Michael McMaster
Aug 27, 2017 · 2 min read

I appreciate what you are doing. Going too large (beyond human scale) has many dangers. But giving up the advantage of cooperative action at a large scale will often be costly. You raise the issues but, I think, are too locked into what has been and not what can be — and exists in a few organizations at least. What we’ve inherited comes from a past where command and control had to be part of the equation of getting (too?) large. But you’ve equated “organization”, “hierarchical organization”, and rigid command and control. Yes we’ve inherited this and we need more careful language to guide our thinking to go beyond.

First you’ve used the word “organization” to refer to a large entity — a thing. But you’ve also used the same work to talk about how things are organized. These are two very different uses and confuse our abililty to think in this area. You’ve also made the common collapse of hierarchy and command and control seeming to be equivalent and necessary. And/or you’ve collapsed hierarchy with command and control.

Hierarchy is a feature of all of life, of evolution, and of knowledge. We cannot escape it. However, there is no necessary relation to command and control.

I didn’t like the phrase “For-Purpose” to describe an organization when I first came across it being used to describe an enterprise. Of course these are all for purpose. Why do we need the term? I’ve finally come to see it has some value because people know what we’re talking about without having to use corporation, of enterprise or other such descriptive words. I prefer the more cumbersome phrase “a non-coercive social enterprise for a purpose”. Both are kind of clumsy but if we don’t use something like this, we’ll also run into applying the to governments which are both coercive and not for purpose in the sense that we have little agreement or consensus of what their purpose(s) are when it comes to practical,actionable terms.

Back to the evils of large corporations/organizations. All those evils you mention, and more (like taking advantage or laws or influencing them so the corporations can freely pollute, for instance) are more likely to occur in large organizations than smaller ones. However, there are a few large corporations that have figured out how to chunk things down to a human scale and coordinate the action so that creativity “bubbles up” the natural (not forced) hierarchies.

My standard of effective action and of organization is, “Does this make enterprise more intelligent or not?” I’ve written books on “Intelligent Organization”. These show that intelligence is a function of organization of energy and information flows. In the human instance, that also includes the recognition of the independent choice and intelligence of the main agents of the system — the individual human being. These are a particular category of social organization that needs to be discovered and nurtured.

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Michael McMaster

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Design4OrganizationIntelligence, complexity, CPA,transformation@Monsanto,BP,Unilever,https://WWW.transformativeorg.com michael@disruptiveconsulting.ca