Thanks for coming back to comment again. I appreciate your comments and those of everyone who has participated in this conversation.

I can’t help wondering whether perhaps we have different understandings of self-organisation.

A number of people in this conversation (including me) have been attempting to articulate what is meant by the term self-organisation. In this process of iterative articulations, I (and I suspect others too) have gained new insight and a sharper appreciation of what it means to each of us, judging by the shifts in thinking that people are acknowledging.

I am interested to know what you understand by the term self-organisation and would like to invite you to comment on what it is that self-organistion means from your perspective. In this way, we may both deepen our understanding of this concept that has provoked so much discussion in this thread on this blog, and on the blogs and twitter tweets of those others who have participated in this conversation as well.

I’m intrigued by your phrase “hire and fire until IT [my emphasis] works”.

Leaving aside the difficulty I have in equating this in any way with the idea of “good” management, you appear to be suggesting that the complex dynamics of organizations can be mastered if only we ‘do IT better and get IT right.”

This might fit well with established wisdom and may even seem like common sense. But it is a version of common sense that still sees the business world as ordered, predictable and ultimately controllable. It isn’t.

I must say I just don’t quite get where you are coming from. I went to your CAS blog and read a bit and if you’ve read a bunch of books on complexity theory and CAS’s I don’t see how you could come to the conclusion that self organization is rare. It’s pretty much the first thing those books talk about.

After all you did self organize yourself into responding to these blogs unless you have someone somewhere telling you to write this stuff, and someone is telling them to tell you and so on…

As for the comment about ‘hire and fire until it works’…. I guess I’m just glad you’re not my manager!

You ask how we can organize a team which organizes itself. The answer is: you can’t. You can only try a kind of controlled evolution or series of educated guesses by constant trial and error and continuous feedback (also known as agile management). This is what good managers have always been doing, hire and fire until it works.

You quite rightly point out that different people mean different things about self-organisation and it is often used as a buzz word. We have been discussing here the idea of self-organisation and emergence as thought of in complexity theory, and how it is applicable in organisations. It has a different meaning in this context from “anything goes” or “laissez faire.”