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

Prof. Sarah W. Fraser
+44(0)1296 747543 phone
+44(0)7714 660550 mobile
+44(0)7092 344044 fax