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WhitePaper Exploring the Organisational Collage of Memetic Paradigms for (a) Change A research note Louis Klein Systemic Excellence Group Independant Think Tank for Leading Practice Contents 03 Abstract I The organisational collage 05 II The disciplinary matrix 06 III Paradigms 07 IV Memetics 08 V Organisational implications 09 VI Resume and next 10 Acknowledgements Endnotes 11 References 2 white paper Exploring the Organisational Collage of Memetic Paradigms for (a) Change | SEgroup © 06/2012 Exloring the Organisational Collage of Memetic Paradigms for (a) change Abstract Exploring organisations is the prerequisite for any intentional attempt to strategic change. Yet, what is it that we observe when we observe organisations. Following Niklas Luhmann this paper puts the processing of meaning as the elementary property of any social system in the centre of investigation. How can we observe meaning, and what are the benefits of doing so? The argument chooses a narrative approach to exploring organisations. With Niklas Luhmann we look at the operations of organising which makes the organisation an organisation. Along Thomas Kuhn’s understanding of paradigms management is referenced as an activity of a community of practice based on a disciplinary matrix of models, methods and instruments. Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualisation of paradigms as reference giving examples allows the opening up of the implicit side of organisational culture. Approaching reference giving examples as memes and culture as a meme-complex enables the observation of dynamics and cultural evolution over time. We come to understand the conservative nature of organisational development and the systemic sensitivity that allows for management, learning and change. And as always, advances in research come at the price of new questions. Key words: Exploring organisations, community of practice, memetics, paradigms, meaning, cultural evolution, management, learning, change, next practice. IThe organisational collage How did any organisation become what it is? What can we know? And what implications does this knowledge have for approaching its further development? Choosing a generic perspective like Niklas Luhmann puts an emphasis on the actual activities, the organising operations of an organisation that make the organisation (Luhmann, 1984). Luhmann refers to the concept of autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela, 1980) to explain the self-creation within an operationally closed system. Being the more or less radical constructivist he is, Luhmann focuses on communication 3 as the volatile substance of any social system, be it interactions, organisations or society as the sum of all communications. The bothering question that comes with this approach is: How can we observe social systems if the substance is so volatile, if communications vanish the very moment they come into existence? The trick is that social systems flag themselves as action systems to gain the possibility to observe themselves as a string of events or a history of actions. [1] Narrative approaches to organisational research do the very same. They conceptualise white paper Exploring the Organisational Collage of Memetic Paradigms for (a) Change | SEgroup © 06/2012 organisations as a collage of stories (Boje, 2007; Boje & Gebhart & Thatchenkery, 1995). So the organisation can be observed as a story of stories, as a grand narration in itself. The approach is very workable yet it is not utterly satisfactory in estimating what the observer actually got if he was to realise that organisational story collage. What is important and what is not important? What determines the quality of a story for the organisation? What is relevant and what is just noise or the simple reinforcement, a functional redundancy? And, which is in terms of practical implications and applicability of knowledge even more important, what governs the organisation? What in which story tells about the past, the present and the future of the organisation? A functionalistic approach clearly states that being a social system the organisation has to process the unity of the distinction of actuality and possibility. Luhmann calls this sense or meaning (Graph 1). In a mode of communication the organisation can memorise what its possibilities are beyond what it realises at present. So we see stories about actual events and stories about possible actions. This can be more or less explicit. Here Luhmann refers to decision as the specific quality of organisational communication which links present possibilities to future actualities. This is very sound theoretically, yet it does not really explain how the organisation turns a decision into organisational practice. Further exploration needs to be undertaken. meaning (sense) = actuality possibility Systemic Inquiry (Klein, 2005) is a good approach to put more structure to the exploration of organisations. Systemic inquiry approaches the organisational collage, the garbage can of stories (Morgan, 1986), with a cascading analysis. The analysis starts on the level of the so called foci of attention. Overlooking the collage you will realise that there are attractors occurring in a majority of interviews steering the course of the open narration. Filtering out these attractors as foci of attention sharpens the image of the organisation respectively of the organisational self-observation and self-description. Not more, not less is the organisational collage. Yet foci of attention can further be analysed by looking for the specifics of semantics and jargon. In the delta between common language and organisational jargon you will find further information about the organisational idiosyncrasies. And last 4 but not least with the means of qualitative mathematics, referring to George Spencer-Browns Laws of Form (Spencer-Brown, 1969), we can identify the prominent distinctions which shape and sharpen the organisational cognition and thus the sense-making in which the organisation is attributing meaning to what it observes as being itself (Weick, 1995). The analysis of the organisational collage however does only to some extent explain the development and governance of the organisation. The organisational collage gives a good idea about the realms of