THE environment does not ex-sist: engendering ‘boundary’ as the object of psychoanalytic study

 drive functioning, ethical challenge, objects, quantum organisation, three 'cuts'  No Responses »
Jan 052013
 

This is the abstract of a paper proposed for the 2013 Paris Conference – Reworking Lacan at Work.  The term ‘ex-sist’ is used to emphasize the Latin derivation of ‘exist’ from ex-(s)istere, to stand outside (in contradistinction to ‘insist’).

Doing many different things at the same time
Psychoanalytic understanding is becoming essential to the study of work, management and organizations. The growing importance of ‘networks’ requires a concept of ‘boundary’ that points towards a different understanding of the psychoanalytic object in the study of organizations. A familiar example of a network organization is a clinic that must focus on the particular demands of its patients’ conditions. The tempo at which such a clinic operates determines the number of patients it is expected to have in treatment at the same time. If it is to be outcome-driven, the clinic must respond at this tempo by being able to align a different care pathway for each patient [1]. This ability to do many different things at the same time is not unique to healthcare organizations. It necessitates a shift in an organization’s locus of innovation from supply to demand [2]. In the place of markets comes a focus on the particular demands of customers within their contexts-of-use [3].

This focus means that the organization must place greater emphasis on its ability to create new forms of collaboration in order to create new propositions. It must adopt ‘shaping strategies’ that focus on ecosystems within which networks of organizations become the new economic ‘entities’ shaping competition [4]. With this comes ‘relationship economics’ organized around the particular context in which the demand arises [5]. Within these ecosystems, task systems become increasingly modular, aligned to customers’ demands through contractual networks [6]. These networks are increasingly independent of institutional boundaries, creating dynamic complementarities between them [7]. Horizontal task linkages become stronger than vertical ‘institutional’ linkages, producing the emergent models characteristic of complex adaptive systems [8]. These ecosystems are experienced by an organization as turbulent [9], the ‘effective complexity’ [10] of emergent models describing the extent of the complexity that an organization must take into consideration in choosing how to act.

Power is exercised differently in Networks
But not all organizations behave like outcome-focused clinics, using networks to do many different things at the same time in order to relate to their customers one-by-one. They more typically do one thing at a time for many different customers. They use hierarchy to impose a particular model on the way they capture value within chosen markets, this model defining the basis of their competitive advantage [11]. And while organizations may attempt to use hierarchies to consolidate positions while also using networks to address the challenges of complexity and change [12], this is difficult in practice because of the dynamic tension created between radically different approaches [13]. While the exercise of power by hierarchies is unipolar and defines what subordinates should do, the exercise of power within networks is multipolar, and enables different actors in the network to act from different understandings of what needs to be attended to. The radical difference is in how the models are authorized, that is whether authorization comes from a pre-existent model in hierarchies or from a particular chosen relation to a current local situation in networks.

With networks, the model that is read into the local situation is contingent upon the particular observer’s relation to what-is-going-on in that situation. But more than this, with a psychoanalytic understanding not all of what-is-going-on is observable even for those present. The observer experiences an absence or ‘lack’ in the situation. This presence of an absence ‘ex-sists’ in the sense of standing beyond or outside what can be said to be present, rendering the patient or customer subject of their demand [14]. The paper argues that the observer’s experience of what-is-going-on in the situation exhibits two different kinds of ontic distinction, homologous with Lacan’s sexuation formula [15].

Engendering ‘boundary’
The first of these distinctions is between behaviours that are singular, and behaviours that are symptomatic of some underlying model. ‘Primary task’ is a way of speaking about an underlying model that is necessary to an organization’s survival [16]. The second is between the singular and symptomatic behaviours in the particular situation, and the contexts in which those behaviours produce their effects. This second distinction defines a ‘boundary’ between behaviour and context, with context there always being that which ex-sists i.e. stands outside or beyond. Thus while the relation to each context constitutes a particular outside or beyond, these contexts do not add up collectively to an environment in general. It is in this sense that THE Environment does not ex-sist i.e. there is no universal environment, only particular environments. This second distinction therefore introduces an ‘engendering’ of the concept of ‘boundary’, establishing a difference between hierarchy and network.[17] A hierarchy acts unilaterally as if there is an environment in general, while a network acts multi-laterally in relation to particular environments.

Psychoanalytic understanding brings its own clinical concepts, practices and particular focus on what enables interventions to be effective [18]. Its focus is on the role of the individual within an organization, or on the organization as if it were itself an individual. Understanding the organization as hierarchical enables its ‘boundary’ to be used to constitute the organization as an object [19]. The paper describes the difficulties that arise in adopting this approach to making sense of the concept of ‘boundary’ within networks, and proposes the alternative engendering of ‘boundary’ as itself an object of psychoanalytic study.

On being, moved by the ex-sistent ‘more’
Psychoanalytic understanding also leads us to engage in a double reading of our relation to what we observe [18]. Implicit in the two distinctions is a third distinction concerning the ways in which what-is-going-on is or is not observable, constraining the ways in which it may be paid attention to [20]. The paper argues that to engender ‘boundary’ is to recognise that there is always an ex-sistent ‘more’ to be paid attention to, providing a basis for a critical approach to organization on the basis of its relation to ‘lack’ [21]. The paper concludes that the engendering of ‘boundary’ allows us to understand the radical difference between hierarchy and network in terms of a psychoanalytic object that is constitutive of the relation to desire.

References
1. Porter, M.E. and E.O. Teisberg, Redefiining Health Care: Creating Value-based Competition on Results. 2006, Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
2. Prahalad, C.K. and V. Ramaswamy, The New Frontier of Experience Innovation. MIT-Sloan Management Review 44, 4, 2003: p. 12-18.
3. Anderson, C., The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. 2006, New York: Hyperion.
4. Iansiti, M. and R. Levien, The Keystone Advantage: What the New Dynamics of Business Ecosystems Mean for Strategy, Innovation, and Sustainability. 2004, Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
5. Zuboff, S. and J. Maxmin, The Support Economy: Why Corporations are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. 2002, New York: Viking.
6. Baldwin, C.Y., Where do Transactions come from? Modularity, transactions, and the boundaries of firms. Industrial and Corporate Change, 2007.
7. Aoki, M., Mechanisms of Endogenous Institutional Change, 2006, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research: Stanford.
8. Kurtz, C.F. and D.J. Snowden, The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world. IBM Systems Journal Vol 42 No 3, 2003: p. http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/423/kurtz.html.
9. Emery, F.E. and E. Trist, The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments. Human Relations, 1965. 18: p. 21-32.
10. Gell-Mann, M. and S. Lloyd, Effective Complexity, in Nonextensive Entropy – Interdusciplinary Applications, M. Gell-Mann and C. Tsallis, Editors. 2003, Oxford University Press. p. 387-397.
11. Porter, M.E., Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. 1985, New York: Free Press.
12. Kotter, J.P., Accelerate! Harvard Business Review, 2012(November).
13. Boisot, M. and B. McKelvey, Integrating Modernist and Postmodernist Perspectives on Organizations: A Complexity Science Bridge. Academy of Management Review, 2010. 35(3): p. 415-433.
14. Fink, B., The Lacanian Subject: between language and jouissance. 1995: Princeton University Press.
15. Lacan, J., ed. On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Book XX Encore 1972-1973. Originally published by Editions du Seuil, Paris 1975 ed. The Seminar of Jaques Lacan, ed. J.-A. Miller. 1998, W.W. Norton.
16. Miller, E.J. and A.K. Rice, Systems of Organization: The Control of Task and Sentient Boundaries. 1967, London: Tavistock.
17. Using the word ‘engender’ invokes its male form ‘to beget’, its female form ‘to conceive or bear’, and in the form of male and female acting together ‘to give existence to’.
18. Arnaud, G., The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Organization Studies and Management: An Overview. Organization Studes, 2012. 33(9): p. 1121-1135.
19. Armstrong, D., Organization in the Mind: Psychoanalysis, Group Relations, and Organizational Consultancy. The Tavistock Clinic Series, ed. R. French. 2005, London: Karnac.
20. Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On a discourse that might not be a semblance 1971. 2003: Unpublished.
21. Stavrakakis, Y., The Lacanian Left: psychoanalysis, theory, politics. 2007, New York: SUNY Press

The Quantum Metaphor III – working without boundaries

 quantum organisation  No Responses »
Sep 262012
 

From the perspective of its managers, a clinic has a clear boundary defined by its physical location, the layout of its premises and its relationships to its suppliers – the ‘classical’ view of an organisation with which the concept of ‘boundary’ (or ‘perimeter’) is associated.  But from the perspective of its clinicians it is not clear that the clinic has boundaries – or rather the boundary is different for each patient, i.e. is experienced as an edge. This reflects the fact that the clinician, in order to address the needs of any one patient’s condition, must organise a complex collaboration with other clinicians, various healthcare providers, members of the patient’s family and quite possibly research into latest treatments and clinical trials. This is the East-West orientation of the clinician that must be balanced with the North-South concerns of resource administration, leading to the challenges within healthcare of managing East-West dominance).

‘Working without boundaries’ refers therefore to the breakdown of the ‘classical’ view of the organisation as a single entity with a set of relationships to its environment that can be characterised globally; to be replaced with working within an ecosystem across multiple edges, each with its particular multi-sided demands. Below I apply the quantum metaphor to the clinic’s situation, outline its analytical consequences for modeling value, and consider the implications of working without boundaries for the notions of strategy ceiling and architecture.

Applying the quantum metaphor to the clinician’s situation
Within the tempo at which the clinic works with its patients’ conditions, it is as if the clinic shape-shifts as it takes up a relation to each patient, the agility of the clinic itself being  characterised by the ‘superposition’ of the full variety of possible states it can occupy within its healthcare ecosystem.[1],[2]  The experience of this ‘shape-shifting’ is the ‘working without boundaries’ that is characterised by the Quantum Metaphor.  Taking up a particular state represents a ‘collapse’ of the clinic’s  superposition of possible states,[3] the difference between the ‘classical’ and ‘quantum’ views being whether this collapse appears to establish a decoherence[4] that is global across time periods, or is just a dynamic consequence of its interactions with a particular local environment.[5]  So what is meant here by ‘collapse’?

