Information Proliferates, Confusion Grows

Margaret Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science has a section on information flow in systems and organizations. I marked paragraph after paragraph, reflecting on how many times I had seen what she described.

Some choice quotes (bold text mine):

pg. 97:

Of course, such freedom is exactly what we try to prevent. We have no desire to let information roam about promiscuously, procreating where it will, creating chaos. Management’s task is to enforce control, to keep information contained, to pass it down in such a way that no newness occurs. Information chastity belts are a central management function. The last things we need is information running loose in our organizations.

pg. 99:

Think about how we generally have treated information. We’ve known it was important, but we’ve handled it in ways that have destroyed many of its life-giving properties. For one thing, we haven’t been interested in newness. We’ve taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for large numbers, important trends, major variances. We live in a society that believes it can define normal and then judge everything against this fictitious standard. We struggle to smooth out the differences, conform to standards, measure up. Yet in life, newness can only show up as difference. If we aren’t looking for differences, we can’t see that anything has changed; consequently, we aren’t able to respond.

pg. 105:

A very different process for how new and abundant information can facilitate self-organization is found in organizational change work described as “Whole Systems”. One model, now in wide use, is “Future Search”. The whole system – sometimes literally, sometimes through selected members – is gathered in one room to develop a desired future for the organization. People from all parts of the organization, including those ‘outsiders” who in truth are very connected to it, work together to generate information on the organization’s history, its present capacities, and its external demands The first day is spent bringing to the surface the information contained in the organizational neural net – opinions, interpretations, and history carried within all the different people in the room. Information is generated in deliberately overwhelming amounts.

In the presence of so much information, people often feel temporarily powerless and disheartened. They don’t know how to make sense of it, and they are in that terribly uncomfortable state of feeling confused. But as information continues to proliferate and confusion grows, there comes a memorable time (usually during the last quarter of the event) when the group self-organizes, growing all that information into new, potent visions of the future. Rather than basing agreements on the lowest common denominator, the whole system that is present at the conference has self-organized into a new creation, a unified body that sets new and challenging directions for itself.

pg. 108:

Organizations that want to stay vital must search out surprise, looking for what is startling, uncomfortable, and maybe even shocking. The organization then needs to support people to reflect on this unsettling or disconfirming information, providing them with the resources of time, colleagues, and reflection. The value of this has been evident in processes such as scenario planning, and some approaches to quality and knowledge management. People are encouraged to look for variances, to travel far afield and bring in newness. They are encouraged to think together to decide what the information means.