possibilities wherein the actual organisation is manoeuvring. It sets boundaries, yet it does not indicate the further course of the organisation. It does not explain how decisions come about and how they are turned into events and actions that make the organisational development. white paper Exploring the Organisational Collage of Memetic Paradigms for (a) Change | SEgroup © 06/2012 IIThe disciplinary matrix So the question is what governs the organisation in its realms of its possibilities? Referring to Thomas Kuhn and his concept of paradigms (Kuhn, 1962, 1970) the hypothesis is that the governance of the organisation is based on a set of models, methods and instruments as reference of any organisational action. The governance lies in the paradigms in use in a specific organisation. This paradigmatic set is so to speak the disciplinary matrix of organisational activities and actions. We can go as far as saying that the reference function of the paradigmatic set works as a discriminator for the organisation itself. It is distinguishing actions and activities which by referring to the paradigmatic set belong to the organisation and make the organisation and other activities which are not referring to the paradigmatic set of the organisation, and which are thus excluded by the very same paradigmatic set. large extent organisations are engaged in explicitly creating self-images, sets of rules, self-descriptions in e.g. management, administration and marketing. Turning to the organisational collage it is not very difficult to identify these explicit references in the organisation to the paradigmatic set it coined for itself. Parts of this set may be imported like the rules for book keeping, controlling and compliance. Other parts of the set may be generated internally like visions, mission statements and self-descriptions in advertising and sales. However, there is a flip side to the explicit reference. There is something implicit which serves the same purpose. It will not be difficult to recall an example where the exception from the explicit rule or deviation is shared as being the implicit rule. This is very disturbing for an external observer of the organisation. And it is serving as a specific indicator along the distinc- On the basis of the paradigmatic set the organisation creates itself referring to specific models, following specific methods and using specific instruments. This concept of referencing organisational action is very much in tune with the systemic concept of operational closure (Luhmann, 1984, Beer, 1972, 1979). On the basis of the paradigmatic set the organisation creates itself referring to specific models, following specific methods and using specific instruments. This is the disciplinary matrix which Thomas Kuhn actually conceived for observing and describing scientific practices reinforcing scientific disciplines. The same reinforcing mechanism can be observed in the reproduction of the organisation as such. Referring to paradigmatic sets creates the idea of an explicit directive. And certainly to a 5 tions of membership and non-membership. It is not-knowing the implicit. Referring to the explicit gives away the outsider, the external and the spoilsport. Observing the latent has always been the ultimate challenge for social sciences (Luhmann, 1991). Yet, referring to the concept of culture or the concept of values only shifted the problem. How do I observe culture, how do I observe values? Observing organisations as action systems, as in action research, improves the approach yet it exposes the observation to the behaviouristic trap sliding down the statistical slope, eventually reducing the organisation to a population with a tendency of strange behaviour. white paper Exploring the Organisational Collage of Memetic Paradigms for (a) Change | SEgroup © 06/2012 III Paradigms The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in his book „Signatura rerum“ closes the loop back to the idea of the paradigm (Agamben, 2008). And by doing so he brings forward a comprehensive concept of the so to speak implicit paradigm as the reference-giving example. He draws on the works of Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn and eventually Michel Foucault. Already with Thomas Kuhn he describes two understandings of the term “paradigm” which is, for one, the disciplinary matrix of a set of models, methods and instruments and on the other side the scientific example. The paradigmatic set refers to Ludwik Fleck´s thought collective or thought style which can be observed within a specific scientific community describing itself as a discipline or a school (Fleck, 1935). And already Fleck indicates the importance of the example, the actual observable action, which makes a difference and gives life to the generic instruction that can be derived from the paradigmatic set. Michel Foucault in his “Archeology of Knowledge” goes even further by introducing the distinction between the cognitive and the emotionally corresponding which enlarges the idea of the example and goes explicitly beyond its cognitive aspects. This could be described as the point where Foucault felt urged to stress the distinction to the instrumentalist’s perspective of Thomas Kuhn. It is not only lately that neurosciences have become very popular in the field of organisational behaviour and project management (Roth, 1994; Becker, 2003). For a good reason it decomposes the mind, refers to the operational closure of the brain and allows for a further, one may say, more substantial, reference in the enlightening the Conditio Humana (Kahneman et. al. 1982). Maya Storch very much brings it to the point when in her Zurich Resource Model she argues that the cognitive and the limbic system need to be in tune to allow for sustainable will (Storch, 2004, 2004). In reference to Foucault this hints to what extend the consonance of emotion and cognition become a discriminator for the connectability of a paradigm as such. 6 Giorgio Agamben returns to the referencegiving example without taking sides. He stresses the importance of the paradigm as the referencegiving example and highlights its extraordinary function to conclude from the specific to the specific which is neither deductive nor inductive in its turn. Similar to style and fashion or with a school of painting it is rather difficult