Feature Article: Leading the 21st Century : The Conception-Aware, Object-Oriented Organization

­­­­(A New View of Organizations & Human Action)

Bonnitta Roy and Jean Trudel

Part I:

Conception Aware The Relevant Situation: The 21^st Century’s Double Bind

A decade ago, Stuart Kaufmann (2000) made a bold claim for the 21^st century mindset, “The universe and the biosphere keep advancing into a persistent adjacent possible” (p 84).  For most of our human existence, the rate of advance was so slow that the concept of stability, rather than change, informed our investigations into such interests as a specifiable human nature, an attainable absolute truth, belief in unlimited natural resources, enduring economic progress, and lasting ecological resilience. In the first part of the 21^st century, we’ve seen innumerable advances into ever new actualities at a rate that even Kauffman might have thought alarming. We not only participate in change that is so rapid that we can actually name it in real time (think Gen X, Gen Y), but we also precipitate unprecedented change at unprecedented scales. The most significant technologies of the last two centuries are obsolete, as are the most significant constructs of the 20th century mindset. We are here to watch as the airplane, television and paperback book are all surrendering their territory to the digital revolution; and the old forms of imperialism, religious fundamentalism, and Keynesian economics give way to secular neo-liberal democracies networked in a global economy.  We are in the midst of one of the largest extinction events—and we are here to record it. We invest in technologies that are designed to offset unimaginable planetary disasters—should they occur—while at the same time invest in technologies that risk them. The Rockefeller Foundation and Bill Gates are funding a massive seed bank vault being built under the permafrost in Norway, and Zak Stein (2010), an integral theorist and developmental researcher at Harvard, recommends building a “Nous – Ark”[1]—a collection of the humankind’s key cognitive, intuitive and spiritual knowledge—for the benefit of the few human survivors of a Armageddon-like world destruction.

Combined, the scientific, technological, and humanistic developments in the 20^th century are both the forces of this change, as well as its consequence:  a feedback, feed-forward loop that is responsible for today’s exponential growth rate in human knowledge. Today, knowledge advances at such a rate that each generation’s knowledge base will be superseded in less than a decade. This is profound in two ways:

Human technology is transforming the planet so rapidly we act with unknowable consequences.

Since there is no “body of knowledge” to be passed on for the future, we must learn how to build capacities to face unknowable futures.

This, then, is the 21^st century’s double bind: we can see that today is already past as we feel ourselves slipping into the near adjacent future; yet, we have no vantage point to see what lies ahead. We can name the change we see, but we are too slow to make course corrections.

In the first century, the Greek astronomer Ptolemy devised an ingenious solution to the movement of the planets that explained the observation of retrograde movement when the planets moved “backwards” in relation to each other. Because Ptolemy was a systems thinker way ahead of any other, he was able to put together a complex map of the variant and invariant epicycles of the planets and stars as they revolved around the earth. Of course, we all know the rest of this story. Ptolemy’s systemic genius notwithstanding, he was constrained because he was only able to imagine the view from the earth. A thousand years later, Copernicus re-imagined the heavens from a heliocentric view—which explained all the celestial movements observable at that time, in a simpler and much more elegant manner.

What if this is true today—that the limitation of our view is responsible for the complexity of our situation? If this were true, then wouldn’t it be more helpful to work directly with understanding what is our view—what are the hidden assumptions, boundaries and constraints that are on the one hand, creating all this hyper-complexity around us and, on the other hand, impeding our ability to “see” from a higher, more inclusive, more systematic yet more elegant vantage point?

And yet, at this level of complexity, leaders can no longer expect to be able to hold onto a static knowledge base from which to sustain an organization, act toward a resolution, or design a strategy for real-world decision-making. Rather, leaders need to be able to view an enormous amount of complexity, in ways that are both conceptually aware to comprehend all the categories, structures, processes, and systems that our current view of the world entails, as well as intentionally constructed in ways that are meaningful, relevant and useful. This process requires the vantage point of being able to see the concept-based value stream embedded in all the salient features and objects of the system, as well as sufficient meta-design skills for building coherent and synergistic systems out of constructed hybrid objects. We may not be able to precisely state what this vantage-point is beforehand, but we are able to state some of the key elements in this new view in a way that would be relevant, meaningful, useful and generative.

Relevant: Create a comprehensive and elegant model that will be equally relevant to the general case as well as the particular.

Meaningful: Integrate human and non-human processes into a unified explanation of the apparent teleology in a way that neither privileges the subjective or objective aspect of the story.

Useful: Identify the processes underlying the patterns through which the future unfolds, rather than pre-stating future conditions.

Generative: Understand our situation from the generative processes that ever-advance the universes and biosphere into the near adjacent possible.

