‘Social engineering’ is a mechanistic logic that traces its rootstock to Isaac Newton and has been propagated aggressively by twentieth-century microeconomic theory. This worldview holds that businesses and organizational processes are reducible to a kind of physics. Unfortunately, social systems in general, and businesses in particular, are phenomena of organized complexity. There are definite limits to what physics (and its pragmatic cousin, engineering) can accomplish. Physics describes phenomena under its scrutiny, biology (of which human organizations are a complex permutation) devotes attention to unveiling pathways of adaptation. Physics is governed by immutable laws; adaptive systems (e.g. bacteria, beehives, societies and businesses) are guided by a few simple rules. Laws are defined in science by top-down observations about the universe that can be described by equations that can be solved. ‘Rules’ in a living systems context are bottom-up principles that broadly depict the interaction of agents.
Author: Richard T. Pascale
Source: ManagementFirst
Subject: Organizational Behavior
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