to give and follow inductive or deductive instructions to identify e.g. an expressionist painter or a ladylike behaviour. It is rather that the example speaks for itself. It makes the “family” recognisable. It’s a little bit like “If you know one, you know them all”. The implications of this can be revisited at Pierre Bourdieu who beautifully describes how powerful this recognition becomes for the discrimination and inner structure of society (Bourdieu, 1979). It is the habitus that makes the difference. We may want to come back to this idea later. Equipped with Agamben’s idea of the paradigm being the reference-giving example the analysis of the organisational collage gains a new quality. It is worth investigating. If there are reference-giving examples in the organisation they will be found in the narrative, explanations, practices being show-cases in, of and for the organisation. The paradigm becomes a paradigm by fulfilling its function of giving reference, enabling the organisation to select out of the realm of possibilities the actual texture of development. For the moment, for the snap-shot, the paradigm as reference-giving example explains the present yet it does not explain the governance of the course of this development. Imitating the example over and over again should rather, in a very conservative fashion, bring about the very same, over and over again. How can we add a dynamic or innovative spin to the idea of the paradigm? How can an organisation be innovative despite the conservative mechanisms of paradigmatic re-production and autopoiesis? The answer to these questions may lay in the concept of memetics. white paper Exploring the Organisational Collage of Memetic Paradigms for (a) Change | SEgroup © 06/2012 „K J IV Memetics The debate on memetics peaked just after the turn of the millennium (Blackmore, 1999; Becker, 2003). The idea was to identify the meme as an equivalent to the gene being a core piece of cultural reproduction (Becker, 2003). The debate on memes unfortunately stranded somewhere in between social sciences, psychology and neurosciences. However, memetics brought about several ideas and concepts which look very attractive out of the perspective of a paradigmatic exploration of the organisation. Especially three ideas taken from memetics shall be revisited in the following: • cultural evolution • meme-complexes • spreading Cultural Evolution The memetic idea of cultural evolution is very close to the systems perspective on social systems (Becker, 2003). Operational closure requires active reproduction. The organisation as a social system is a volatile entity which requires an operational continuity to acquire a state of homeostasis, of stability in a sensitive equilibrium. Looking from the outside and referring to the operational level, this looks very much like order from noise (von Foerster, 2003). Yet active reproduction in operational closure opens up the powerful evolutionary development. It is the very mechanism of evolution that comes with this requirement for active reproduction. In each reproduction lies the possibility of variation. Variation is either in or out of scope of the reproductive useful and thus requires active selection to grant reproduction. Successful selection leads to stabilisation and the cycle starts over again with the next variation bound reproduction activity [2]. In the cultural context of memetics the meme as such is reproduced and selected on the ground of its contribution to the effectiveness for its host’s viability. For example civilised greetings may be regarded as a meme. By culturally reproducing this meme, human encounter or better the variety of 7 human encounter is attracted to non-violent behaviour. This improves the situation of the participating people. And it is an act of confirmation. It reproduces the very embedding civilised culture which allows the person to select a civilised greeting as a non-violent act of encounter. Meme-complex Shaking hands does not make a culture or an organisation. Yet a single gene does not make an organism. Memetics, and this is the second idea on the consideration, suggests the concept of a meme-complex or in short a memeplex (Backmore, 2002; Whitty, 2005). A meme-complex can be seen as a set of mutually reinforcing memes. This is a clear link to a systems perspective on social system and close to the concept of culture. It’s not the single act or the single action that makes a culture. [Ecology of Paradigms] It is the mutual reinforcing reference of these different actions that allow for the operational closure of the social system and by doing so allowing for the emergence that distinguishes the whole from its parts. Spreading Coming back to the paradigmatic exploration of organisations the paradigm is the referencegiving example which can be conceptualised as a meme and by doing so links to the third strong concept taken from memetics which is the spreading. [] The spreading of memes is based on imitation. Imitation is the active reproduction of the meme. Active reproduction within an operationally closed context like a meme-complex allows for the emergence of a social system. And although memetic reproduction is not very likely due to low replication accuracy and high mutation rate, the mutual reinforcement within the emergence of the social system possibly described as the meme-complex, allows order from noise and what Niklas Luhmann calls the unlikely possibility of the social system (Luhmann, 1984). white paper Exploring the Organisational Collage of Memetic Paradigms for (a) Change | SEgroup © 06/2012 V Organisational implications The paradigm being the reference-giving example seems to be bound to the very evolutionary dynamics brought forward in memetics. The example is imitated and by doing so reinforced and reproduced and continued towards an existence that allows for stability. So analysing the organisational collage by exploring memetic paradigms opens the door to understanding the evolutionary development of the organisation. However, does this mean that organisations are • • • • organisational learning governance and management management education organisational change Organisational learning The approach of memetic paradigms allows for a generic perspective on organisational practice. At the core of the organisation we find the imitated