My PhD on modeling value within ecosystems put forward a ‘triply articulated’ method of conceptual modelling. Two of these articulations were  to represent the many possible composite states that could be taken up by the relationships between the different organisational entities within an ecosystem.  This was a double articulation of the relationships possible between social constraints and technical behaviours, revealing the extent to which their states at any one time were under-determined (i.e. superposed).[6]  Looked at in this way, the clinic and those with whom it collaborated were like a huge box of lego bricks, including half-disassembled structures and special shapes.  Each time the clinician encountered a patient, the clinician had to construct a model of patient, clinic and collaboration that could structure the patient’s care in a way that created indirect value for the patient i.e. value within the larger multi-sided context of the patient’s life.  This structure-determining role of the clinician was what generated the ‘collapse’ of the ‘superposed’ states.[7]  The relation it established to what-was-valued was the third articulation of value representing the ways in which value was experienced by particular stakeholders – in this case the patient.  What is meant by ‘collapse’, then, is the particular articulation of value ascribed to a given stakeholder defined as a ‘coherence frame’ local to the patient-clinic relationship.[8]

Analytical consequences for modeling value
Triply articulated modeling of an ecosystem brings together a double articulation of its possible states and their relationships, a referential articulation of different possible ways in which value may be experienced, and different ways in which the former may be aligned to the latter.  In effect, this is a conceptual model of the different ways in which a system of systems may be entangled with different local environments.  Working within a given tempo of interaction with its local environments, probability distributions can be attached to the variety of different ways in which value may be experienced, and used (through montecarlo methods for example) to generate distributions of patterns of usage across the system of systems. Associating costs with these original and derived distributions then enables a distribution of total expenditure to be calculated (curve ‘a’ below):

If an investment is made changing the ways a system of systems may be entangled, its potential impact may be to alter this distribution (for example in curve ‘b’ above).  The return on this investment will then be the change in the range of potential expenditures.[9]

Implications for the notions of strategy ceiling and architecture
The analysis of ‘strategy ceiling‘ creates a sequence of four approaches to integrating increasingly differentiated behaviours -  operational, professional, positional and relational – as the causal texture of the demand environment becomes increasingly complex. In the second and third of these, senior management retains a priori assumptions about what form of global relation the organisation will sustain in relation to its environment (the first being where a business model first gets tested).  But in the fourth relational approach there are no such a priori assumptions, the identity of the organisation being emergent[10] from its ways of interacting with its local environments. The architectural consequences of this lead to a need for platform architectures, open source competition, and distributed or collaborative forms of leadership.  The following figure shows how this sequence of four relates to the quantum metaphor:[11]

The entrepreneur sees an opportunity in the local environment amongst multi-sided demands, but has to start with a particular business model (1) e.g. starting a clinical practice. As this business grows,  one possibility is to capture economies of scale through specialisation by taking up a one-sided relation to demand (2) e.g specialising in a particular kind of treatment.  If successful, this model in turn can be adapted to different markets delivering economies of scope (3) e.g. providing several different kinds of treatment, each addressing a different market niche.  The crunch comes when, in order to stay competitive, it has to vary how it aligns services to demand, depending on the particular context in which the demand arises, in order to deliver economies of alignment – a ‘crunch’, because this involves moving from a ‘classical’ to a ‘quantum’ understanding of its organisation (4) e.g. becoming accountable for the long-term outcome of particular patients’ treatments.  The other possibility, of course, is that the practice avoids going after pursuing scalable efficiencies (the 2-3-4 route), instead going directly for scalable learning[12] (5) e.g developing an approach to patients’ treatment based on the through-life outcomes from their condition.[13]

The point of the quantum metaphor in understanding what makes the relational approach different is this convergence of the need for economies of alignment with the ability to scale learning. Both are needed to compete in this environment in which the classical notion of ‘boundary’ no longer applies, their relationship being dependent on a quantum understanding of organisation and value.

Notes
[1] State: The state of a system of systems from the perspective of its environment is a geometry-of-use – a particular composite pattern of interoperation between its constituent systems.
[2] Superposition: borrowing from the definition of a quantum superposition -  superposition holds that a system-of-systems exists partly in all its particular, theoretically possible states simultaneously; but, when measured within any given coherence frame, it gives a result corresponding to only one of the possible configurations.
[3] Collapse: A system-of-systems initially in a superposition of several different possible states appears to reduce to a single one of those states after interaction with a particular environment, the observer being a particular form of environment. The nature of the collapse depends on the particular nature of the observer’s or environment’s entanglement with the system-of-systems.
[4] Decoherence: coherence refers to the relatedness of a system-of-systems to its environment,  decoherence being the loss of this relatedness.
[5] Global versus Local Environment: There are many ways in which a system-of-systems may be entangled with its environment.  To the extent that the its state collapses differently when observed in different environments, the system-of-systems may be said to be entangled with different local environments.  It does not follow from knowledge of this entanglement/collapse in different local environments that the global state of the system-of-systems may be known.
[6] To be over-determined means that the technology itself imposes a ‘collapse’ – the potential for the superposition of potential states in a system of systems is thus bound up with the way software is used – a point made in from race against machine to race with the machine.
[7] This structure-determining role refers to the way the clinician brings about the collapse of superposed states in the system-of-system’s relationship to the local environment that is the patient’s condition within the context of the patient’s life.  Structure-determining roles are circular in nature (‘triadic’ in terms of Peircian logic), the dynamics of the situation determining the state of the system-of-system’s relation to it through the mediating effects of the observer-clinician.  These are modeled as c-type, K-type and P-type relations.
[8] Global versus Local Coherence Frame: A coherence frame is the frame of reference within which the relatedness of a system-of-systems to its environment may be observed.  Whether or not the coherence frame is global with respect to a system-of-systems depends on how local observations correlate with each other.
[9] This analysis examines the total cost of aligning behaviours to a variety of different multi-sided demands at a given tempo (for example, the total cost of interdicting fleeting targets in a military theater, or the total costs of responding to citizens’ queries within changing domains of interest). In the cases where this analysis has been done (detailed in evaluating platform architectures) savings of the order of 30% to 50% have been identified by investing in increasing agility within a given ecosystem.
[10] See footnote [6] in ‘when should critical realists care about drive functioning‘.This emergence is weak emergence, being a side-effect of trying to explain the local interactions within a ‘classical’ frame of reference.
[11] This is described in leadership terms in tempo, entanglement and East-West dominance.
[12] ‘Scalable learning‘ is a characteristic of the ‘pull’ economy, written about by John Hagel and John Seely Brown in The Power of Pull.  If delivering economies of alignment becomes possible with agile infrastructures, scalable learning becomes necessary for those at the edges to make effective use of the infrastructures.
[13] To understand scalable learning we have to engage with triple-loop learning and the economy of leadership within which such learning can take place.

The Quantum Metaphor II – North-South vs East-West dominance

 quantum organisation  No Responses »
Sep 132012
 

Another thing that it has proved very difficult to grasp has been the difference between directed and collaborative systems of systems.[1] In the case of the directed system-of-systems, the formation of the system-of-systems may be under the direction of a single enterprise or a contracted (prime) entity [2],  but with collaborative systems-of-systems this is not the case – the way systems can be brought together by users is no longer under the direction of a single entity.  How does this change the architect’s task?

In practice, even ‘green-field’ directed systems-of-systems are then deployed into environments in which they are expected to interoperate with systems-already-in-the-field in ways never anticipated by their designers.  So in-the-field, everything begins to look like a collaborative system-of-systems, as evidenced for example in the introduction to a special issue on evolving critical systems, in which ‘entanglement’ and ‘increased evolution tempo’ are put forward as game changers in the processes of design.  More recently, this issue has begun to be addressed in the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge under the rubric of the ‘Extended Enterprise’ in Enterprise Systems Engineering, and ‘collaborative’ or ‘virtual’ Systems of Systems.  But what makes this issue so challenging to address? Why has it taken so long to recognise the different kind of engineering challenge that these collaborative systems-of-systems present?

When considered  under the Quantum Metaphor, this begins to be apparent. If we think of the system S as made up of a number of systems Si, Sii and so on, then a ‘directed’ approach to bringing them together as a system-of-systems will be based on a one-sided approach to the environment E i.e. the sovereign entity A will define those aspects of the environment that will be relevant within a ‘classical’ worldview (all systems within one enterprise on the left – a ‘directed’ system-of-systems, multiple enterprises on the right – an ‘acknowledged’ system-of-systems):

But a relation to demand that is multi-sided at a given tempo means that each relationship to demand will select different states of the system-of-systems, i.e. the multi-sidedness of the particular relationships means that they select the ‘local’ nature of the system-of-systems. If we accept that the way some of the local relationships select states of the system are correlated, so that there is a limited variety of local states, then under the quantum metaphor, these different local states will involve different selections of states of the individual systems.  For example multi-sided environment E{2,3} will select system-of-systems S{i,ii,iii,vi} (as in the clinic managing a number of different complex combinations of care pathways in relation to different patient conditions):

Again, this presents the accountability system with a new kind of challenge – to track not only multiple forms of environment, but also multiple forms of alignment of systems-of-systems.  Why?  Because under the quantum metaphor, the state of S as a whole cannot be derived from SiSiiSiii… etc independently of their environment because of the differing effects of entanglement and selection on each of the separate systems.

So in order to be able to say something about the whole, it is necessary to describe[3]

  • the different forms of entanglement between system and sub-environment,
  • the different ways in which different sub-environments suppress different states of the system-of-systems,
  • the relationship between different distributions of sub-environment and corresponding distributions of states of the system-of-systems, and
  • to establish metrics across all of these in order to be able to quantify value.

