The New Sciences

I argue in “Managing Leadership” that leadership from within is an organizational asset - a characteristic of the group, not its individuals - that arises with the formation of a group with a corporate purpose, and that develops over time. Many readers have observed that this reminds them of emergent theory, complexity theory, and various other of the new sciences, which describe the automatic generation, under certain circumstances, of complex systems from apparently unordered, chaotic beginnings.

This is an intriguing idea, but I think it is important that we be very careful about the assumptions we make about human organization from sciences such as subatomic quantum physics, chemistry, botany, and even animal studies. Unfortunately, there are books on the market by management consultants, and even by scientists, which fail to take this care, and which draw broad and unwarranted lessons from the findings of these sciences about how we should organize and manage our organizations. Some of these can get quite dreamy-eyed and vague, yet declaim that the “patriarchal” organizational designs and management systems of the “Newtonian” era are over forever, and that we must now find ways to enable our organizations to find their own logic and path in the world.

This, of course, is nonsense. Organizations are created to fulfill specific purposes established by their founders. We don’t start up organizations to create independent life, like Frankenstein building a monster. We found them to help us unify the actions of large numbers of people to accomplish ends none of could on our own.

Yet, management is a complex field that can sometimes be difficult to conceptualize. It is here that examples from other fields, including the new sciences, can help us by providing insights and, in particular, metaphors that enable us to visualize the aims we are trying to accomplish in the management of our organizations. It is important, though, to remember that these are metaphors - not examples or standards - and also to avoid overburdening these metaphors so that they lose their ability to convey insight to our efforts.

For example, years ago a consulting firm ran a series of ads showing schools of fish forming into amazing shapes, and visually demonstrating various brief lessons about organizational change. As it happens there is a lot of study about how things like flocks of birds and schools of fish form, change shape and direction, and how and why all the individual members so flawlessly and instantaneously accomplish these maneuvers. And, as the consulting firm’s advertisement indicates, some are attempting to determine if there are lessons in this science to help our large, complex organizations become similarly nimble and agile, able to respond with effortless precision and synchronized organizational unity to rapidly evolving events.

But, of course, that’s not how real life works. These formations operate on the basis of a few simple rules regarding distance and position which all members of the schools and flocks maintain with respect to each other. Thus, when a few members react to a feeding opportunity or to a threat, the entire formation wheels around their initiative with an apparent will and verve that, actually, doesn’t exist. It creates sometimes breathtaking visuals, but it is generated by a mechanical compliance with simple rules - not with vision or conscious will. These are not smart organizations. They don’t create an extra-individual entity that sentiently perceives and interacts with its environment on a different level than its members.

It nevertheless is intriguing to see the evolutionary adaptability, benefiting both the group as a whole and its individuals, that can be created by this phenomenon. There is indeed both a global and a local benefit created by these local interactions. This can more clearly be seen in certain ant colonies which, operating according to a similar limited set of preprogrammed simple instructions, employ a division of labor according to the needs of the moment. This division of labor ensures that tasks necessary to the health and survival of the colony as a whole, as well as to its members, are performed when and where necessary. But we must recall that these individual ants lack the resources and individual scope of behavior that higher order creatures possess. It is certainly possible that this remarkable group behavior generated by local individual acts is not a clue to how we can better organize ourselves, but rather is a caution of what soulless depths we could fall to if we (as we too often do in the management sciences) attempt to supplant our free will and judgment with “sure-fire” mechanical templates and checklists for the behavior of our own organizations and of ourselves acting within them.

So, shall we learn from nature or not? And if so, what lessons should we draw? In my next book, I will offer a review of these sciences, and of their real and purported relevance to management; I’m working on that chapter now. But here, I will offer a review of a book that is wonderfully insightful, useful, and thought-provoking for students and practitioners of management (and all practitioners of management should also be students of it). That’s coming up next.