reference-giving example. This links to the notion of learning, and especially to the notion of model learning (Bandura, 1963, 1977). Model learning, learning from examples lies at the very heart of any concept of socialisation, may it be primary or secondary socialisation, may it be the inclusion of the growing child into society or the integration of the new employee into the organisation. In this perspective the integration of a single person into a social system may just be seen as a special case or a litmus test for the concept of memetic paradigms. Yet it allows to pinpoint what it actually is that needs to be learned in order to be integrated into the activities and operations that actually make the organisational practice as such. Imitating the reference-giving example puts a conservative mechanism at the very heart of social constructivism. By imitation you only learn what is already there and through the imitation you reproduce and confirm the reference-giving example. This is not only true for individual 8 drifting in their contexts, evolving like species do? Well, yes and no. They are robust and sensitive at the same time. Evolution is possible and intervention as well (Willke, 1994). Governance and management are possible, yet in a less grand manner than some of the protagonists wish for. Analysing the organisational collage of memetic paradigms has most prominently consequences for: learning; this applies as well to organisational learning. Nonaka and Takeushi put the SECIcycle at the very heart of organisational learning. Socialisation, externalisation, combination, internalisation, this is the organisational learning cycle and the most important mechanism for any kind of organisational knowledge management (Nonaka/Takeushi, 1995). The value of knowledge lies in its application. And this links back to a generic perspective on organisational practice. Governance and management Governance is an organisational practice. The manager is not a mechanic. Managerial deeds cannot be separated from the organisation. It is a second order re-entry, as von Foerster would put it (Foerster, 1993). This has two major implications on management. First, management is as conservative as any organisational practice. Management is a memeplex, a set of different reference-giving examples of what has been established under the name of management (Wittgenstein, 1953). This is management habitus as we saw it earlier. If a manager wants to be re- white paper Exploring the Organisational Collage of Memetic Paradigms for (a) Change | SEgroup © 06/2012 garded as a manager in that very organisation, reproducing the reference-giving examples becomes a must. Any other behaviour will be organisationally rejected. And so will the manager in focus. Second, management is possible. There are variations and changes possible in the imitation of reference-giving example, which are not rejected. This may be without further implications. And this is the likely case contributing to a robust organisation. However, in its loose coupling the organisation is also sensitive for minimal changes of initial conditions, as it is known from chaos theory and the so called butterfly effect (Lorenz, 1963). Clapping its wings a butterfly at the Amazonas may cause a tornado in Texas. Management education It is the set of reference-giving examples a manager needs to learn to become a manager. It is not only the explicit managerial paradigm, the models, methods, and instruments which may be an important external reference for any kind of organisational practice. It is most of all the reference-giving examples that make the habitus that ought to be learnt in order to become a manager (Bourdieu, 1979). And in the way that you may say it is learning on the job, the source of those reference-giving examples is the implicit reference within the organisational collage. It is learning by doing. And as long as this does not go hand in hand with a distinct capacity for reflexion, this learning will be conservative and so will be the individual career path. Organisational change Organisational change is possible. Yet organisational change is limited to the possibilities carried forward in the organisational collage. Organisational change thus operates in the delta between the present practice and the possible practice as reflected in the organisational collage (next Practice). Organisational change beyond that realm of the very organisational possibilities is not possible. For any diligent change manager reading and understanding the organisational collage determines a path of improvement, development and even innovation. This is where best practice based consulting suffers the most. If the organisational collage does not carry this specific best practice as a possible next practice it will not be. Change in this sense can be seen as moving the next possible practice and by doing so changing the actual practice and accordingly the realm of possibilities which allows for the next move towards the next possible practice. Organisational change conceptualised on this basis may not chose the direttissima, the straight line up to the top of the mountain, it will allow for the feasible route. Acknowledging this still puts a challenge to mainstream management. The future lies with the alternatives. VIResume and next Observing meaning is key to sustainable organisational development. … 9 Organisations are kluge (Gary Marcus). Stories are tainted (Gardner 2008, 2010) white paper Exploring the Organisational Collage of Memetic Paradigms for (a) Change | SEgroup © 06/2012 Acknowledgements A prior version has been presented to the Standing Conference of Managerial and Organisational Inquiry, Philadelphia, 2011. Endnotes 1 Observing social systems Whenever it comes down to observing social systems, referring to the action system provides access to Luhmann’s work. And is not so much an epistemological trick as it is the empirically observable way of the organisation observing itself. 2 Evolution works To some extend it seems to be important to stress, that evolution is kluge in the sense of being smart enough yet far from perfect (Marcus, 2008). Evolution works, it does not strive for perfection. And any solution will be selected and stabilised in evolution that does the trick. 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