The point, of course, is that within a given tempo of operations, the system-as-a-whole is dealing with probability distributions of ‘quantum’ states of the system-of-systems selected by different sub-environments presenting different forms of multi-sided demand.  The accountability systems can no longer be identified solely with the supplier – they have to be able to derive the benefit to the supplier from an understanding of the dynamic behaviour of the multi-sided demands with which it is interacting within a larger ecosystem – a shift from working within a single ‘global’ coherence frame to working within multiple ‘local’ coherence frames.  In the following diagram, this is related back to the ‘North-South’ versus ‘East-West’ perspectives – the former, being ‘classical’, leaves the complexity associated with different forms of local coherence to a Faustian process; the latter, having to deal with a ‘quantum’ understanding of aligning systems with local environments, has to develop new ways of managing value.  So for example, S{v} is a complementor that has to collaborate with other complementors in two different ways (S{iv,v,vi,vii} and S{v,vi,vii,i}) in order to support two different kinds of customer situation – E{7,8} and E{9,10,1}, while the role of AS becomes one of providing the platform strategy that makes this possible: [4]

In the case of the clinic example, the different kinds of customer situation are different kinds of patient condition demanding different kinds of treatment strategy (i.e. collaborating treatments within multiple episodes of care) through the life of the patient’s condition, and the platform strategy is one that enables this variety of treatment strategies to be held accountable for their through-life effects on patients’ conditions.[5]

Notes
[1] This distinction is discussed for example in Evaluating platform architectures within ecosystems, Supporting social complexity in collaborative enterprises, Ideologies of Architecture, or in Architectures that integrate differentiated behaviours.  The difficulty appears to be in letting go of the need for a single coordinating enterprise responsible for the whole – the need for a sovereign entity.
[2] With ‘Directed’ or ‘Acknowledged’ systems-of-systems there is a single entity responsible for delivering the performance of the whole (e.g. a defence system or the UK national patient record system that was). But the essence of a ‘Collaborative’ system-of-systems (for example the platform architectures of iPhone or Android), is that it leaves the user to assemble their own combination of services on the platform. See Designing collaborative systems of systems in support of multi-sided markets, or Evaluating platform architectures within ecosystems.
[3] This was the methodological challenge taken up by my PhD thesis – Evaluating platform architectures within ecosystems: modeling the supplier’s relation to indirect value.
[4] The “new ways of managing value” refers to [3] and the importance of indirect value in these multi-sided environments and of the platform architectures needed to capture it.
[5] As I did with colleagues for the UK’s NHS orthotics clinics, and in recommendations to increase the responsiveness of e-Government (on this latter project, see also Building Multi-Sidedness into Tomorrow’s Systems through Projective Analysis).

The Quantum Metaphor I – the asymmetries

 quantum organisation, three 'cuts'  No Responses »
Sep 062012
 

I have expended a great deal of effort in trying to elucidate the difference between (for example) positional and relational strategies, North-South dominant and East-West dominant approaches to leadership, one-sided and multi-sided understandings of the nature of demand, and triple- and double-loop approaches to learning. It all makes sense, but who really cares about this stuff?

Experience working with these ideas within organisations  – for example in health care, manufacturing, professional services, and government – has shown the extraordinary difficulty of taking up these ideas in practice.  Not only difficulty but often active ‘resistance’ in the sense that clients choose to turn a blind eye to all the issues raised until easier to deal with. So even when people care, why is this stuff so very hard to tackle in practice?

For a long time now I have proceeded on the assumption that better explanation, better methods and better communication would overcome these difficulties.  But my experience in the context of particular consulting assignments is that this may be necessary, but is by no means sufficient.  There is something more to be understood that underlies this difficulty. Two examples come to mind:

  • the first involved a chemicals business making the material for containers.  Top management’s assumption was that R&D would develop products that the business would then sell.  What actually happened was that each customer wanted a different product matching their particular needs for containing their products (e.g. food, drinks, meals).  The product of the business became the research and quality control supporting each customer.  Before it became a top-performing business within the larger group, its chief executive had a nervous breakdown trying to hold the tension between what the larger group expected, and what the business actually needed to do – a breakdown caused by the incommensurability of the two business logics – a push logic in the larger group, and a pull logic for the business itself.[1]
  • the second involved Orthotics clinics within the UK’s National Health Service.[2]  An approach to restructuring these clinics was developed so that the patients’ conditions could be managed through through their lives within the context of each individual patient’s life.  A number of clinics in different Trust environments proved to the satisfaction of the UK Treasury that for every £1 spent on Orthotics services, the NHS would save £4.  But the changes did not even survive in their pathfinder sites.  The approach to change was judged to be incommensurable with the approach to change being used across the rest of the NHS.  Again, people’s lives were damaged, not least of whom were those of patients.

So what might the ‘something more’ be?  I think it is that an hierarchical view of an organisation (what is later referred to as ‘classical’) involves a one-sided relationship to demand – the unit of organisation is designed to behave predictably independently of its environment.  But an organisation designed to support multi-sided demands must not only treat each demand at its edges as different, but must also do so in a way that is dynamically responsive to the situation in which the demand arises – it has to be designed to do things in a way that can only be predicted if the dynamics of the environment in which this is happening is known.  Such an organisation is inherently complex (not just more complicated[3]), cannot be held accountable in the same ways as an hierarchical organisation, must be as good at collaborating as it is at competing[4], and must deal with detail at a much finer level of granularity.  Managing such a business is like stepping into an alternate reality that uses business network models that are as different from existing hierarchical corporate models as quantum realities are to classical realities.  Instead of dealing with well-defined aggregations of performance, individual differences have to be managed in ways that are driven by the particular and individual contexts-of-use.  This is what leads to the incommensurability – the behaviour of the one-sided hierarchical aggregations follow different rules to the behaviour of the individual multi-sided relationships.

The Quantum Reality

In classical reality, you can know where a thing is and you can separate it out from other things in order to deal with it.  In a quantum reality, not only is there not a ‘thing’, but there is in its place a probability distribution of many possible states (superposition of states). This nature of this distribution is itself entangled with other distributions of states in its environment that affect each other in ways that defy classical explanation.  True, this entanglement may result in aggregations of quantum states behaving as classical ‘things’ because of the ways in which they suppress multiple (superpositioned) states to present singular states qua ‘things’ through a process of environment-induced suppression (einselection).  And a distribution of states taking up a singular state may be brought about by a process of decoherence with respect to the environment with which it is entangled, raising the question of within what coherence frame is something to be known about a system i.e. within what ‘non-local’ context.  From this perspective, a classical reality emerges from an underlying quantum reality.[5]

Something of the strangeness of this quantum reality can be seen in this YouTube – a quantum view of the world – which speaks of the underlying nature of the world as being all relationships and not things. [6] The ‘incommensurability’ then is that the behaviour of the one-sided aggregations follow a different (classical) logic to the (quantum) logic of individual multi-sided relationships. So how does this quantum metaphor apply to our understanding of organisations?

The Quantum metaphor

We can think of the decoherence of quantum effects as being produced by the accountability systems of an enterprise’s sovereign hierarchy, exercising control and accountability over the behaviours of its task systems in order to bring about a ‘classical’ reality.  On the basis of these aggregating effects, generalisations can be made about the particular behaviours of the enterprise in its environment.  The classical reality is constituted by those behaviours that are measured by the enterprise’s accountability systems, the consequences of which are a one-sided relationship to the enterprise’s environment.  This understanding of the enterprise makes the accountability system AS a part of the enterprise system S in a one-sided relation to its environment E i.e. the enterprise system defines its environment:

But what happens when the enterprise system is interacting with different subsystems within its environment, each one of which is demanding the enterprise to behave differently because of the multi-sided nature of the context with which the enterprise is interacting?  Consider the enterprise to be a clinic responding to different patients’ conditions.  We can think of each patient’s multi-sided context as selecting one particular state of the clinic consistent with the nature of their condition.  Using the metaphor of einselection, we can think of the ‘agility’ of the clinic as its ability to be in different states for different patients at the same time (i.e. within a given tempo of response to the environment), these different states being thought of as the enterprise system exhibiting a number of quantum states with some probability distribution:

But what does this do to the previous classical assumptions built into the accountability system?  In effect, the ‘whole’ enterprise system can no longer be defined in a way that is independent of the different environmental subsystems with which it is interacting – to understand what kinds of agility it is or can be capable of, the accountability system has to be able to superpose the multiple states constituted by the enterprise system’s multiple relations within its larger ecosystem. Understood in this way, the sovereign hierarchy of the enterprise has been forced to surrender sovereignty to its different relationships with its different customers to the extent that it has to respond to those customers’ particular contexts i.e. has been forced to take on multi-sided relationships with its environment.  This may be for reasons of competitive survival or for the public good, but either way, the enterprise has to be able to deal with the particular ‘local’ characteristics of each individual demand.  From the perspective of the sovereign hierarchy, its agile task systems can no longer deal in certainties, but rather must manage across a range of probable varieties of relationships with sub-environments. This is the analogue of the quantum reality – the multi-sidedness of the particular relationships means that they select the ‘local’ nature of the enterprise within a larger ecosystem.[7]  The accountability system can still make generalisations, but they have to be made from a different place i.e. as a part of the environment of the enterprise system, and expressed in terms of ‘local’ multi-sided relationships within the context of the particular nature of their relationship to their local contexts i.e. within local ‘coherence frames’:

In practice there may be correlations between sub-environments in the way they select local states of the enterprise, so that multi-sided markets may emerge for particular kinds of multi-sided relationship (represented here for example as composite sub-environments E{7,8,1}. In our clinic, these multi-sided markets would correspond to closely related patient conditions amenable to similar treatment strategies:

It is in this sense that the notion of an enterprise moves from being based on a classical hierarchy to one based on the superposition of a number of different states for a given tempo of responsiveness to its environment, with all its implications for the agility of the enterprise’s infrastructures, and the need to shift the focus from the enterprise to its ecosystem.

Observing behaviours

Finally, the relationships of the enterprise to its environment, whether one-sided or multi-sided, will be constrained by the way its behaviours are embodied, i.e. by the nature of those behaviours it claims to be its own.  The following ‘ontic’ space, in which three asymmetries distinguish four kinds of ‘ontic’ assumption, provide a way of thinking about how much of its relationship to its environment the enterprise includes in the way it understands its behaviour: [8]

  • The Cartesian asymmetry between particular occurrences and universals generalising across those occurrences;
  • The Heisenberg asymmetry between occurrences that can be experienced across all sub-environments of a system or only within particular sub-environments; and
  • The Endo-Exo (endogenous-exogenous) asymmetry between those occurrences that are constitutive of the system’s experience of its own being (what is ‘ontic’ is inside the box), and those that are not.

