I want to make a subtle change to how we can think of organizations as living systems. My purpose is to improve the way of thinking about organizations as extimate symptoms. Essentially, it is us…
Category: 3 Asymmetries
The different ways of managing the supply-demand relationship.
The last blog ended on the challenges faced by customers created by ‘market failures’. Market failure arises when providing a product or service to a market-defining aggregation of demand cannot be economically justified on the…
Using the biological metaphors from the 2nd blog, we have approached a structural ecosystem as being like a holobiont. This enables us to include the ecosystem’s constituent business units, subcontractors and outsourced services as symbionts…
If we take up the biological metaphors from the 2nd blog, we must consider how to set aside the vertical cybernetic approach to sovereignty, based on an external authority, in order to approach a structural…
Introduction We return now to the issues raised by the first blog in this series: what is involved in the doubling of the Harold Bridger’s double task (Bridger 1990)?[1] In order to compete effectively in…
In the last blog, I described how the variety of possible 1st order material cause closures represented all the possible behaviors able to be realized by a living system. The 3rd order formal cause closures…
Special thanks go to John Kineman who has acted as a reader for this blog, providing invaluable help in clarifying my thinking. I alone bear responsibility for the end result! The need to surrender some…
The Tavistock Institute community was well aware of the challenges presented by ecosystems (Trist and Murray 1997), addressing the different nature of turbulent environments (Emery and Trist 1965), the referent or regulative organizations that arose…
I wrote a blog recently on how 21st Century Capitalism differs from 20th Century Capitalism (Boxer 2023). It argued that Marx worked with two dialectics: not only the dialectic between use-value and exchange value, but…
by Philip Boxer Why three kinds of symmetry-breaking? Because each symmetry is based on a different kind of basis for agreement: ‘how to do things’, ‘who to be’ and ‘what to want’. The need for…