There are so many ways to think about how things are connected.
And other ways to think about how connected thing enact the relationships afforded by being connected
Thinking about the graphic below – a conventional mapping of centralized, decentralized and distributed networks
A self-evidently more accurate way of understanding the three network graphs above – would start with Centralized – a self-evident hub-spoke centralized configuration.
The middle graph named ‘Decentralized’ should be renamed Polycentric – as it it self-evidently a collection loosely linked smaller hub-and-spokes – thus polycentric configuration.
The third graph – called distributed, seems to be what is self-evidently truly decentralized – with no evident hub-center or spoke since all nodes connected to all neighbor nodes. Thus decentralized (literally no centers) and distributed seem to be the same thing.
A key re-cognition is that a society is self governing to the degree that all three network forms serve for the flourishing of that society. Democracies are complex living societies where all individuals can become ‘entangled’ within diversities that ‘group-forming’ freedoms enable (the freedom of association – the free coordinating of relationships)
Democracies are also complex living systems to the degree that resources of the whole are distributed to all the cells for their flourishing and thus in order for the whole to flourish as greater than the whole of all the ecologies of cells.
There are polycentric levels of self-organization and niche functioning:
- levels of government – federal, provincial, municipal
- levels in private sector – monopoly, franchise, partnership, cooperative, non-profit, etc.
- levels in civil society – religious, charities, clubs, leagues, associations,
In a democracy any individual can participate in a diversity of network structures and governance regimes – sometime simultaneously.
Trinity of Institutional Domains
The graph below comes from Henry Mintzberg which inspired some of the reasoning above. Because in a democracy an individual can participate in all three domains simultaneously.
We The People – are entangled in the whole. Each domain entails corresponding institutions related to the capacity to organize people to get things done.
Of course there are many ways people can organize themselves to get things done. Gerard Fairtlough, who worked for Shell for 25 years – the last 5 of which he served as Chief Executive of Shell Chemicals UK, wrote a wonderful book called: “The Three Ways of Getting Things Done”. He summarized these three ways.
In democracies every person is afforded the freedoms and response-abilities – to participate with fluency in all three ways of getting things done.
- Central-Hierarchy –
- Polycentric-Heterarchy –
- Distributed-Decentralized-Responsible-Autonomy
Whether it is a private or public sector organization – hierarchy is everywhere – it’s the ‘chain of command’.
In modern city-suburban life there numerous organizations and networks – Mintzberg’s plurals, and thus is a ubiquitous experience of polycentricity.
In a democracy – every individual is afforded the freedom of response-able autonomy.
Now we can re-imagine how we could structure organizations to enable and incentivize response-able innovation within the organization and for the organization.
Very simply, let’s imagine we give managers ‘ownership’ of only 70% of employees paid worktime. Their budget of employee time to achieve expected outcomes would of course be correspondingly adjusted.
Then give the executive ownership of 15% of employee paid work time. This enable executive special actions, tasks to be resources more quickly and fluidly.
The give individuals ownership of 15% of their paid work time. Individual’s would a variety of ways to allocate this portion of their time – from individual and/or collective learning opportunities to inventive collaborative project-tinkering. This is the very means that enabled the invention of the post-it note (love or hate it). A collection of 3M employees self-organized around a question of how to do something useful with a glue that was bad at sticking.
Another way of framing of ‘Responsible Autonomy’ comes from the work of Barry Wellman and Lee Rainy in their book “Networked: The New Social Operating System”. In the book they use the term ‘Networked Individualism’ to describe the condition of being a person in the digital environment.
Both networked-individualism and responsible-autonomy frame the human individual as embodied-embedded in a social context. This is a more accurate frame than the ubiquitous assumptions of neoliberal economics, evident in claims such as Margaret Thatcher’s view that there is no such thing as society, rather there are only individuals. And of course, such individuals are best considered: as atomistic, isolated, and selfish.
One more important thinker to add to this brief account of the structures available to ‘get things done’ is Yaneer Bar Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute. In his analysis of complex systems he provides further grounding to Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. Bar Yam situates complex systems in contexts of their environment.
Briefly he notes that any system that can not match the external complexity of the environment with it’s own internal complexity will become overwhelmed by their environment. Thus, internal complexity is a requisite ability to match environmental complexity if the system is going to flourish in a changing environment.
This is an important concept in understanding the vulnerability of hierarchic centralized systems and even of distributed systems. In a centralized-hierarchic system – control comes from the top-center. This means that the capacity to generate response-able complexity to changing environments is limited by the ‘command-control-center’. Thus the capabilities of the command-control centralized hierarchy represents the ‘ceiling’ of it capacity to access it’s own complexity in order to generate responsive adaptation to its environment. The slide below is illustrative of the threshold of internal and external complexity for survival and flourishing
And below we see the dangers of centralized hierarchy of command-control – a complexity ceiling of a single center of command.
Yaneer Bar Yam provides an historical view of an evolving complex society.
The above illustration suggests that complex societies are more able to flourishing in complex environment because they can access a capacity to explore and generate more response-able possibilities. Complex societies are polycentric, diverse and evolve-able.
It is self-evident that human are fundamentally social – becoming human through the technologies of language and culture. Humans shape technology and technology shape humans.
We live in times of profound change in conditions of change which will require a re-imagining of how we govern ourselves to enable the flourishing of all.
The ‘We-the-People’ of a democracy must provision ourselves the means to connect as we choose to participate in various ways of getting things done. ‘We-the-People’ must also ensure we provision ourselves with the means to attain and enact a fluency of agency no matter the network-structure, sector of society, way of getting things done.
Every social-collective effort has rules, rules about changing the rules, and rules about policing the rules. Every democracy must provision all its people with the means that enable agency and response-ability to play in the rules and to contribute to changing the rules should experience and evidence call for change.
We-the-people are free when we collectively provision a healthy ecology of diverse conditions for each and all to participate in a spectrum of way with a spectrum of motivations.
The ecologies of contexts where fluency and agency afford a rich well discovered life – like from playing tennis in the morning, soccer in the afternoon, chess in evening, and then playing in a late-night band.
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