These asymmetries, the second and third of which depend particularly upon understanding an enterprise in terms of the quantum metaphor, appear in a number of blogs:

  • Within the quadripod, where a footnote on the railway metaphor used refers forward to the ways in which an organisation inscribes itself through its behaviour in terms of three asymmetries;
  • Within logical time and the three moments, where the three moments are understood as the progressive articulation of the three asymmetries;
  • Within in what ways does an organisation inscribe itself, where the three asymmetries are understood in terms of the different ways in which behaviours depend on the way they are experienced by an observer;
  • Within the Lacanian four discourses, where the three asymmetries structure both the way being is articulated in discourse and also the way being is itself evidenced in behaviour;
  • Within by what authority are we to follow, where the three asymmetries, in describing the way being is articulated, provide a way of accounting for performativity; and
  • Within crises of delegation in recognising new truths, where the third asymmetry, in describing the ways in which being is taken up (aka embodied), situates origination itself.

What is the underlying ‘something’ to be understood?

It is that the transition from a one-sided to a multi-sided relationship with an environment confronts the sovereign entity with a need for a fundamentally different way of managing its viability.  This is based on the different order of complexity/granularity through which viable behaviours may be constituted, and the presumption of a corresponding quantum organisation able to creat agility through being able to superpose multiple states of relationship to its sub-environments within its overall behaviour.

Notes
[1] This is a reference to John Hagel’s work on Push versus Pull. A recent blog by him emphasises the extent of the shift involved in moving from scaling efficiencies to scaling learning… From Race Against the Machine to Race With the Machine.
[2] Written about in Meeting the Challenge of Health Care Reform, and Why critical systems need help to evolve.
[3] This is a reference to the distinctions between simple,, complicated, complex and chaotic in the drivers of organisational scale.
[4] This is a reference to the particular challenges of edge-driven ccollaboration
[5] This is an embarrassingly brief rendition of work that has emerged over the last 20 years centered around Wojciech H. Zurek‘s work starting at Los Alamos, supplanting the previously dominant Copenhagen Interpretation that subordinated the quantum reality to the classical reality. Some references are Decoherence and the transition from Quantum to Classical – Revisited,  Decoherence, einselection, and the quantum origins of the classical, Quantum Darwinism, and Coherence Frame, Entanglement Conservation, and Einselection.  The notions of information in a Quantum reality are summarised in the YouTube The Physics of Information, a useful paper being Quantum Darwinism: Entanglement, branches, and the emergent classicality of redundantly stored quantum information.
[6] Other examples are this YouTube – all we see & seem is but a dream within a dream – which takes a look at the challenges created by the effects of entanglement on measurement by an observer (i.e. the effects of entanglement on our ability to know things independently); and this YouTube – a quantum view of God – in which a religious reading is offered of this quantum view.
[7] i.e. to accept its necessary entanglement with its environment. This kind of environment was described in the 1960′s (in Volumne III of the Tavistock Anthology) as ‘turbulent‘.
[8] The symbols within this diagram have the following meanings:

  • and its ‘bar’ represent the distinction between whether or not an experienced behaviour leaves traces of its occurrence in its environment.  If it does, then its experience can be inter-subjectively agreed by observers.
  • and its ‘bar’ represent the experiencing of a singular behaviour by a system and the distinction between whether or not that experiencing is accessible across all of its environment or only in relation to particular sub-environments.
  • and its ‘bar’ represent a generalisations about multiple occurrences of and its ‘bar’, the distinction between whether or not that generalisation is accessible across all of the environments of those occurrences or only within particular sub-environments.

What is happening to Boundaries, Authority and Containment?

 discourse  No Responses »
Jul 232012
 

David Armstrong, in his 2012 Eric Miller Annual Memorial Lecture entitled ‘Terms of Engagement: Looking Backwards and Forwards at the Tavistock Enterprise’, spoke about what seemed to him most disturbing and challenging within the wider social field in which all our engagements are currently framed:

Might this perhaps be the 21st century’s version of ‘spiritual drift ‘, now leading communities into forms of dissociation, a withdrawal of social bonds, no less destructive of human capacities, in which an  unconsciously sensed psychological disinheritance (denial of the deeper human roots of well being) is dealt with through projection into others, third world operatives, young rioters, benefit claimants, the casualties of institutional and societal ‘defensiveness’?

David was speaking of the effects of maladaptive responses to turbulence introduced by Fred Emery in his 1967 paper: “The Next Thirty Years: concepts, methods and anticipations” i.e. superficiality, fragmentation and dissociation.  Emery argued that this maladaptation arose in response to an over-complex environment, and enabled its complexity to be down-graded.  But at what cost to us all? David’s lecture concluded with a call for new kinds of engagement to meet the particular challenge of our times, saying:

I am not convinced  that the ‘consultant lens’ is the appropriate way to frame such an engagement. For there is no way in which one can stand apart from one’s own societal dynamic; it infects oneself no less than the organisationally structured defense system, Isabel identified, infected the nurses. One needs to find and/or to make a different mode of what James Krantz refers to as ‘collaborative conversation’.

Something of the nature of this complexity can be seen in a recent comment by James Krantz concerning consulting practice:

I have been struggling with the question of boundaries in practically every arena for the last several years and, in particular, the declining relevance of the construct in light of how the world seems to be evolving.  This, in contrast to the central role the idea plays in socio-technical theory and systems psychodynamics.  I have been thinking for quite a while now about what social defenses mean in the context of networks and loosely-bounded configurations, about how we think about strategies of containment, and what it all means for authority relations.

The current problematic state of the concepts of Boundary, Authority and Containment refers back to David’s summary of the Tavistock legacy from the 50′s: “Bion’s explorations of group mentality, Eric Trist’s socio-technical breakthrough, Fred Emery’s introduction of open system theory, Ken Rice’s development of the concept of primary task, and Elliott Jaques’ and Isabel Menzies’account of social systems as a defense against anxiety“.

So what is happening to these concepts?  What follows is a brief summary of the challenges facing each concept and links to related material.

Boundary and primary task

When dealing with complex systems, what constitutes the scope of a system (i.e. what components are included in its description) depends on the properties of interest to the observer.  The way these properties are understood by the observer then depends on the resolution with which the system’s components are described (i.e. how finely distinguished they are from each other), and on the way the states of the system can be distinguished (i.e. how alternative configurations of the relationships between components can be distinguished from each other at a given resolution).   Emergence of properties at some level of scope, resolution and state of a system has no necessary relation to the one or more  accountability hierarchies superimposed on the behavior of that system’s components (see Alex Ryan’s paper – Emergence is coupled to scope, not level). ’Boundary’ is therefore derived from primary task, it being derived form the observer’s definition of properties-of-interest.

When we speak of ‘ownership’ we do not start from properties-of-interest, but from a definition of boundary of a system defined by those system components over which an accountability hierarchy has direct control under all circumstances.  We can usefully distinguish this direct control within a boundary from contractual control within a perimeter.  This perimeter will include systems ‘outside’ the boundaries of direct control, over which control can only be exercised under particular contingent circumstances. Both forms of control, however, are exercised by a socio-technical system i.e. a social system that has been given the authority to exercise them over particular system components.

So what is ‘a problem with boundaries’?  It is a problem with the relationship between the way ‘ownership’ and ‘properties-of-interest’ are defined, there being no necessary relationship between them.

Authority and open systems

The behaviour of an ‘open system’ depends on the properties of systems ‘outside’ its boundary as defined by its accountability hierarchy. Extending its control to a perimeter through the use of contract may enable the hierarchy to limit the effects on its behaviors arising from its openness. The definitions of ‘boundary’ and ‘perimeter’ are made with respect to an accountability hierarchy that has sovereignty not only over its owned and contracted system components, but also over the social system that exercises control over these components.  For this sovereignty to be effective, the  social system must conform to the hierarchy’s definition of primary task, evidenced by a system-of-meaning qua discursive practice1 that authorises those behaviours consistent with that definition.  This social system encounters an ‘edge’ when it encounters a system-of-meaning other to its own (i.e. in some sense alien), but with which it must work. Such ‘edges’ have the potential to require of the accountability hierarchy that it surrender some aspects of its sovereignty.2 Authority, then, is an effect of a relationship of obedience to that particular form of ‘thirdness’ constituted by the discursive practice which is anticipated to be performative from the perspective of the hierarchy.  It contrasts to the authority emerging from the demands of a particular situation that may require quite different properties to those anticipated by the hierarchy.

So what does this mean for authority relations?  It means that there are always two bases of authority – one rooted in the received ‘discursive practice’, the other in the nature of the properties demanded by the immediate situation.3 To the extent that there is a relationship between them, it is because of the way the individual holds them in relation to each other.4

Containment and group mentality

Bion understood the container-contained relation to be the means by which fears associated with beta-elements could be modified. Internalised as alpha-function, this container-contained relation manifested the ‘K-link’. Thus to ‘contain’ the other was to return meaning to the other for what the other experienced as ‘bizarre’, or anxiety-inducing.  This container-contained relation enabled unconscious processes to be given meaning in consciousness through a work of transformation, but it took place within the context of a ‘vertex’ – a way of organising meaning.5  And to the extent that this work of transformation did not take place amongst the members of a group, enabling the group to engage in a ‘work-group mentality’, the group became captive to ‘basic assumption mentality’. 

So how are we to think about strategies for containment?  The basis of the difference between the basic-assumption and work-group modes of functioning lies in the group’s relation to reality both in the sense of what-is-going-on (wigo), and also in the sense of an experienced psychic reality.  But Bion’s arbiter between different vertices organising meaning was a truth function operating within the individual.6   What if we accept the dilemmas inherent in the definition of system and authority, and assume that they must apply also to the consultant. As David points out above, what if the consultant cannot escape being implicated in the way these dilemmas are held?  We must assume that there is no necessary reason why the vertices within which consultant, client and others organise truth can be brought into alignment.  And to the extent that they can, we must address explicitly the interests being served in so doing.

