01.22.07

the forgotten ways VIII

Posted in culture, ekklesia, emergence, leadership, reviews, theology, transition at 3:58 pm by len

“Nothing is more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than achieving a new order of things.” Machiavelli

Remember that as we opened this review Alan offered six elements of mDNA.

* Jesus is Lord
* Disciple Making
* Missional-Incarnational Impulse
* Apostolic Environment
* Organic Systems
* Communitas instead of community

We have now covered four of the six elements. Chapter 7 outlines “Organic Systems.” Alan opens the chapter with a quote from Peter Drucker that reminds me of a similar line attributed to JP Getty: “In times of rapid change experience is our worst enemy.” The reasons for this may be less an attribute of complex systems than of our embeddedness in them. We resist change because our personal sense of identity becomes tied up in organizations. Status, security, power.. we resist change because of the loss of these things we value. Inevitably we confront the reality that nothing changes unless we ourselves are willing to change.

I begin this chapter with memories of Howard Snyder in Liberating the Church: the Ecology of Church and Kingdom. Published in 1983, the work began to give me a language for the discomfort I was experiencing in my own setting. At the time I had just discovered the work of Jacques Ellul. The two writers began to push me outside the boundaries of a system which was as much mechanized as organic.

Snyder reminds us that our word “ecology” is related to the Greek word “oikos” (house) and oikonomia (our word “economy.”) The whole world is God’s household, and his ordering of it is his economy. Snyder writes that, “Fundamentally, the Universe is not ordered logically,, psychologically, nor sociologically, but ecologically.”? (50) Synder goes on to connect God"s rule to shalom, an embracing metaphor. He continues,

Will we opt for technology or ecology? This is not an either-or choice, but a question of dominant models. Will we view the world essentially as a machine or as a garden? Will we see the earth as a factory or as a home? Will we opt for technology or ecology? This is not an either-or choice but a question of dominant models… If the controlling reality is technosystem, mechanistic technology takes over and life suffers from being squeezed into the “clockwork orange”? habitat for which it was never meant…. (43)

The clincher follows on the next page when Snyder writes that, “As men and women become like their gods, so they become like their models. A machine model (a technosystem) produces human robots; an organic model (an ecosystem) produces healthy persons.”?

Some may argue that this is still too simple; we may relate more easily to the expression “we become what we worship.” The role of the imagination in drawing us toward a vision is powerful. What most of us are getting at when we use the language of organic versus organized, or institutional versus unstructured, is the expression of dualism we see in most of the western church. We see an incarnation of the technological society, and a vision of the “good life”? that is culturally bound, oppressive, and unsustainable. It is not coincidental that we pursue small as the new big. Some of us remember EF Schumacher. It"s true that some really are anti-structure; but most of us are pursuing simplicity without that dichotomy, and we are ready to embrace both design and emergence. This background will become significant later in the chapter.

The images of the church in the second testament are universally organic. Similarly, the analogies and parables Jesus uses to describe the kingdom are images and stories from life. Alan argues that the theological richness of the metaphor is precisely because it is not mechanistic.

From here he moves into a discussion of systems theory. Systems theory itself came into being as a result of the biological studies of Murray Bowen and related work in attachment theory by Bowlby and Ainsworth. Eventually family systems theory led to systems of therapy, since diagnosis is fundamental to treatment. That’s not a bad analogy to keep in mind as we think about the western church and Alan’s use of systems theory here.

Alan references the work of Capra, Wheatley and Pascale as influential in his thought about emergent systems. The first two are well known to most readers of my blog, the latter, along with Milleman and Gioja, are the authors of Surfing the Edge of Chaos, a book which applies systems thinking to organizational change and leadership — the book is well referenced all over the net.

Alan offers a summary of the insights of systems theory as relevant to this chapter on the organic component of mDNA.

1. all living things have innate intelligence.. sometimes called “distributed intelligence.” The task of leadership is to unleash and harness (?) distributed intelligence by creating environments where it can manifest

2. Life is profoundly interconnected. The primary operative idea is that of relationships in a dynamic network– a web of life and meaning. We are part of a larger system (ex. the butterfly effect)

3. information brings change: all living systems respond to information

4. adaptive challenges and emergence: by constantly interacting with the environment living systems catalyze a built in capacity to adapt to changing circumstances

Before continuing, note the (?) mark in point one. How does “harness” fit with “unleash?” The words connote opposites. I’m curious also about point 3: information does not always result in change, whether in living systems or in individual persons. In fact, one of the fundamentals of systems theory points in the opposite direction: systems seek equilibrium. This is called the “homeostatic mechanism.” It works in macro physics also: disturb a stationary object and it will soon be stationary again. What we are really questioning here is entropy, in view of the discovery that on the quantum level energy seems almost limitless and laws of entropy don’t always apply. Theologically, we know that the Spirit is given to the church and in this sense the church is not a closed system and is not limited to physical laws. Alan’s first point in summary, that everything they need is given to God’s people, is right. He argues that “the task of missional leadership is to unleash the mDNA that is dormant in the system.”

Secondly, “the task of missional leadership is to bring the various elements in the system into meaningful interrelationship.” The idea was expressed by Fritjof Capra like this, “The most powerful organizational learning and collective knowledge sharing grows through
informal relationships and personal networks”?via working conversations in communities of practice.”? In order to adapt in an increasingly complex environment we have to harness the knowledge and good will of every individual in the system. Alan reminds us that in Ephesians 4 language, we have to connect every part of the body in a healthy way to the other parts so that the gifts can function appropriately to bring maturity. Looking through the leadership lens we might quote Mort Ryerson, chairman of Perot Sytems:

“We must realize that our task is to call people together often, so that everyone gains clarity about who we are, who we"ve just become, who we still want to be. If the organization can stay in a continuous conversation about who it is and who it is becoming, then leaders don"t have to undertake the impossible task of trying to hold it all together.”?

Third, and this point was made strongly in the previous book (Shaping), “we have to move the system toward the edge of chaos; that is, it needs to become responsive to its environment.” (184) When systems are controlled from the top-down they become essentially conservative and unresponsive. They lose flexibility. Good examples of over-control of organic systems abound in science text books, and usually there are good examples of poor ecological management near to home. Forest are overmanaged and smaller fires are extinguished too quickly, resulting in huge wildfires that are tremendously destructive. For management reasons, biological uniformity is preferred over diversity, and a simple disease spreads unchecked through an entire system. The lesson shouldn’t be lost on the church. But Alan’s point is not lost: we have to disturb the system. This is happening by virtue of our shifting culture and dwindling church memberships; but the response we make is critical.

Fourth, “because systems exist in a mass of disordered information, the task of leadership is to help select the [type] of information and focus the community around it.” With the amount and complexity of information now available, the church needs help to make sense of cultural change, to rediscover the essential gospel narrative, and to reconnect in authentic ways with the culture.

From here Alan will look at “the problem of institutions” and offer his own take on the old “organic” versus “organized” dichotomy. In The Shaping of Things to Come Michael and Alan offered the taxonomy of Man -> Movement -> Machine. He’ll pursue a similar direction here but integrate some of the work of Neil Cole and CMA. Then he’ll discuss networks and the possibilities they offer.

We’ll cover that material tomorrow.

Related: Richard Ascough, “Chaos Theory and Paul"s Organizational Leadership,” in: Journal. of Religious Leadership 1:2, Fall 2002, 21-43

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