Creating supportive conditions for self organization - Most people want to express their quality, their learning, their self-organization. They want to figure out the best response, the best structure for a given situation. The question becomes whether we can create the organizational conditions that allow people to express these innate desires and abilities. The primary condition we need to create is:

An organizational community that is clear about its intent, knows what it wants to accomplish and knows what its purpose is.

If people have enough clarity about intent and direction, then they can effectively self-organize into temporary but appropriate structures for fulfilling that intent. They know the self that they need to organize around. Two other conditions also are essential to creating a purposeful organizational community:

Living systems are webbed with feedback information available from all directions.

 This is true for organizations as well. Information is the nourishment of the organization; the system cannot adapt or change if it is starved to learn what is happening. It cannot be adaptive without access to information about its situation. The organization loses its adaptability whenever anyone goes hungry for information.

Living systems also are webbed with connections; individual members have access to the whole system.

In networks of living organizations, people need to know that they can reach anywhere in the system as a particular need or opportunity arises. They need to be able to seek out skills, experience, information from anyone in the system in order to respond intelligently to a particular situation.

What would be different if we supported self-organization? Think about how quality efforts would differ in a living system. What would be different, if we really believed that most people have a deep desire to do quality work, want to make things work better and want to develop sustaining relationships beyond narrow self-interest.

It seems to us that if we believed in such innate capacities, we wouldn't be investing nearly as much in training programs, motivational efforts, contests or awards. We'd spend much more time in thinking about how to engage people in figuring out how to resolve quality issues. We would focus on providing better resources to support their inquiry, rather than limiting that inquiry to particular metrics or measures imposed from outside.

We would support many more solution-seeking processes, many more sources of feedback. We would support a whole conglomeration of quality efforts that operated in parallel rather than hoping to find the one perfect program or measures. We also would understand that meaningful relationships with customers are a natural desire of most humans. We would give up trying to implant customer service through trite slogans or campaigns, and instead support our employees to seek out the relationships with customers that they discover they need. We could expect that they would create diverse but effective responses.
If organizations are living systems, then quality is not tools, or diagnostics, or particular process modifications. Quality, we believe is a deeply ingrained desire to make our lives mean something, to contribute to others. We do this by weaving ourselves together into systems that can sustain us. We know that we cannot do it alone.
In the later years of his life, Dr. Deming urged us to look more deeply into quality, to understand what it was, truly. He stated simply that quality was about the human spirit. Spirit is the Latin word for breath, breath as a symbol of life.
As many of us inquire into respiriting work, we literally are breathing life back into our organizations. As we understand more about the qualities and capacities of living beings, we naturally will create organizations that nourish and respect our extraordinary human spirits.
"The question becomes whether we can create the organizational conditions that allow people to express these innate desires and abilities."

"The question becomes whether we can create the organizational conditions that allow people to express these innate desires and abilities."

Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers have been exploring and applying the discoveries of chaos and complexity science to organizations for several years. With their clients and seminar participants, they are teaming to create organizations that know how to change continuously because they engage the intelligence of all their people. Through this collaborative inquiry, they are discovering the conditions that support self-organizing in today's organizations. Their inquiry into science is combined with more than twenty years of consulting line management and academic research. Wheatley's book Leadership and the New Science (winner of many awards, including "Best Management Book of 1992," in Industry Week Magazine) marked one stage in their inquiry. Their current thinking, reflected, in part, in this article, will be shared in their forthcoming book A Simpler Way.