Implications for engagement and social defenses against anxiety

It is this question of ‘in whose interests’ that brings us back to David’s challenge concerning the way we engage with the complexity around us.  We are situated within a socio-technical ecosystem, with the strategy of containment offered by any one sovereign entity within that ecosystem being at best partial.  Strategies of containment depend on the way a particular sovereign entity contains the individual.  So in understanding its organisation as a defense against anxiety for an individual taking up a role in its life, we are privileging its particular vertex qua way of organising meaning for that individual. But within an ecosystem, that entity is also taking up a role in the lives of others in its environment, putting its vertex into question. No surprise, therefore that those whose identities are being supported by the particular entity should prefer to reduce the complexity in its environment to fit their interests, rather than to accept the challenges which that environment presents to their own identifications.  Thus ‘social defense thinking’ allows us to think about the way a particular individual’s identity is supported by an existing organisation of meaning, but not to think about the relationship of that identity to those of other organisations of meaning within the larger ecosystem.7 Thus while ‘social defense thinking’ may enable us to consider how new possibilities may be emerging for how identities may be supported by “new images of social organization, with different rules, grammars, rituals, and practices reshaping the projective landscape of organizations”8, it does not tell us how the processes of identification may themselves be being changed through changing ‘terms of engagement’.

So how are we to think about the implications for engagement?  For Freud, the alignment of ideal and vertex was a secondary identification built on the foundational identifications of primary process.  But Freud added a third identification that was an identification to a symptom “based upon the possibility or desire of putting oneself in the same situation [as another]“.9 This third identification offers a way out of the individual’s dependence on a sovereign enclave of ideals in considering their relation to the ‘other’ – a relation that may or may not be transformative if pursued, depending on how that ‘otherness’ is worked with. This way out moves the individual from trying to ‘do what’s right’ for the other to at least ‘doing no harm’ to the other’s environment, and beyond that to the possibility of creating value in the other’s environment, some part of which can benefit the organisation – from a one-sided working under sovereign norms to a multi-sided problematising of the role of sovereignty itself in the lives of others. The terms of engagement that this third identification implies are those of continuous innovation in relation to that which is particularly valued by the other – a privileging of an ethic of engagement with the ‘otherness’ of the other and of the forms of organisation that support this.10

Notes
[1] ‘Discursive Practice’ is a reference to Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between Power and Knowledge, in which the power arises from obedience to particular forms of knowledge. A discursive practice is defined by the relationships between four things:

  • The objects about which it speaks
  • The concepts through which it thinks about and operates on its objects
  • The ‘enunciative modalities‘ in which speaking is recognised as being authoritative, and
  • The unifying ‘strategies‘ or ‘themes‘ through which the discursive practice is kept ‘whole’ (described by Kuhn in terms of what renders science ‘normal’.)

The relationship of this discursive practice to any given speech act is therefore one of ‘thirdness’, ‘thirdness’ being a way of understanding how a speech act is itself rendered performative.
[2] This distinction between boundary-perimeter-edge is therefore relative to a sovereign accountability hierarchy.
[3] This is the distinction between the two meanings of ‘auctoritas’ in by what authority are we to follow - authority by recognition of ownership, and by recognition of origination.
[4] This is the tension between mission and ethics – what is owed to the accountability hierarchy versus what is owed to the situation.
[5] Bion, in contrast to Freud, placed the contact barrier between the unconscious and the conscious, with the container-contained alpha-functioning progressively transforming the relation to the unconscious (See Bion’s Learning from Experience p17ff). This understanding of the contact-barrier differed from Freud’s, who not only placed the contact barrier between experiencing (whether endogenous or exogenous) and the whole process of complexification, but who also distinguished between the complexification of thing-representation in the -complex from the word-representation in the -system. It is this more complex reading of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious that is taken up by Lacan. For more on this, see Bion, Lacan and the thing-in-itself
[6] I draw here on the paper by French and Simpson in Human Relations on The ‘work group’: Redressing the balance in Bion’s Experiences in Groups; and on Grotstein’s A Beam of Intense Darkness in speaking of the importance of the quest for truth in Bion.
[7] One way of understanding power therefore (in the sense of power corrupting) is this ability to defer and/or repress consideration of other organisations of meaning, in which demands from the environment are assumed to be organised in a way that is symmetric to its own organisation (for example, see asymmetric demand on this).
[8] I quote from James Krantz writing about Social Defenses and 21st Century Organizations, in which he speaks about how “the wellsprings of psychotic anxiety in organizations are being intensified by the rapid breakdown of containing structures in both the social and organizational worlds”.
[9] I enlarge on this in Freud’s third identification and in distinguishing the Kleinian object and the Lacanian symptom.
[10] Some of the practices that flow from this within ecosystems are ‘asymmetric leadership’, the pursuit of ‘multi-sided demands’, ‘edge-driven’ ways of working, and ‘triple-loop’ learning processes.  Some of the evidence for their emergence is to be found in “The Twitter Revolution: how the internet has changed us“.

Thoughts on Bion’s ‘Faith in O’

 ethical challenge  No Responses »
Jul 042012
 

My critique of Bion in Bion, Lacan and the-thing-in-itself was that he approached the relation to the-thing-in-itself as a transcendent form of knowing that moved towards ‘knowing’ in a Platonic ideal form – hence without-memory-or-desire as a kind of non-attachment with almost religious connotations. To quote Grotstein in A Beam of Intense Darkness (p79):

Most notably, Bion’s episteme shifted Freud’s – and even Klein’s – emphasis on the life and death instincts (drives) to that of emotional truth, O, as first cause, thereby rendering what heretofore were the libidinal and destructive drives, along with the epistemophilic drive, into L, H and K emotional categories and linkages between objects and between self and objects.”

I applaud the direction of Bion’s thinking, but feel that he became caught within the first two dilemmas: the transcendental versus the empirical, and the cogito versus the unthought known… This is a reference to ‘the dilemmas of ignorance’ (see The Diasporic Way), in which these two dilemmas are put in relation to a third: the retreat versus the return of the origin.

I propose that if the relation to not-knowing approached through faith-in-O is understood to be an immanent (rather than transcendent) relation (and therefore implicating the knower’s embodied relation to knowing), then it would be a more fruitful1 way of building on Bion’s work – for example it would point towards a different way of reading Freud’s understanding of drive functioning, and of the relative importance of the third form of identification as a taking up of a relation to the symptom qua lack.

This relation to ‘lack’ is an embodied relation to not-knowing characteristic of the origination associated with ‘the return of the origin’ to the present moment.  It contrasts with the forms of affiliation associated with the retreat of the origin to a past moment.

Note
[1] By ‘fruitful’ I mean better able to address the challenges presented by the dynamics of socio-technical ecosystems.

Difficulties with the use of Lacan in ‘The Perverse Organisation’

 drive functioning, identification  No Responses »
Jun 142012
 

Susan Long, in her chapter on trauma as cause and effect of perverse organizational process [1], refers to Lacan [2] in stating that “many psychoanalytic schools of thought consider perversion as a specific set of symptoms, primarily including sadism.” (p48) How does she make use of Lacan? Here is her account of the way an individual is divided from himself or herself through the effects of their relation to the Symbolic:

Lacan refers to socially required subjugation as “symbolic castration”. In being subject to culture, primarily through language, one is subject to the Symbolic field. This is what Lacan also terms the big “Other”. In this process of symbolic castration, much jouissance is given over to repression and the Other. The subjection (symbolic castration) that creates subjectivity, forever divides the human subject from his or her primal nature, because the world of symbols can only represent reality, not replicate it. P93 [3]

This captures the division of the subject, but to refer to that which is ‘lost’ as the subject’s “primal nature” is to accord an essentialism to the subject that is not in Lacan. This difficulty continues in the following description of the subject’s experience of their own ‘Otherness’, my additions in square brackets indicating where I see this difficulty to lie:

Hence, the subject in the[ir] world of symbolisation, language and all that they [i.e. symbolisation and language] imply, will lack something. This is the part [of their own experience of being themselves] that cannot be represented; the part that can never become part of the[ir relation to the] symbolic world wherein we [all] mostly live. This part lies within [their experience of their relation to] the register of the Real. Experience registered in [relation to] the Real cannot be represented in our normal everyday world. It is ineffable [but only in the OED sense of not being able to be expressed or described in language - not as “transcending expression”]. P93 [3]

For the subject, an encounter with the Real always has the quality of the unheimlich – an irruption of an impossibility defying the particular subject’s understanding of their ‘reality’. For the subject to render this experience transcendent is to try and ‘recapture’ the Real within their relation to the Symbolic. The difficulty with this implied essentialism continues with reference to jouissance:

So, in one sense, for the civilised person, jouissance is [not] personally lost [but situated in their experience of their own Otherness. In this relation to their own Otherness] and [to jouissance] is [the experience of being] lacking. In another sense, it [i.e. their relation to lack] becomes [extimate, manifesting itself as] part of the psychodynamics of community – linked into [the relation to] language and culture as well as into our [individual] sense of the ineffable or unknown [understood as an immanent rather than transcendent ineffability], with all its awesome, wonder-full and terrifying characteristics. In the perverse position, symbolic castration has [not so much] failed [as the subject is trying to defend themselves against their experience of their own Otherness through replacing it by their relation to an object]. P93 [3]

Understood in this way, perversity denies the other’s Otherness through a reduction of the other to being nothing but an object:

Pleasure is gained through, not with the other. This is the complex face of perversity, that while linked to the [relation to drive formulated as] death instincts in its [i.e. the drive’s] cyclical repetition, its destructivity [comes from this reduction of the other to being an object, which] is also linked to sexual excitation and built around what Lacan calls jouissance. Jouissance is that pleasure/pain derived through satisfaction of what one is unconsciously driven to do; that which is at the core of character [in the sense of ‘character’ being the particular individual’s way of structuring their relation to drive]. P90 [3]

Perversity
Perversity is thus a particular way of dealing with a relation to the other that the subject anticipates as being traumatic – trauma as not only the cause, but also as having a traumatising effect on the other. But this is the narcissistic defence that underlies envy – a defence that is not in itself the operation of the ‘death instinct’, but rather a defence against an unbearable relation to drive:

There is always attraction in destructivity and its place within and alongside the life forces [i.e. alongside the workings of the pleasure principle in the modulating of pleasure/unpleasure], if only the attraction of the hope that we might get a better grip on knowing its nature and understanding its insidious grasp; its jouissance as the Lacanians would say. P150 [3]

