Posted by Yogesh Malhotra on January 29, 1998 at 15:52:16:

In Reply to: Re: On Discussion Threads, Boundaries and Relationships posted by Tom Sudman on January 29, 1998 at 14:19:10:

Tom,

Your point about 'structure' given to the dialog by means of technology is well taken. Agreed... advanced technologies can - by means of providing identifiers such as chronological dates, topics, active threads, etc. - provide an _artificial_ structure, however such structure may have its costs... it may not provide the 'unstructuredness' of 'messes' that are more and more relevant to managerial thought and action. Let's for the sake of dialog, probe further into these issues...

Does a more recent date on a piece of information suggest it is really 'new' information? How often do we read the same thing over and over again in different contexts, in different disciplines, in different eras - industrial era, information era, knowledge era and so on... Does newness of information depend upon the 'frame' within which you are trying to understand it, or is it inherent in the information? Relating to Rob's story of the 16th century vellum print, the print remains unchanged, it's the person who suddenly realizes its importance or significance. The human assets have been always a part of the organizations since day one, however we have seen the 'frame' that managers have put on such assets as they have traversed across the popularity of Taylorism, the bygone era of Hammer's reengineering by coercion, and the latest trend on intellectual assets.

Hence, one may visit any 'new' story / discussion / thread and still not find anything 'new' within one's frame of reference regardless of the newness of the time stamp on that piece of information. Contrarily, one may visit some 'old' stories, and on every visit find something new in it... this is the essence of the constructive view of creation of new knowledge.

The objective is not to discourage the focus on technologies... they are important... primarily for Brian Arthur's 'old world of business' driven by optimization and predictive models. However, we have yet to find technologies that are geared to the discontinuous era of 're-everything' in which everything (all assumptions about the 'givens'... including the traditional or extant notions of product, organization, industry, work, education, etc.) are up for grabs. For this new and more interesting era, we would need to revisit what good ol' man Skinner said:

"The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do."

Question for another day: "What creates more knowledge: structure or chaos (or more appropriately, the edge of chaos)?" Some new thinking on learning suggests that education that raises new questions about the contexts may result in greater learning than education that just emphasizes given solutions to pre-defined problems...

- Yogesh

• Out-of-box Thinking

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Follow Ups:

• Re: On Structure vs. Edge of Chaos Rob Patzig 09:48:09 2/03/98 (8)
  • Re: On Structure vs. Edge of Chaos Tom Sudman 10:23:57 2/03/98 (7)
    • Re: Complexity, Complex Systems & Chaos Theory Yogesh Malhotra 01:29:16 2/04/98 (5)
      • Re: Complexity, Complex Systems & Chaos Theory paola 11:16:10 3/05/98 (0)
      • Re: Complexity, Complex Systems & Chaos Theory Tom Sudman 11:27:42 2/04/98 (3)
        • On Science: Scientific and/or Human Perspectives Yogesh Malhotra 18:49:22 2/04/98 (2)
          • Re: On Science: Scientific and/or Human Perspectives Tom Sudman 20:00:52 2/05/98 (1)
            • Re: On Dialog and Bohm (in Senge's Fifth Discipline) Yogesh Malhotra 08:52:20 2/06/98 (0)
    • Re: On Structure vs. Edge of Chaos Rob Patzig 11:32:47 2/03/98 (0)
• Re: On Structure vs. Edge of Chaos Tom Sudman 18:06:47 1/29/98 (0)

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