I don't know about you, but I still get excited when I see things like this. My physics is way in the past now, but this level of almost primal discovery and understanding fascinates me. The BBC whose news item brought this to me have a wonderful phrase For astronomers, the challenge of mapping the Universe has been described as similar to mapping a city from night-time aerial snapshots showing only street light. That phrase would also apply to a lot of narrative work in organizations, and as I said yesterday, when you can start to visualize complex environments you get the equivalent (to use another BBC phrase in respect of this Hubble image) the equivalent to seeing a city, its suburbs and country roads in daylight for the first time. Of course, for many years we have known that Dark Matter exists, even thought we could not see it, we also have known that only about a sixth of the mass in the Universe is represented by ordinary matter. It’s the same in organisations. The visible stuff that gets management attention is a sixth at most. The underlying narrative structures and unarticulated culture is hidden. we are starting to discover ways to represent it, and gain perspective but its all about discovery and essential ambiguity. If we limit our vision to the conventional and the acceptable aspects of process and formal structures then we are incomplete, and our actions inadequate.
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Dark Matter
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» Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi from Cognitive Edge
In 1676 Newton, in a private letter to Robert Hooke said If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. Stephen Jay Gould in his last book The Hedgehog, The Fox and the Magister’s Pox... [Read More]
Comments (4)
Dave,
I love what you have stated here. It's so simple yet so complex. It makes good sense to visualize prganizational life as dark matter. What's scary is that the compariosn is such a perfect fit. You get three cheers from me on this one.
Charlie
Posted by Charles Ehin | January 11, 2007 7:08 PM
Posted on January 11, 2007 19:08
I think Dave has provided us with another brilliant "intuition pump" here, to use Daniel Dennett's notion. It may not yield new practical handles for change, but it does offer a novel view of the challenge. An eye-opener. "If we see things this way, what follows?"
The explanatory power may be comparable to the iceberg metaphor ("only 1/7 visible above water"), but where the latter plays on familiarity and recognition, dark matter is a potent appeal to novelty and curiosity. And very appropriately so.
Gunnar
Posted by Gunnar J. Coll | January 12, 2007 2:40 PM
Posted on January 12, 2007 14:40
Then opne caution I would have is that, for all the wonder of the map, and I share it completely, we have absolutely no idea about what we have mapped or what it means.
To go further, I whooly agree about the "essential ambiguity" in organisations, without which they cannot function or change.
In a way (but not definitively) organisations are inhabited by a herd of Schroedinger's cats; we cannot know for certain what the status is inside until we open it.
The best that we can hope for is to infer from the fact that the organisation functions, that the cats are alive but if the ambiguity (or the multiguity) is essential, then by opening the box all we will do is let out the cats, or kill them.
Posted by Earl Mardle | January 13, 2007 3:11 AM
Posted on January 13, 2007 03:11
maybe i am stupid - but why do i get the impression that people who write about organizations live in mental prisons - how can it be 'news' to anyone who ever worked with people on any 'real' level that the vast majority of what ticks in the clock is hid - is it some sophisticated inversion - a kind of mock humility going on here? disengenuousness...
from a dark one ;-)
Posted by andrew | January 14, 2007 3:14 PM
Posted on January 14, 2007 15:14