The destructivity is a narcissistic defence against the other’s Otherness – the other experienced as symptom of their relation to the big Other. The big ‘O’ is about the other’s relation to the Symbolic, with which comes the other’s unconscious relation to their own ‘lack’ and to jouissance. In the child, this rightly implicates the Otherness made present through the primary relation to the mother.
But this narcissistic defence is also a defence against desire – the relation to that which stands in the place of the relation to ‘lack’, or objet petit a. The desire of the Other is made present for the subject through the particular form taken for them by this objet petit a. The defence may therefore be against the other per se as much as against the other’s relation to its objects of desire:

Moreover, it is a moot point as to whether rivalry grows because the other has what we want, or, desire for a possession grows because it is a rival who holds it. P95 [3]

Discourse
In the following, the loss of this distinction between the small ‘o’ (objet petit a) or big ‘O’ introduces a confusion over the nature of desire:

Although, Lacan’s idea (namely, that desire is the desire of the [this should be big ‘O’] other) means that our very nature is determined by the powerful desire of the [again big ‘O’] other [i.e. by the way in which, as divided subjects, our relation to desire is constituted by our being situated within the defiles of the signifier – by the desire of the Other], it is argued here that what is at stake in envy is the growth of rivalry and malice towards the powerful and envied [Otherness of the] other. This rivalrous malice brings with it a destructive jouissance. P95 [3]

So what is being lost here is the impact of the subject’s relation to the Other on his or her relation to the other. This elision of the Otherness of the other appears elsewhere. For example, the subject’s relation to the Other becomes in the following a subjective position within a system in relation to other subjectivities:

The intersubjective approach implicitly recognizes system and role. Subjectivity is not synonymous with individuality but a position within a system (Lacan, 1977) in relation to other subjectivities. P286 [4]

This understanding of “position within a system” is not in Lacan. Rather, what is being spoken of here are the Imaginary relations between subjects – Schema L in the Ecrits [2] p193 – which is along an axis that is orthogonal to that of the subject’s relation to the Other. Certainly, we can ask what is the nature of the “system” within which these imaginary relations are taken up:

In everyday terms this means that for each role we take up in a system there are role counterparts. For a doctor there must be a patient (and perhaps a hospital administrator, or a government health provider, depending on the system); for a teacher, a student, educational bureaucrats, parents, and so on. P286 [4]

But to the extent that we try to articulate the nature of this “system”, we are attempting to articulate a relation to the Symbolic order, and not the Symbolic order itself. And to the extent that this articulation of an ensemble, network or mental matrix is lacking, it will be constitutive of the desire of the Other that the subjects doing the articulating will encounter in the form of objets petit a. Thus unconsciousness will not be found in the ensemble, network or mental matrix itself, but rather in the subject’s relation to the Symbolic implicit in the place they assume within the ensemble, network or mental matrix.

And, if unconsciousness is found [by the subject] in the [course of their taking up a relation to the] ensemble or the network – [to] the mental matrix or [ultimately to the] Symbolic order – perverse organisational dynamics must be understood as operating through [the way the subject takes up their relation to] this unconsciousness. P154 [3]

Lacan formulated the four discourses in order to think about the way the subject took up a relation to the other [5]. What distinguishes this formulation is the way it situates the subject within a social formation in relation to the other that is also constituted in a particular relation to both the big Other and to jouissance (through a ‘quadripod’ structure itself derived from a reading of Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology [6], the Project itself not being published until 1950).

The more we move from ideas of the personal [relation to the] unconscious toward ideas of a level of cultural[ly constituted relation to the] unconscious, such as formulated in the Lacanian ideas of [discourse making present the subject’s relation to the Imaginary, the Real and] the Symbolic, the more we require conceptions that understand social and cultural mores and “agreements” as serving actively defensive as well as simply tacit functions. For Lacan, the paradox of the individual[‘s] dynamic [relation to the] unconscious in Psychoanalysis is implicitly embedded in a broader [constituting of the relation to the imaginary other through particular ways of knotting together the relation to the Imaginary, Real and] Symbolic field[s]. [The relation to] Unconscious process occurs not simply in a social context but forms the [very warp around which the] fabric of social symbolic processes [are woven]. P290 [4]

Conclusion
So what can I say in conclusion about the way Susan makes use of Lacan? The additions in square brackets are a symptom of what I see to be lacking in her reading, which I summarise as follows:

  1. Attributing to the subject a kind of essentialism (primal nature) not present in a Lacanian reading of Freud, and situating jouissance in the psychodynamics of the community itself as well as in that of the individual, in what appears to be an extension of this essentialism to the community per se. [Understanding the subject as a relationship to lack opens up a different understanding of 'being' that is the counterpoint to the perverse, in which the object defines the subject... the 'perverse organisation' thus becomes a way of referring to the use of organisation as a defence against experiencing being as lacking.]
  2. Conflating the imaginary relation to the ‘other’ with the ‘Otherness’ of the relation to the Symbolic in speaking about desire, so that the objet petit a ‘cause of desire’ is conflated with the desire of the Other. [The Other is structurally lacking, but the particular other takes up a relation to the lack of this Other in a particular way as the object petit a. Separating these two out brings us to the Lacanian understanding of discourse as the way the formation of the subject emerges from this relation to the Other.]
  3. Conflating the relation to the drive (qua operation of the death instinct) with the narcissistic defences against that which is unbearable in the relation to the drive. This treatment of drive reduces the constituting of the subject’s relation to the other in (the Lacanian formulation of) discourse to a relation between subjectivities taking up roles within a system. [Including the relation to the drive in the formation of the subject per se creates a much richer way of understanding an 'organisation' as a particular complex of inter-related ways of supporting identification.  This allows us to see how some of these ways of supporting identification are repressed, if not foreclosed.  This leads us to understand the 'perverse' as a side-effect of this repression.]
  4. Attributing unconsciousness to the Symbolic field itself, as if there were an Other of the Other, which is again not present in Lacan. The essentialism is thus extended to the Symbolic field considered as a thing-in-itself. In Lacan, the relation to the unconscious is an effect of the subject’s relation to the Symbolic, inextricably bound up with his or her relation to the Imaginary and to the Real (a binding spoken of in later Lacan in terms of the sinthome and of a Borromean knotting). [The relation to the unconscious is thus particular to  the way the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real are bound together, a particular binding together being a particular way of being a subject. The relation to the unconscious thus becomes the particular site of generativity and innovation as well as of angst!]

References
[1] Long, S., Trauma as cause and effect of perverse organizational process, in Trauma and Organizations, E. Hopper, Editor. 2012, Karnac: London. p. 45-64.
[2] Lacan, J., Ecrits. 1977 [1966], London: Tavistock Publications.
[3] Long, S., The Perverse Organisation and its Deadly Sins. 2008, London: Karnac.
[4] Long, S., Organizational Defenses Against Anxiety: What Has Happened SInce the 1995 Jaques Paper? International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 2006. 3(4): p. 279-295.
[5] Lacan, J., The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Book XVII. The Seminar of Jacques lacan, ed. J.-A. Miller. 2007 [1969-70], New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
[6] Freud, S., Project for a Scientific Psychology, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 1950 [1895], The Hogarth Press: London. p. 283-397.

When should critical realists care about drive functioning?

 drive functioning, objects  No Responses »
Jan 112012
 

This Lacanticles blog aims to share the background thinking to the blogs on asymmetric design and asymmetric leadership.  Recently I was asked: “What additional benefit is to be derived from the formalisations in Lacanticles? What do these forms of analysis add beyond the use of the practices described in your other blogs? And when are even those practices of sense-making and interpretation a useful precursor informing action?”  Given that the Lacanticles already contain a presumption that a Lacanian reading of Freud is of some use – a presumption that is certainly not widely shared (!) – these are good questions that I try to address below.

The quick answer to the question in the title?  Because they need to be able to describe the conditions surrounding novel emergence as it is experienced in the behavior of a social entity exhibiting agency.

The observer and models
The critical realism of Roy Bhaskar[1] points out that the observer is implicated in the construction of any models s/he attributes to the behaviors s/he observes in the world.  Thus there is a domain of the ‘actual’ events happening in the world of the observer, an ‘empirical’ domain of the observer’s experiences, and a ‘real’ domain of causal processes that may or may not manifest themselves in the ‘actual’ domain, whether or not these ‘actual’ events are experienced by the observer.[2]  So I may ‘really’ have carcinogenic chemicals in my body.  These chemicals may be giving rise to ‘actual’ events amongst my body’s behaviors.  And I may experience some of these events ‘empirically’ as symptoms of something not being right with me.

A model is some formalisation.[3]  Its entailments within the formal domain are designed to commute with ‘empirical’ events (i.e. the logical conclusions that can be drawn from the model are designed to correspond to the events).  If an experimental design can separate out ‘empirical’ events against a backcloth of ‘actual’ events in such a way as to establish this relationship, then the model can be said to ‘explain’ causal processes in the ‘real’ domain.  So cancer research has shown that there is a correlation between the presence of chemical X in the body and the incidence of cancer Y, on the basis of which I should only microwave food in plastic containers designed for that purpose.[4]

A closed system is one for which all the ‘actual’ events causing its behavior can be included within the experimental design separating out its behaviors ‘empirically’ i.e. it can be isolated from its environment. In practice, most systems are open because this is not possible, a difference having to be assumed between the ‘actual’ and ‘empirical’ domains of the system. The behavior of an open system may nevertheless be deterministic if, for any given set of initial events, its subsequent behavior can be predicted.  Under these circumstances, we can say that we have a model of how the system ‘really’ behaves.  So the behavior of a car is predictable to its driver if the conditions in which it is being driven are known.

Open systems and emergence
A model of an open system-of-interest is defined in relation to some ‘empirical’ behaviors defined by the observer to be of interest.  The 1st order model of that system-of-interest would combine all the causal processes attributed to generating those behaviors-of-interest in the ‘real’ domain.  The behavioral closure of this model is all the possible sequences of behavior predicted by the model.  This would be non-deterministic if the model predicted more than one possible outcome for any given initial set of conditions.