The Meaningful Response: A New View of Organizations and Human Action

Last fall we (the two authors of this article) met at a 3-day workshop with Suzanne Cook-Greuter. At the time Jean Trudel was working on expanding a developmental-systems based performance management “balanced scorecard” for one of Canada’s largest wireless communications channel companies. Over five years, Jean had expanded his organizational developmental understanding to include the notion of “holarchical zones” that interpenetrated different thematic issues such as strategies, ego-development, skill set, team performance, management, communications, and cultural orientation. With this model Jean was able to exercise what he called “middle-up/down” management, which requires the middle manager to manage both down as well as manage up the organization. This manager became a kind of “keystone” to the entire organization. However, some of the most advanced and significant material that Jean had in his portfolio seemed to be an awkward fit with his developmental “zone” model. During the winter, the two of us met to try to glean the meaning of those parts that didn’t fit. They seemed like key indicators that Jean was onto an even more comprehensive way of looking at organizations and human action. This was a fortuitous meeting. Bonnitta had been working on the foundations of an integral process ontology. She was able to see that the important “outlying” themes in Jean’s portfolio could not be contained in a system that ran only on a developmental framework. She could see that some of these outlying themes were relevant to processes that were not developmental, but rather were derivative of one or more of the four other generative processes that she had identified as being foundational to an integral process ontology, namely, along with development, construction, evolution, emergence, and autopoietic enactment.

Together, we began to envision a view of organizations and human action that has the capacity to work with, through, and across multiple process narratives. We found that any narrative that appeared in Jean’s portfolio could be framed in terms of one or more of five generative processes—the set of which we fondly refer to as “the G5.”

This new view of organization and human action is based on two fundamental working hypotheses:

1. The 21st Century Organization is a complex hybrid (human and non-human) organism that enacts multiple hybrid objects through five generative processes, striving toward synergy as the organism advances into the near adjacent future through the multiple teleological streams of their tensegral relationships.
2. The ability to align a particular process with the fundamental processes of the biosphere, and to synchronize with their unique teleological imperatives, is key to creating a self-sustaining, ever-advancing, boundlessly innovative enterprise.

The first statement describes a transformational view of organizations, and the second prescribes the role of the transformational leader. The idea is that the situation we are facing is always already here, just as for Ptolemy, the planets always already revolved around the sun—he just couldn’t see it. So, too, for the 21^st century leader, the change is always already happening, and the optimum configuration is always already available—we just can’t see it. But by re-framing each of the organization’s problematic situations in terms of each of the G5, we can begin to build a platform in which the multiple teleological streams that are compelling the situation will reveal their relevant features and key aspects. If, through a set of rigorous rules, we can define these features and aspects as multiple objects, we can make them accessible to inquiry. If in turn we can make these objects specifiable, then we can make them assessable and we can begin to work with them in more conventional ways. To summarize, the G5 offers a re-framing methodology that reveals relevant features of a situation that can be specified by rules and thereby become objects that can be assessed, creating a continuous feedback-feedforward cycle that is generative of human understanding and can also inform action.

The Generative Systems Model : The “G5” – Five Generative Processes

A generative process is a process that prescribes structures. To think in terms of generative process means to see structural parts as arising from processural wholes, the way a seed develops into a plant, the way a forest ecology evolves over time, the way a plasmid emerges from electron activity, or the way a cell autopoietically enacts its own interiority. These are all discrete and non-reducible generative processes that entail unique internal dynamics, give rise to unique types of structural organization, and operate in fundamentally different ways. We have also listed “construction” as a generative process, even though it is usually used as a primitive linear narrative rather than as a generative process. The construction narrative differs from the other generative processes because it is not self-contained or comprehensively self-prescribed, since it  relies on an external force or external dynamics. So for example, if we think of a geodesic dome being constructed, we might find it difficult to see how this could qualify as a generative process. Indeed, constructive processes produce heaps or aggregates, rather than what we commonly refer to as “whole systems”. However, when we include the externalized factors– in this case gravity and the load-bearing properties of the beams—the constructive narrative can be seen to be relevant as a generative process. In fact, as we shall see, the constructive narrative is one of the most valuable frameworks for implementing the G5 in organizational leadership.

The reader will find that we are switching back and forth between calling the G5 generative processes and, alternately, human narratives. This is intentional, because we do not want to privilege either the subjective aspect of the G5 as only a human narrative nor do we want to privilege the objective aspect of the G5 as only an objective phenomenon. Rather, we want the reader to understand the G5 as generative processes in which the subjective and objective interpenetrate. In this sense we might say that generative processes autopoietically enact both their subjective and objective aspects or, alternately, we can say that we choose to see the G5 through an autopoietic narrative in which subjects and objects mutually enact each other. It is important that the reader be able to stretch both ways in order to understand fully what we mean by the G5 and generative process. This is another key feature of the new view we are proposing. This both/and orientation integrates the objective bias of conventional enterprise architecture with the subjective bias of developmental models popular within the integral community. We want to extend this integration to both the “constructive” narrative/process—which is primarily relied upon by objectivist “enterprise architects”, as well as to the “developmental” narrative/process—which is primarily relied upon by subjectivist organizational consultants. In addition, we most certainly do not want to introduce either an objectivist nor subjectivist bias onto the notions of evolutionary, emergent, or autopoietic processes. This notion of the interpenetration of process and narrative is crucial to understanding the innovative view we are attempting to communicate in this paper.

