the assumptions behind human agency and organizations
development of our thinking – the road to Internet,
WEB 2.0 and complexity sciences
Esko Kilpi
www.kilpi.fi 1

contents
• middle ages and dependence
• from enlightenment, scientific revolution to the modern and to the
notion of independence
– rational causality
– Kant
– systemic causality
– Forrester
• post-modern and the notion of interdependence
– complex causality
– Hegel, Mead
• Internet, WEB 2.0
www.kilpi.fi 2

dependency, independency, interdependency
from middle ages to today
www.kilpi.fi 3

dependency
the middle ages
www.kilpi.fi 4

www.kilpi.fi 5

www.kilpi.fi 6

the middle ages
no notion of an individual as an autonomous agent
the subject defined in relation to a cosmic order, in
union with gods
individual identity related to one’s pre-given position
within the social hierarchy
www.kilpi.fi 7

independency
enlightenment and the scientific revolution
www.kilpi.fi 8

www.kilpi.fi 9

www.kilpi.fi 10

scientific revolution
• modernist position of the autonomous individual
• everything is open to doubt (but not the existence of the individual
doubting self, according to Descartes)
• self consciousness was understood to require withdrawal from the
objective world through individual, internal processes of observation
and thought
• individual as separate from others, aware of himself, defining himself
through processes of introspection and reason
• atomistic view of society consisting of a collection of autonomous,
rational individuals
• rational hypotheses about an objective reality
www.kilpi.fi 11

Immanuel Kant
humans are autonomous individuals. each individual
has the capacity, through powers of reason, to choose
for himself his own objectives and devise plans to
realize
www.kilpi.fi 12

rational causality
www.kilpi.fi 13

rational causality
mechanistic, linear, if-then
double the input, double the output
www.kilpi.fi 14

sender – receiver model of human communication. rational
causality brought to human communication
Shannon & Weaver 1949
www.kilpi.fi 15

www.kilpi.fi 16

www.kilpi.fi 17

a system according to Kant
a bounded set of self-organizing, interacting parts
which produce both themselves and an emergent
whole
www.kilpi.fi 18

systems
the individual mind is a rational, autonomous system
inside a person which processes information to form
mental models and maps, while collectives of such
individuals are social systems - organizations
www.kilpi.fi 19

Jay Forrester
“social systems belong to the class called multi-loop
nonlinear feedback systems. in the long history of
evolution it has not been necessary until very recent
historical times for people to understand complex
feedback systems.”
www.kilpi.fi 20

system dynamics
concepts of feedback systems are more and more
applied from physical systems to social systems.
feedback system ideas were first developed and
applied to engineering systems. understanding of
closed-loop (feedback) systems has now reached
social systems
www.kilpi.fi 21

the principles of system dynamics
www.kilpi.fi 22

structure determines behaviour
structure here implies the inter-linkages among
different parts of organization and includes human
decision-making processes. an example of this is a
supply chain, which involves complicated interaction of
the components (customer, retailer, wholesaler,
distributor, factory, and raw material supplier)
www.kilpi.fi 23

the structure of organizational systems involves soft variables
a supply chain structure includes how each agent
forms perceptions about the future behaviour of its
customer. the mental models of people play a crucial
role in determining the dynamic behaviour of
organizational systems
www.kilpi.fi 24

systems are fundamentally dynamic in time
a static snapshot of a system reveals the size of the
stocks at that instant, but discerning the role of the
flows, or of the feedback loops that control them,
requires a period of time during which they will exhibit
their influence. it is this evolution of the system in time
that is its primary characteristic, not its state at any
instant
www.kilpi.fi 25

the behavior of a system is ultimately controlled by its
structure
by the combination of stocks and flows of which it is
composed and by the positive and negative feedback
loops that control the flows
www.kilpi.fi 26

structure is made up of stocks and flows – causal loop diagrams
represent these
www.kilpi.fi 27

www.kilpi.fi 28

interdependency
the post modern
www.kilpi.fi 29

who is the philosopher of the Internet?
www.kilpi.fi 30

www.kilpi.fi 31

Hegel
consciousness and ways of life are constituted in social
activities. for Hegel the individual is a social being
dependent on others. the individual develops a mind
and purposes of his own in interaction with others
www.kilpi.fi 32

Hegel’s thinking
• a sense of self arises in social processes of mutual recognition
• an individual can only recognize himself, as a self, in the recognition
of those he recognizes
• a move away from the idea of self as the autonomous individual to a
notion of interdependent people.
• individual selves are constituted in their interaction with each other
• individual change cannot be separated from change in the groups to
which an individual belongs and vice versa
www.kilpi.fi 33

the social construction of reality
a sociological theory of knowledge based on Hegel's
ideas. the focus of social constructionism is to uncover
the ways in which individuals and groups participate in
the creation of their perceived reality
www.kilpi.fi 34

