process principles to the first ten foundational principle of meta-design listed in Wikipedia:

Auspicious – focuses on the affirmative, optimistic and serendipitous
Indescribable – seeks to make the unthinkable possible
Self-steering – adapts by re-languaging its own working language
Fractal – making complex systems navigable through pattern-familiarity
Holistic – delivers complex, comprehensive and self-aware outcomes
Synergistic – cultivates and harnesses team complementarities
Synergy-seeking – aspires to a beneficial ‘synergies-of-synergies’
Opportunity-Making – uncovers unexpected potential for other systems
Integrated innovations – creates whole systems by interdependent parts
Paradigm-shifting – seeks to make human culture more ecological

Generative – creates order, pattern, structure, objects out of the underlying processural dynamics of the system
Responsible – remains responsible to the design intentions that allow second-order objects to “stand in for” process dynamics
Responsive – allows first order dynamics to inform second-order constructs
Recursive – enables first-order changes to revise design intentions embedded in second-order objects

You are welcome to explore the content of this space. We are interested in growing a group of practitioners that are curious to learn about this approach and contribute to its practice.This group will start its activities in September 2011. Please inquire.