Table 1 summarizes the key features of each of the five generative processes. It shows that each process generates a unique type of order or form in which members are of a characteristic type and share characteristic relational dynamics with each other and throughout the form. We have also found it meaningful and useful to describe each generative process in terms of its distinct and fundamental type of agency which, in turn, allows us to describe each generative process as having a kind of telos, or inherent drive or direction. We are intentionally aware of this table as a set of creative imaginaries that are meaningful and useful in service to the view we are attempting to engage with the reader.

Construction is a process which produces aggregates or heaps. A building is a construction, as is a termite mound and a bicycle. While these examples are physical constructions, there can be abstract or virtual constructions also. The form an argument takes can be constructed from simple to more complex principles, and a common calculator computes constructively. The biblical  story of Genesis, in which an external Creator-God creates the world, is a constructive narrative. When networks are viewed as roads and hubs over which communications, relationships, or digital bandwidth travels, a simple construction process is being utilized to describe the network. (As we will see, there are alternative ways to describe networks.) In each of these instances, there is “work” being added to the system from the outside. This is why it is not terribly convenient to see constructive processes as generative. To do so, we must include the role of the external agent.

It is easy to see that constructive processes create hybrid objects. This is because we construe the external agent as “the subject’ and the product as “the object.” Again we caution the reader not to adopt this conventional dualistic view when regarding construction as a generative process. We want the reader to see the constructive process as generative of hybrid (human and non-human) objects. The term “constructive process” signifies all the aspects of the generative process—the members as well as the (external) agent(s).

The relations among members (aggregates) in a constructive process are “translational” which means that work must be done to navigate between members. For example, the “work” being done in a building is the kinetic work it takes to hold up against the force of gravity. The “translational” work in a linear network is the real or virtual “distance” between members or nodes. A digital calculator or modem ‘translates” great quantities of binomial work at rapid speed.

Finally, the telos of a constructive process can be construed as being the function of the external agent. So a building can be construed as “wanting” or having a telos or drive to function the way the architect and builders intends. The reader should be aware of our non-anthropomorphic use of the words associated with “telos” “drive” “wanting” as we are using them in a cybernetic context.

Development (as every integralist knows) is a process which generates holarchies whose  members are holons that are central agentic individuals. We describe the relations between the member-holons as compositional, by which we mean that the parts relate not individually to each other (as in translating components) but relate together through the context of the whole, as elements in a musical composition or the composition of a work of art relates the parts through consideration of the whole. For us, the key term identifying the telos of development is actualization, which means the realization of potentials. Development then can be said to be a process that generates actuals from potentials through whole-part transformation of the individual. The story of the big bang and the search for the constants of nature, is a narrative of the development of the universe from potentials situated at the “time of the singularity” that are being actualized in universal “time” (which is the same as distance measured as expansion from the singularity). We are mostly familiar with developmental processes that are associated with living organisms, but “things” usually construed as non-living objects, such as crystals, can be seen to be generated through developmental processes. Similarly we use a developmental narrative to describe organizations, how theories develop, cultures, communities, and the like.

It is important to emphasize that development pertains only where an individual central agentic monad can be construed. So when talking about an organization developing, we are talking about the organization as a single entity, by subsuming all of its parts under the notion of a single entity. However, if we look at an organization as a kind of ecology of multiple departments, then we must adopt another process narrative—ideally, in this case, evolutionary processes.

Evolution  is a process that entails a plurality of agents. Evolutionary processes generate ecologies. But this gets rather tricky. The individual agents in the ecology are not the members of an evolutionary process. An ecology, evolves on a different scale and level, and is like a standing pattern dynamic through which individual agents come and go, are born, develop, and die. Individuals develop, but species or communities adapt through complex, non-linear engagements that are both internal and external to the communities, internal and external to the environments, but that are all “internal” to the evolving ecology.  Therefore it is important not to think of the members of an evolutionary process as particulars, but rather as processural derivatives, or pattern dynamics. These pattern dynamics have been identified in the literature of Resilience Theory as phases in a panarchy cycle. These phases are illustrated and described below:

* Г—phase of growth where species and cultures grow and diversify to exploit new opportunities and develop entirely new ecological ways of being.

* Κ—phase of conservation, where climax species are tightly connected and organized, and ecologies and cultures stabilize into mature, often hierarchically nested systems, where there is little or no room for innovation or growth.

* Ω—phase of release (the “backside” of the mobius strip) where mature systems destabilize and collapse, and become increasingly discontinuous and chaotic which opens the field for

* α—phase of reorganization in completely new ways, which creates a new field of conditions and possibilities for the next growth phase.

Because the panarchy phases cycle, the relations between them can be described as transitional or successional. While it is true that there are extinction events, the telos of an evolutionary process is to produce diversity and novelty or, in other words, evolution is generative of diverse and novel forms. The agency of an evolutionary process is distributed collectively as adaptation. So as an ecology cycles through panarchy phases, the phases (members) transition or succeed each other, and the agency is provided by and distributed throughout the ecology collectively as adaptation. Again, we should neither privilege the subjective nor objective aspect of this adaptative agency, since the biosphere-as- agent is a