A 2nd order model of relationships constraining the behaviors of the 1st order model can be added to make this behavioral closure deterministic, i.e. some form of controlling system.  So to an understanding of internal combustion has to be added control systems that regulate the ways in which the engine burns fuel.   The relation of the 2nd order model to the 1st order model defines what components of the 1st order model are included ‘inside’ the system-of-interest, and what components are left ‘outside’ in its environment: the 2nd order model defines the ‘organisation’ of the  1st order model and the boundary around its 1st order components i.e. we can separate out the engine assembly as a working power unit.[5]

This ‘organisation’ of a system-of-interest is emergent if the ‘empirical’ behaviors of the system-of-interest cannot be explained in terms of the components of its 1st order model.  This emergence is ‘weak’ if this failure to explain is because of a limitation in the knowledge of the observer about the behaviors of these components, and ‘novel’ if not.[6] Given that the components of an open system may themselves exhibit behaviors that can only be explained by assuming emergence, we may therefore stratify open systems on the basis of this relation of embedded ‘organisation’, for example the ‘organisation’ of the engine system is embedded in the components ‘organised’ by the powertrain system, etcetera.[7]

Systems that exhibit agency
The system-of-interest has been designed if, as in the example of the car’s engine system, the source of the ‘organisation’ of the system is external to it.

But a system that exhibits agency is one for which the source of its ‘organisation’ is internal: the source of its ‘organisation’ is the conservation of its ‘organisation’ per se.  Such systems are self-organising, capable of adaptively regulating the way they are coupled to their environments according to the norms established by their own ‘organisation’ of viability conditions. For example, the elephant is able to survive in a wide range of conditions, and exhibits behaviors towards other elephants that are particular to each elephant. As observers of such systems, we observe them to be individually autonomous and goal-seeking with an asymmetric relation to their environment arising from their ability to adapt their behavior to changing conditions, i.e. we understand them to be autopoietic in their relation to their environment rather than allopoietic, as in the case above of the designed engine system.[8] These systems exhibiting agency are what Robert Rosen refers to as ‘living systems’.[2]

Social Agency and the Internal Conversation
Which brings us to social agency.  Bhaskar’s understanding of modeling means that even though I can ‘explain’ things, I-as-a-modeler am implicated in the construction of those models, regardless of whether or not we all end up agreeing that my models do in fact ‘explain’ causal processes in the ‘real’ domain: I exhibit agency[9] when I attribute my structural models to the ‘real’ domain. Thus as a manager for example, my sense-making, analysis and interpretations will all exhibit my agency informing the way I relate to my ‘real’. But how are we to understand the relationship between my agency and structures in the ‘real’ domain?

If we accept that  emergence is to be expected as much in how I understand ‘my agency’ as in how I understand the ‘real’, then we must include my being an observer of the ‘personal emergent properties’ through which I constitute myself.  This leads us to the reflexive conversations of Margaret Archer[10] and the expression of my understandings of myself through my use of language, taking the form of an ‘internal conversation’ that is the corollary of my conversations with others. Discourse is taken as a defining characteristic of social systems of agents, defining as it does the ways in which these agents share understandings both with themselves and with each other. Here discursive practice is not only a social formation, but also an emergent property of people-as-agents, whose embodiment as agents affects their ‘empirical’ experience and the understanding which they draw from that experience (which may or may not become articulated in language).[11]

Agency and drive
As embodied agents, our 2nd order behavioral closures are non-deterministic – we experience undecideability and choices.   Put another way, we experience structural holes in the ways we understand ourselves and others – we experience not-knowing.[12] And in acting under such conditions of not-knowing, we reveal preferences that are particular to ourselves as embodied agents, whether or not these preferences are articulated in language. We can think of this embodied valuing as a 3rd order system (i.e. our relation to our embodiment) constraining the non-determinism of the 2nd order.[13]  ‘Drive’ then becomes a way of understanding what we are doing in acting as if we know while knowing that we do not in order to create 3rd order determinism in the face of 2nd order non-determinism.  For example, after extensive consultation with colleagues concerning a particular client’s case in which we agree that our current knowledge does not enable us to know what we must do to help the client, I realise that I must go beyond what I know in choosing what to do next… 

So how are we to understand social entities as exhibiting agency?
A social entity can itself act as an agent.  This is the focus of theories of competitive advantage and of business ecosystems.  And agency and drive apply as much to a social-entities-as-agents as they do to individuals-as-agents.  Thus, to the extent that the behavior of a social-entity-as-agent cannot be reduced to the agency of its constituent individuals (i.e. that there is an emergent ‘organisation’ beyond that of its constituent individuals), then we need formalisations enabling us to think about the determinants of its choices.  Such formalisations are necessary if we are to question its practices in ways that can go beyond the understandings of its constituent individuals i.e. to be able to engage meta-reflexively with those understandings.[14]

Why?  To the extent that the understanding of both demand and leadership can no longer be assumed to be symmetric with the social entity’s own understanding, the social entity needs to be able to engage in triple loop learning.  And to be able to support this level of learning in the behavior of the social entity, we need to be able to understand what resists that learning.[15] It is this that brings us to need a theory of drive functioning as it applies to social entities.

Footnotes
[1] Andrew Collier has written a useful Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy. This distinguishes critical realism from reductionist, positivist and realist approaches in which the power/knowledge formations remain ‘hidden’ in the sense of being rendered invisible by virtue of the nature of the formation itself. In these terms, the human agent is a critical realist for whose agency the reflexive use of language is constitutive.
[2] This way of understanding the modeling relation is described in Robert Rosen’s book on Life Itself.  The self-organisation characteristic of living systems applies to all forms of agency, whether or not ‘human’.  A very good insight into the ways in which living systems are self-organising can be found in Kirschner and Gerhart’s book on The Plausibility of Life, in which different kinds of living system facilitate variation in different ways. A distinguishing characteristic of ‘human’ agency is in the way the use of language affects their self-organising capabilities.
[3] ‘Model’ is to be understood more widely here than mathematical models. Bertram F. Malle in How the Mind Explains Behavior describes how each of us develops models of our own and each others’ social behaviors within the wider context of the physical world.
[4] A correlation means that there is some probability that there is a causal connection in the ‘real’ domain, without knowing what form that connection might take.
[5] This 2nd order model of relations will constitute the conditions for the continuing viability of the behaviors of the 1st order system.  Naming it as ‘organising’ the 1st order system attributes it to the ‘real’ domain as being an emergent property of the system-of-interest in the ‘real’.  For example, we can say that the body’s immune system ‘organises’ its defences against infection.
[6] Thus ‘weak’ emergence can ultimately be explained in 1st order terms, while ‘novel’ emergence cannot.  This distinction between ‘weak’ and ‘novel’ emergence, together with the dependence of the scope of a system-of-interest on the prior definition of behaviors-of-interest, are in Alex Ryan’s paper on Emergence is coupled to scope, not level.  Ryan goes on to point out that weak emergence is epistemic since once understood, it is no longer emergence, being reducible to the properties of 1st order components.  This distinguishes ‘novel’ emergence as ontological because it is independent of the epistemic status of the observer.
[7] Bhaskar gives the example of the particular form of chemical interactions being explained in terms of atomic number and valency, which in turn are explained by a theory of electrons and atomic structure, etcetera. Knowledge of this stratified relation of embeddedness is thus a ‘deepening’ of knowledge. But the characteristics of novel emergence are such that this does not mean that a ‘higher’ layer can be explained away in terms of a lower layer.
[8] This formulation of agency is taken from Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde’s work on defining agency. This work defines a system as exhibiting agency in terms of its exhibiting individuality through the particular way it is autonomously goal-seeking, sustaining an asymmetry in its interactions with its environment and conserving its identity over time (identity being defined by the sustaining of particular relations of viability).  ’Human’ agency adds to this the effects of the agent’s being in language, within which (social) medium it must sustain its identification with its embodiment.
[9] The Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions for ‘agency’ are specific to social agency, and include: (i) The faculty of an agent or of acting; active working or operation; action, activity. (ii) Working as a means to an end; instrumentality, intermediation. (iii) Action or instrumentality embodied or personified as concrete existence. (iv) The office or function of an agent or factor. (v) An establishment for the purpose of doing business for another, usually at a distance.
[10] This approach to understanding agency are to be found in Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, with ‘communicative’ reflexivity, autonomous reflexivity and meta-reflexivity being different relations to that internal conversation (This meta-reflexivity corresponds to the second loop in double loop learning).  In her book, Archer draws on Peirce’s notion of thirdness to give an account of the particular forms of ‘organisation’ that make the internal conversation performative for the subject of the conversation.  It is the nature of this thirdness that Peirce problematises in his later work with the concept of ‘irremediable vagueness’.  The blogs in Lacanticles speak of ‘thirdness’ in terms of the way ‘discourse’ works, problematising discourse in terms of the concept of ‘drive’.  (For more on irremediable vagueness, see Peter Ochs on Peirce, pragmatism and the logic of scripture).
[11] Embodied cognition is one line of research exploring the way our embodiment affects the ways in which we know. For our purposes, we can formulate  performativity for the agent by the way s/he takes up a relation to language in terms of Foucault’s discursive practices.  Particular to the agent are the enunciative modalities and unifying themes to which the agent subjects himself or herself, expressed in terms of their objects and the concepts that operate on those objects.  The resulting forms of social construction differ in the ways they allow variation, the special case being reflexive critical realism – the conjectural in which the individual agent takes personal responsibility for their radical constructivism.
[12] A ‘structural hole’ is a concept developed by Atkin in the 70′s in describing the properties of relational structures and taken up by Burt in the 90′s with reference to social networks.  We can think of a structural hole as confronting the observer-agent with a Lacanian Real beyond the ‘real’ of Bhaskar – something that is impossible to the observer-agent’s current understandings.
[13] When we situate ourselves in discourse in ways that are particular to the way we experience ourselves as situated, our use of language has to become explicitly triply articulated i.e. we vary its structure of substitution (paradigmatic structure) in ways that are situationally specific. This means a lot of ‘what I mean is…’ and ‘what I like to call…’ statements.  If we expand on the conjectural to examine the particular ways in which the speaking subject is present in the speech act, we get the following. The ‘deictic’ parts of speech are those that indicate the presence  and circumstances of the speaker or hearer as context to the communication itself, particularising the situated speech act. The ‘indexical’ parts of speech are those that  rely on particular modes of reference to situation to convey meaning, the deictic parts of speech being a special type of indexical.  And the ‘subject’ used here is the subject of the unconscious, i.e. a ‘de-centered ego’.  This is the domain of the unintentional, to be contrasted with the intentional actions of the sovereign ego.  It is on this ground that ‘drive’ functioning becomes most apparent.


