Leadership and New Science by Margaret Wheatley (1999)

Here are some quotes from my textbook readings. I find these enlightening in the sense that I'm not the only idiot out there contemplating how systems work. :)

"There is another important paradox in living systems: Each organism maintains a clear sense of its individual identity within a larger network of relationships that helps shape its identity. Each being is noticeable as a separate entity, yet it is simultaneously part of a whole system. While we humans observe and count separate selves, and pay a great deal of attention to the differences that seem to divide us, in fact we survive only as we learn how to participate in a web or relationships. Autopoiesis describes a very different universe, one in which all organisms are capable of creating a "self" through their intimate engagement with all others in their system. This is not a fragile fragmented world that needs us to hold it together. This is a world rich in processes that support growth and coherence through paradoxes that we need to contemplate."

"In a dissipative structure, anything that disturbs the systems plays a crucial role in helping it self-organize into a new form of order. Whenever the environment offers new and different information, the system chooses whether to accept that provocation and respond. This new information might be only a small difference from the norm. But if the system pays attention to this information, it brings the information inside, and once inside that network, the information grows and changes. If the information becomes such a large disturbance that the system can no longer ignore it, then real change is at hand. At this moment, jarred by so much internal disturbance and far from equilibrium, the system will fall apart. In its current form, it cannot deal with the disturbance, so it dissolves. But this disintegration does not signal the death of the system. If a living system can maintain its identity, it can self-organize to a higher level of complexity, a new form of itself that can deal better with the present.

In this way, dissipative structures demonstrate that disorder can be a source of new order, and that growth appears from disequilibrium, not balance. The things we fear most in organizations--disruptions, confusion, chaos--need not be interpreted as signs that we are about to be destroyed. Instead, these conditions are necessary to awaken creativity."