The Falicy of Organizational Heirarchy: the Evolution of Self Organization

I think there is a fatal flaw in the argument that some make that organizational heirarchy is needed or that it even exists.

These arguments often start with a presumption that the human corpus is centrally controlled. This is simply inaccurate. Stafford Beer many years ago in “The Brain of the Firm” used the human brain as an analogy appropriate in considering the “managerial cybernetics”, the organization, of enterprise.

The whole point of his credo and his analysis is that the human or nay brain is very very far from being a centralized directive and controlling system. In a very real and practical sense 70% plus of its operations are entirely decentralized to autonomous systems that keep our heart beating, our lungs working, our food being digested or rejected and our bodies repaired with no reference whatsoever to any central authority.

Even at the level of the cerebral cortex and the other “higher levels” of our central nervous system’s behaviour decision making is NEVER centrally directed or controlled. It emerges as a consequence of a self organizing process. In it “good and evil” in a myriad shades of gray fight for dominance over every minute outcome we seek or need to achieve. Most of the activity involved is sublimible. It is located in our unconscious not our conscious mind - we are lazy, energetic, sexually aroused or positive about things not as a result of rationale logical decisive cetnrally directeed thought but as a result of stuff welling up from a heaving morass of unconscious neural activity guided by past experience and fearful of irrational expectatios as to possible outcomes unrelated to the immediate stimuluses we have constructed a belief that we are reacting to - behaviour is the result of learning and is not not enacted inthe moment.

To top all of this our central nervous system is emmersed in a chemical bath, our body and the things it senses which have a continuous but unseen impact on what we like to call our state of mind. This chemical matrix has a huge impact on our choices. Hormones determine huge ammounts of our behaviour as do other less evident factors such as the amount of oxygen and many other chemicals in our blood.

This is an organization it is true and organization that is necessary but it is anything but centrally directed or even really heiracrchical. It is a self organizing network of semi-autonomous but interconnected systems that embraces external social institutions and societies as wella s our bodies and none of which has any truly evident part in directing the actions of the whole.

Lao Tze in the Tao de Ching saw the best leaders as those we were not aware of because they empower as so effectively that we believe in our own capacity to act and decided effectively using our mind and the institutions and societies we can effect. The search for the myth of leadership and or the necessity for central direction is surely that a myth an other philosopher's stone.