[14] By ‘meta-reflexively’ I am using Archer’s concept of an internal conversation about the way internal conversations make sense.  The economy of leadership is a way of thinking about the form taken by this emergent ‘organisation’ at the level of the social-entity-as-agent.
[15] The particular form taken by this economy of leadership for any given social entity exhibits ‘novel’ emergence. Thus the social entity conserves particular asymmetries in the way it behaves – a metaphor would be to represent these asymmetries in the form of a particular coral reef. Individuals derive support for their identities by the way they take up a relationship to the way the social entity works – in the metaphor these are the various species colonising the coral reef and their relationships to both the reef and to each other. To change the social entity’s way of conserving its particular asymmetries, we therefore have to consider the ways these identifications constrain what changes are possible. The economy of leadership describes both the different ways in which identities are supported by the social entity, and also the ways in which the different forms of leadership are co-dependent on each other.

The drivers of organisational scale

 learning  No Responses »
Dec 072011
 

The previous blog provided a very abbreviated description of the successive crises of delegation that led religious authority to be devolved closer and closer to the individual. These crises of delegation confronted those at the top of hierarchies when their authority failed to be recognised by their followers i.e. when power-at-the-centre failed to command obedience. How are we to think about these successive crises?  In what follows, the crisis of delegation arises when the complex overwhelms the complicated.

When power at the centre of an institution is effective, it creates strong vertical linkages of control between the leadership of the institution and its followers (or employees, contractors etc). A crisis of delegation happens when an individual faces strong horizontal cause-and-effect linkages that are in conflict with the vertical linkages: to survive, the individual can no longer afford to be obedient to the institution.  Combining these horizontal and vertical linkages gives the following 2×2, derived from the work by Kurtz and Snowden:

  • In the simple system, cause-and-effect relations are repeatable, perceivable and predictable. Everyone knows the right answers that are easily provided by the leadership.
  • In the complicated system of systems, cause-and-effect relations are not so easy to predict because they are spread over time and space.  Nevertheless numbers of experts can be expected to provide the right answers in support of the leadership.
  • The complex ecosystem emerges when cause-and-effect relations become apparent only in retrospect, and cannot be assumed to repeat.  This happens when the sheer weight and circularity of cause-and-effect relations become overwhelming (corresponding to the turbulent fields of Emery and Trist).   In this environment, the particular characteristics of the situation become crucial, and vertical control linkages become weak because right answers can only emerge retrospectively – not a good basis for central authority.  This environment is described as an ecosystem because fromm the perspective of the situation, multiple separate institutions become involved, the individual having to work in relation to many different authorities, each spanning different areas of local control.
  • Finally, behavior becomes chaotic when no cause-and-effect relations are perceivable, even in retrospect.  In this environment there are no right answers and everyone is in trouble knowing what to do.

While power-at-the-centre describes the exercise of strong vertical control linkages by leadership (North-South dominance as distinct from East-West dominance), power-at-the-edge (i.e. being edge-driven) describes the necessary approach to leadership in a complex ecosystem in which those closest to a situation need to be authorised if they are to be effective.

What, then, are the drivers of organisational scale?  Any institution is going to face a gradual increase over time in the complexity of its environment, and therefore a demand for increasingly differentiated behaviors. We may therefore expect a progression in any institution from the simple to the complicated. The crisis of delegation arises when the complex nature of the ecosystem overwhelms the complicated basis of the institution’s existing authority, demanding the removal of its ‘strategy ceiling‘ so that it can make a transition to the relational form of organisation.[1]

The drivers of organisational scale are therefore the capacity of the institution to manage the complicated, set against the complexity of the cause-and-effect relations to which it is having to respond. Looked at like this, any institution is in a governance cycle through which it can learn how to respond to increasingly asymmetric demands. Or not.

Footnote
[1] The argument I made in The Twitter Revolution: how the internet has changed us is that just as the Printing Revolution precipitated the crisis on delegation associated with the Reformation, so too is the Information Revolution precipitating a crisis of delegation in our own time.  The difference, however, is that whereas then the crisis heralded the emergence of the complicated as the dominant form of organisation (giving science its place in the world), the current crisis of delegation is heralding the emergence of the complex as the (coming-to-be) dominant form of organisation.  With this emergence, of course, come the challenges of asymmetric leadership and asymmetric design.

Crises of delegation in recognising new truths

 identification  No Responses »
Dec 062011
 

I hope you will forgive the heretical direction of this blog (as well as its bias towards an English experience!), but I want to pick up on ‘by what authority are we to follow‘ by considering crises of delegation. These are crises in which people refuse to recognise truths offered by those in authority, forcing new forms of authority to emerge.  By considering changes that have been made in the way religious truths are authorised, we construct a rich source of metaphor for the ways in which the listener/follower may constitute performativity.

The rich source of metaphor

The diagram summarises this metaphor, the numbered balloons corresponding to the points made below.

  1. An ‘original’ authority for monotheistic Judaism was recognised in the story of a people’s origin emerging in Second Temple Judaism, the meaning of this authority of origin becoming the Mosaic Law through Rabbinic interpretation (Rabbinic Judaism).
  2. Very much later (in the 19th Century), Reform Judaism separated itself from this authority of origin on the basis of a crisis, in which local communities took issue with these received interpretations within the context of their lives together at that time. Authority became vested in the religious community.
  3. By the beginning of the 21st Century, the movement of Reform Judaism in the UK is reaching out to people and meeting them ‘where they are’, supporting them ‘thinking for themselves’ and ‘walking their own walk’, but within the context of the movement. Partly a response to the crisis of assimilation, an emphasis on ‘The Jew Within‘ gives authority to the individual’s acts of origination within the context of Tikkun Olam – the work of repairing the world for all humanity.
  4. A different authority for monotheism was recognised following the death of Jesus, with the emergence of early Christian communities.  The First Council of Nicaea established some agreement concerning the nature of Christ’s Divinity through the doctrine of the Trinity, in which authority was established through Apostolic succession.  This enabled the Eastern Orthodox Church to establish its authority through the relation it established between Communion and Otherness, the Russian Orthodox Church emerging subsequently as a slavic translation of this.  Authority was based on the religious community.
  5. The Roman Catholic Church differed in arguing that the Spirit came through the Son as well as the Father (the doctrine of the Filioque).  This enabled an original delegation to a person (St Peter), the meaning of which was interpreted as the Roman Catholic Church being the Body of Christ.  This established an authority of hierarchy based on the Roman Catholic Church being ‘directly’ authorised.
  6. The first crisis of delegation facing this hierarchy came with the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century, enabling the kings of states to break with the authority of Rome to establish their own divine right (through the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies), and their own authority of hierarchy.
  7. In England, the next crisis of delegation came in the 17th Century, separating the body politic from the King’s body and establishing the power of the people’s representatives over the State’s authority of hierarchy, further strengthening the break with Rome and the identification between Church and State.
  8. And so to the nonconformists who did not accept this identification and placed authority with their own dissenting communities, some of the effects of which are to be seen not least in the emergence of the United States of America! Here religious authority was vested in the religious community in which the Church is separated from the State.
  9. In the 21st Century, we see a further step in the refusal of religious authority at the same time as a greater reliance on the individual’s authority for good works, a position evident amongst the Quakers from their beginning, apparent in Peter Ochs’ reading of pragmaticism, but evident also in the emphasis placed even by Pope Benedict XVI on agape. Here again, authority is given to the individual’s acts of origination – the ethical response characterised as the diasporic way.

And so we see crises of delegation in two forms of monotheism, each crisis reducing the scale at which ‘the people’ authorise truths until it reaches the individual scale, presenting the individual with an ethical challenge in facing the dilemmas of ignorance.  So how does this “rich source of metaphor” bring us closer to understanding performativity in terms of the three asymmetries?

Acts of origination

An act of origination[1] follows wherever an individual actively holds open all three dilemmas of ignorance, assuming individual responsibility for the ways in which s/he holds them in relation to each other.  These three dilemmas are the experiencing of the triple articulation of human being according to a Lacanian reading of Freud’s Project, the individual’s way of binding them together forming the fourth ring of the Lacanian sinthome, corresponding to an identification with a particular form of inscription. This binding together constitutes performativity at the level of the individual.

This relation to the triple articulation corresponds to the Eastern Orthodox understanding of the individual’s relation to the Trinity (see for example Michael Grant on this), just as the construction of the sinthome can be read in relation to the Jewish Mystical Tradition.  But in both Lacan and Freud, the scale at which a truth is authorised is that of the individual.  But the progression in the structures of delegation above show how this identification at the scale of the individual is a relatively recent phenomenon. Thus if we read history backwards (as an après coup), we can see how larger scale institutions have been treated as if they were individual actors constituting performativity in how they support the identifications of individuals. We can read these histories from a psychoanalytic perspective by understanding the institutions as binding together these three asymmetries through the particular way they inscribe themselves in extension.

And why should we read history backwards in this way?  What might be moving the scale of performativity towards smaller and smaller scales or organisation? To answer this one, we need the next blog on the differences between the simple, the complicated, the complex and the chaotic.

Footnote
[1] An origin is that which an observer identifies as the source of something.  In saying “that is the source”, the observer is speaking from a position that is exogenous to the act of sourcing itself.  Origination is the process of sourcing itself, and refers to the experience of the individual doing the sourcing – an articulation of experience that is endogenous to the being of the individual engaged in the sourcing. This origination/origin distinction is the endo-exo asymmetry spoken of in the previous blog. The Foucauldian version of this (third) asymmetry is “the retreat and return of the origin”, i.e.  in saying anything, there is always that about it which refers back in time, and that which is original to the present moment (written about as the control dilemma in Intent and The Future of Identity and The Dilemmas of Ignorance).

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