Emergent Order

The Key Affiliates team recently changed the New Order Cluster name to Emerging Order. The change was made because a google search shows the these days New Order is mostly associated with conspiracy theories.

Click the title to this post to view a video which gives a good example of how a new order can be created through providing people the right environment and resources to support their values. The new order emerges through the natural process of self-organisation. It is this mechanism which led us to use the new term: Emerging Order.

Progress

"The art of progress is making things ever more simple through increased complexity." -- Paul Chippendale

How we live our values

How we live our values matters much more than what values we have. Because we live in a society, we cannot live our values any way we want! In fact, the very nature of our society is shaped by how we live our values. This sentiment is expressed beautifully in the following quote:

...morality is not just about how we treat each other; it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. [The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, JONATHAN HAIDT -- Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia]

Ethical Organisational Change

For change to occur within organisations, people need to make different choices in familiar situations. Since values lie behind all our choices, this means people need to undergo a values shift. For a values shift to occur, people's world-view must change. The diagram below shows the main things which shape a person's world-view:

Apart from changing people in the organisation for others with the desired values, the fastest way of shifting people's world-view is through deliberately provoking a "significant emotive event" in their life -- brain washing techniques are an extreme example of this. If you think your organisation would never resort to these techniques, think again! The question we must ask is, are organisational change techniques which deliberately provoke "significant emotive events" in their people, ethical?

The debate around this issue could rage on for years, however, the debate can be completely side stepped. How? Well it turns out that, though creating significant emotive events is a very effective way of modifying a person's world-view, those provoking the event have no control whatsoever over how the person's world-view will change. If you cannot control the outcome, then what's the point of employing the technique?

How can I be so sure that you cannot control the outcome? Well it's a basic principle of chaos theory. When you provoke a significant emotive event in a person's life, you create a bifurcation in their meaning-system (i.e. the way they made sense of the world up to know is broken down -- bifurcated!). The brain's system of making sense of the world -- it's meaning system -- is as about as complex as system as you can get -- in fact it might very well be the most complex system in the universe. Chaos theory tells us that when a bifurcation occurs in any complex non-linear system (not just the most complex in the universe) no one can predict the outcome.

So this means, if you deliberately provoke a significant emotive event in a person's life in order to impact on their world-view, you have no control over, nor any way of predicting, what new world-view they will have after the event -- how useless then is this as a technique for organisational change?

What does work as both an effective and an ethical means of world-view modification? The answer: "Use a combination of dialogue, experiential learning, and structural change."

To be continued...

Happiness

Principle: Happiness comes from our developed ability to control the flow of our conscious mind.

One strategy to achieve this: Is to continually seek to increase the challenges in living our values with a commensurate increase in skills.

Decisions

Principle: We make decisions based on our identity.

Rationale: We make decisions based on our values. Our values come from our world-view (our beliefs, and knowledge about the world in which we live). We channel our dialogue between our inner and the outer world through our values. Thus our identity is manifest through our values.

About Principles

The type of principles covered here are those which guide our behaviour. They are about the nature of things, they are descriptors about how we believe "things work". For example, the new field of neuro-economics tells us that when people believe we trust them, they actually become more trustworthy (read more). So, if we want the community to become more trustworthy, we have to give the message that we already trust the people in the community.