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Good effort Sarah. And thanks for your input too Frank. I, too, think relationship is the proper focus. I also belief that there are many levels to approach the subject from and that all have there appropriate audience. Also, I think that having different perspectives, and understandings, is part of this new model. Respect for conflicting views, paradox, and ambiguity etc. this too is part of the new understanding. We are really trying to affect a major perspective change, so we should not expect it to be easy. What we are really trying to do is not reveal something new, to show a new thing, but to show a whole new way of "seeing". Marcel Proust said that the voyage of discovery is not in discovering new horizons but in seeing with new eyes. I think that this quote by Terrence Hawkes says it well, "How can we recognize or deal with the new? Any equipment we bring to the task will have been designed to engage with the old: it will look for and identify extensions and developments of what we already know. To some degree the unprecedented will always be unthinkable." So ultimately we are trying to change people from the inside out. And we have absolutely no power to do that. We can only be faithful witnesses to this new truth-we have no power to convert. But this new science is now at a new stage, it is coming of age. So we can now take the theory out of our heads and bring it down to earth with real life, practical examples. Thanks, Jon Frank said this in his note: - "They can give us some powerful insights until we start to forget that -basically- organizations are groups of people interacting. With all their individual flaws, expectations, histories, etc" Building on Frank's comments above I have gone for some thoughts around focusing on relationships (as the basic structure of a group / organisation). I do this in the knowledge that the naming of the 'features' are our own constructions as a means of trying to understand. This means of understanding is through the lens of CAS. If I were looking to understand about relationships in organisation I may not approach my inquiry this way. SO, in the spirit of thinking differently about cas and relationships I offer the following: 1. Complex adaptive system: A clumsy way, with multiple interpretations (and does it matter?) of describing how my relationship with someone is not isolated; but rather has knock on impacts to others, including how I see my self. 2. Self organisation Is this what happens when both parties in a relationship agree on their mutual goals and work together to achieve them? And if I attend to all the different relationships I have with all the different people I know, and we work on these relationships constructively, we self-organize around our common purpose, values et. I've got a great story / example from a hospital here I the USA which I'll write up separately. 3. Emergence: the output from relationships. Neither of us can predict what we'll what the paper will look like when we start writing together, but as we share thoughts, develop our relationship, thoughts and patterns emerge, some of which are captured on paper. I think this can scale up to lots of relationships / lots of people. 4. Scale: is this term useful if we base the unit of measurement as the relationship between two people? 5. Co-evolution - see self-organisation and emergence above. If relationships are the unit of measurement then it is difficult to stand 'outside the system' and see how to 'direct' unless you are inside and working on a relationship. It basically all happens at the same time. I suggest this could be a redundant term. 6. Fitness landscape - huh? 7. Non-linearity; in relationships nothing is linear. Surely we feed back into ourselves and then outward to others in a non-linear way. 8. Period and chaotic dynamics; is this a way of explaining what happens in some relationships at some stages. I could think of terms from other paradigms that might help me explain this better. Are we trying to see this stuff in orgs (interesting academic debate perhaps but what about the 'so what') or are we trying to understand the dynamics of orgs? Etc through to 13 14. Sensitivity to initial conditions- yup - you slap me in the face and it could change our relationship for ever. Also, first impressions count.. 15. Bifurcation; in our relationship we will have one of those moments which are critical and the way I behave could tip in all sorts of directions. 16. Attractor - think internal motivations 17 & 18 - see above on chaos stuff. As to Jon's request for something simple... perhaps the issue is one of scope and boundaries. Many non-western cultures see all this as simple and I suspect that may be because the people I am talking with are not bounded up with theoretical definitions and abstract concepts. Are we looking for simplicity through a set of exceedingly complicated set of concepts? I suspect I've already said enough to create a blizzard so we can leave the rest for later! Yours, pending a revolt, Sarah