George Herbert Mead
human societies are not possible without human minds
and human minds are not possible in the absence of
human societies. Humans must cooperate to survive
and they also have an intense, intrinsic need for
relationship and attachment to others
www.kilpi.fi 35

human social forms and human consciousness thus both
emerge at the same time, each forming and being formed by
the other at the same time, and there cannot be one without
the other
www.kilpi.fi 36

interdependency
the primary psychological unit is the group, the primary
biological unit is the individual. the process of existing
is a process of communication in different, significant
groups. radically said: without communication we can't
exist
www.kilpi.fi 37

the tissue resulting from many single plans and actions
www.kilpi.fi 38

is this the way we see organizations in the future?
a self-organizing nexus of contributions perpetually under construction
www.kilpi.fi 39

or this?
www.kilpi.fi 40

while individuals can have own intentions and can plan their
own actions, they cannot plan the actions of others and so
cannot predict the interplay of plans and actions – thus the
end result can never be fully managed
a different notion of causality is needed to understand
what is actually going on
www.kilpi.fi 41

the difference between a clock and a family?
• the family cannot exist separately from its members as a plan or
idea governing the interactions because the family is the interactions
• neither are the members or the family there before they interact
because what they are - arises in the interaction. they form and are
formed at the same time
• the family is never complete. it is continuously in development of
continuity and change
www.kilpi.fi 42

self organizing interaction
• organizing in a family is about complex ongoing processes of people
relating to each other
• what a family really becomes emerges from the relationships of its
members, rather than being determined by the choices of one or few
individuals
• this is because families are not things that can be designed or
managed from outside
www.kilpi.fi 43

an evolutionary view in sciences today
• the parts of a living organism are not first designed and then
assembled to form the organism
• the parts emerge, as parts, not by prior design but as a result of
internal interactions within the organism itself, in a self-organizing
dynamic, in the particular context
• the context, the whole, is never complete. the whole is under
perpetual construction
• if this new thinking guides our view to what an organization is and
how it functions, we need to distance ourselves from seeing it as “a
thing” that can effectively be designed in advance and managed
from outside
www.kilpi.fi 44

complex causality
not linear, not systemic, but complex
www.kilpi.fi 45

complex causality
a pattern of movement
stable and unstable at the same time
continuity and novelty at the same time
predictable and unpredictable at the same time
www.kilpi.fi 46

complexity sciences
• concerned with phenomena that are characterized by nonlinear
dynamics
• a complex system consists of a large number of interacting entities
(often called agents)
• during the interaction they respond to each other
• each agent is following its own rules and aims in interacting with
relatively few others
• interaction is non-linear
www.kilpi.fi 47

organizations seen through the lens of sciences of complexity
www.kilpi.fi 48

organizations are population wide patterns emerging in local
interaction
www.kilpi.fi 49

the patterns of interaction are called attractors
www.kilpi.fi 50

fixed point attractor
www.kilpi.fi 51

limit cycle or periodic attractor
www.kilpi.fi 52

strange attractors
www.kilpi.fi 53

www.kilpi.fi 54

www.kilpi.fi 55

what forms the pattern of interaction?
• attractors can take a number of different dynamical forms depending
upon variables such as:
– flow of energy / flow of information
– number of interactions / quality of interactions
– degree of diversity
• an attractor is what the behaviour of a system settles down to
• this may take fractions of a second in some phenomena, and
hundreds of thousands of years in others
www.kilpi.fi 56

novelty stems from complexity
• novelty is created in tension. it results from differences, diversity and
paradoxes
• you have to keep the paradoxes and tension alive to create potential
for novelty
• stability and instability at the same time
– if only stability – “death”
– if only instability – “anarchy and death”
www.kilpi.fi 57

Hegel, Internet and social software
WEB 2.0, Enterprise 2.0
www.kilpi.fi 58

WORK 2.0
• having a question but not knowing who to ask?
• asking questions and allowing other people to choose whether or
not they are able to comment and contribute. if they have the time
and the experience they may choose to engage with you
• geographically dispersed work. everyone whose contribution is
needed cannot work in the same office at the same time following
the same working hours – peer production
• connecting across space, organization unit, time and age
boundaries – transaction costs of work
• working transparently and having reflective conversations
• flexibility in the way you want to structure your day, or where you
want to work
• iterative work – collective shared editing of information
www.kilpi.fi 59

www.kilpi.fi 60

www.kilpi.fi 61

www.kilpi.fi 62

www.kilpi.fi 63

more information
www.kilpi.fi
www.kilpi.fi 64