Fields

• Fields and Matter
  It's not particles that make up the universe; it's fields. Particles may come into existence often temporarily and briefly, when two fields intersect. It's like Tim Ferris' graphic of the substratum, with particles appearing, following trajectories, disappearing; like resonances. Fields are real, but they are not material. Remember - it's all waveforms.

• The Vacuum
  Though Wheatley doesn't talk much about the vacuum, it fits in here. The vacuum is potential, waiting to be actualized. It is not empty space. It is what gives birth to everything that exists. There is information in it; remember, information doesn't have to obey the usual laws that pertain to matter and energy.

• Morphogenic fields
  As there are electromagnetic, strong, weak and gravitational fields in physics, so there are morphogenic fields in bioloty. Morphogenic fields are built up through the accumulated behaviors of species' members. It is like cosmic consciousness: the sum total of all intelligence and learning, which we can tap when we stop thinking linearly.

Information and self-organization

• Information
  Information is not a thing to disseminate. It is the underlying structure and the dynamic process that ensures life. It gives order and prompts growth. It organizes matter into form, resulting in physical structures. For a system (an open system) to remain alive, information must be continually generated. Information is always spawned out of uncertain, even chaotic circumstances.

• Consciousness
  If the capacity to deal with information, to communicate, defines a system as conscious, then the world is rich in consciousness, extending to include even those things we have classified as inanimate. Consciousness occurs in systems that do not even have an identifiable brain. Organizations qualify as conscious entities. They have capacities for generating and absorbing information, for feedback, for self-regulation.

• Conflict
  We create order when we invite conflicts and contradictions to rise to the surface, when we search them out, highlight them, even allowing them to grow large and worrisome. We need to support people in the hunt for unsettling or disconfirming information, and provide them with resources of time, colleagues, and opportunities for processing the information. Through constant exchanges, new information is spawned, and the organization grows in effectiveness.

• Order
  It is not that we are moving toward disorder when we dissolve current structures and speak of worlds without boundaries. Rather, we are engaging in a fundamentally new relationship with order, order that is identified in processes that only temporarily manifest themselves in structures. Order itself is not rigid, but a dynamic energy swirling around us. Order has to do with relationships. Leadership is always dependent on context, but the context is established by the relationships we value. We cannot hope to influence any situation without respect for the complex network of people who contribute to our organizations.

• Self-reference
  Self-reference is what gives a self-organizing system its stability. It facilitates orderly change in turbulent environments. In human organizations, it is a clear sense of identity, of the values, traditions, aspirations, competencies, and culture that guides the operation. For one's self, it is being true to one's self, the sum of past experiences leading forward to new ones - it does not deny free will, but it lends structure to one's life. The more freedom in self-organization, the more order. Allow autonomy at the local level in an organization, but let individuals be directed by guideposts for organizational self-reference.

Fractals and Attractors

• Fractals
  Fractals have an inherent order; they self-organize at all levels. They are based on a simple, dominant pattern or equation that is allowed to vary randomly and feed back upon itself. The basic form (attractor) is predictable, but the exact state of the system at any one time is random.

• Application to organizations
  Effective leadership emphasizes the importance of simple giverning principles: guiding visions, strong values, organizational beliefs. A few rules that individuals can use to shape their own behavior. The leader's task is to communicate them, to keep them ever-present and clear, and then allow individuals in the system their random, sometimes chaotic-looking meanderings.

• Meaning
  People in a dying organization can hold on to their own personal coherence, their own meaning-making. It is their way out of chaos. Their lives do, they have a purpose, even if the organization seems purposeless. This is very important! As long as we keep purpose in focus, we are able to wander through the realms of chaos, make decisions about what actions will be consistent with our purpose, and emerge with a discernible pattern or shape to our lives.

Relational Holism

• Holism
  Relational holism describes how whole systems are created among subatomic particles. The wave aspects of particles interfere with one another, overlapping and merging. The aggregate behaves as a whole, a many-body problem, in which it is completely indeterminate which particles are contributing what attributes to the whole. It is like Bohm's implicate order, like Capra's "Net of Indra".

• Dissipative Structures
  Prigogine's dissipative structures each have a unique identity, a clear boundary, yet they are merged with their environment, sharing information with it. In them, disorder can be the source of new order; the system lets go of its present form so that it can re-emerge in a form better suited to the demands of the present environment. New information from the environment enters the system as a small fluctuation; this grows in strength, creating internal disturbances. With information feedback, the system disintegrates itself and then reconfigures itself at a higher level of complexity, one better able to deal with the new environment. This is order out of chaos.

• Organizations
  In informal leadership, the organization creates the leadership that best suits its needs at the time. This adaptive leadership emerges from the group, not by self-assertion, but because they make sense, given what the group needs to thrive and what individuals need to grow. It is the antithesis of a permanent, hierarchical corporate structure. It involves participative decisionmaking, participative knowledge-building, and is able to adapt to ever changing situations (funding, projects, etc.)

• Reductionism
  Reductionism is the antithesis of holism. It describes Newtonian physics: particles that go their separate ways and only interact with one another infrequently. In holism, the entity is more than just the sum of its parts; it involves constant interactions and relationships among all the parts, constantly in a state of flux. We cannot just deal with the universe, or an organization, as a linear system - things don't separate themselves out nicely. Everything is interconnected; variables are confounded, not easily separable. Hence, the determinism associated with Newtonian physics is lost when we get to quantum physics.

• Quantum physics
  Absolute prediction and uniformity are impossible. The observer interacts with what is being observed. It is all part of the whole. We cannot separate the pieces. Wave packets collapse, determinism is gone, so is objectivity. The same is true in organizations; the process of measuring interferes with what is being measured. We can measure lots of small things, but never see the whole by putting them all together. In an organization, acting should precede planning - we create the environment by our action and implementation. This is like acting on a particle to collapse the waveform and observe it the way we wish to.

• Relationships
  Look at how a workplace organizes its relationships - not its tasks, functions, and hierarchies, but the patterns of relationship and the capacities available to form them. Who has what talent? What mix of talents make up the best team to do a project?? It's the irregularly dispersed expertise that makes a good team.

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