Self-organizing systems... Do we really NEED to have a boss...?

barbara ehrenreich, not surprisingly, uses first-hand experience to describe one of the fundamental elements of living systems...

[H]ow would anything get done without bosses and Bossism? Well, a surprising amount gets done that way all the time ... . If the restaurant gets swamped or the nursing home residents start tossing their food around, don't count on a manager to tell you what to do -- if, indeed, there is a manager within hailing distance. In crisis situations, I again and again saw low-paid workers organize themselves, more or less spontaneously, everyone pitching in and helping each other, with no one playing the role of "boss." As for any real boss on the scene, the best he or she could do in a crisis was to pitch in -- or get out of the way.

interestingly, there's an entire field of study on what's called "self-organizing systems" pioneered by the santa fe institute... they have determined that the tendency to self-organize is an inherent element of complex, living systems... i have used this principle extensively in my organization design work and have found it to be every bit as fundamental to human behavior as the research says it is... in one of my earlier lives as a "boss," i trained the 32 employees in my charge to perform in a "manager-less" environment in which they took care of literally all aspects of the unit's operation while i stood aside and concentrated on running interference or, as i used to say, holding an umbrella over their heads to keep out the rain of shit...

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