Meeting 3 Notes

Co-ordinator = Patrick Humphreys

PARTICIPANTS

• I think that finding a methodology is not the problem. What we look for is for processes that produce emergent forms and in that respect the idea of best practices appears to be a good model to follow.
• At the end of the last session we came about with this statement about aspects that enable and aspects that restrict variety generation. Somehow we were saying that these new organisational forms were the outcome of tensions between enabling and inhibition. So, perhaps the understanding of how they connect is one of the issues that underpin the emergence of new forms. Can we take this as a general framework and move ahead to find out concrete instances. 
• It could be interesting for us, using this language of enabling and inhibition to see how these strategies (e.g. best practices) and the way people construe these particular tools or fads creates enough variety which at the same time is controllable for the group itself in order to maintain internal cohesion. The question is how much of this is required?
• I think we can have at least two ways of doing this. One way is to find out horizontally how much do you need and the other one is when we have layers. In the latter we can create restrictions in some layers in order to enable variety generation in others. 
• It is interesting to note that if we put some sort of fences or boundaries in a system we allow chaos to unfold inside and this restrictive chaos could be a rather valuable thing in order to produce organisational forms.
• I think a nice way to identify these instances is by using what we call poor languages. So our observational instrument would be precisely the jump from the multiple poor languages to the single rich language.

CRITICS

• I regret that you have decided to drop the issue of methodology because I think the problem really has a methodological aspect. If we use Luhmann´s theory we can say that organisation is in between interactions and society, so organisations are being created by decision-making. In this context, we may consider the idea of ethically accountable decisions that are needed for new organisational forms to emerge, in fact, we need purely contextually accountable decisions that are juxtaposed in a table as the ones used by the Japanese to make decisions in inside policy contexts. These tables can be used to generate new organisational forms by inviting everybody to add new dimensions (rows and columns) and providing new semantic to the tables or the cells, because in each of the cells can be a different type of language, and then people can begin to discuss the configuration of the table. These tables can also be used for everybody as a kind of benchmark to open up the domain of discourse. 
• I think that you are not coming to something that can be understood by someone who has bot being here. 

PARTICIPANTS

• Perhaps we need to find out the conditions under which discourses are communicated or revealed. Here, again, the distinction between rich and poor languages could be very useful.
• In methodological terms what we want to explore is how to do something (i.e., the emphasis is on processes) rather than a research methodology. Here we are not in the business of diagnosing but we are in the business of producing processes.
• We want to explore a methodology on how to produce rich semantic networks that are likely to create enough cohesion among a group of actors so that they eventually come together and produce a new organisational form. What we recognise is that in this process we are dealing both with the need to create this rich semantics and at the same time the need to define ways of reducing variety. In the reductional variety we are finding this tension between what we called last time inhibition and enabling. So we need to have continuously this space for possibilities, which is the rich language, and on the other hand we need to have concrete forms of action that are driven by poor languages.
• What we can do as a group is to find out one or more stories presented in a rich language (i.e., the whole story), very unstructured with a little bit of our own poor languages as the way of seeing it, and then exchange it with the intention of approaching some of the issues that have being brought forward during these meetings.