Condensed concepts

Symmetry breaking is integral to biology. Spatial symmetry is broken as cells differentiate and also as organs form. Time reversal symmetry is broken in the life history of the development of individuals: from birth to death, it is heading just one way. The fourth article in The Economist , Biology briefs, is  Making your way in the world: An individual’s life story is a dance to the music of time . Here is the opening paragraph. The organs of a body are a spatial division of labour, one created by different genes being turned on in different cells. The same process serves to give individual lives a division of labour over time. Complex algae, animals, fungi and plants all have predictable life histories which separate out three basic aspects of development —the creation of an autonomous individual, growth and reproduction—and run them sequentially. There is also a fourth stage: death! Individual identity is tied up with sex. A lot of the complexity here is to do with sex... Sex is c

 If organisations are emergent can they be managed?  This is the question I discussed in a previous post, stimulated by an article,  The Dialogic Mindset: Leading Emergent Change in a Complex World   by Gervase Bushe and Robert Marshak. They make the following claims. To be sustainably successful, organizations have to manage learning as well as performing. This is one of the core paradoxes of management and organization theory : how to create organizations that can be simultaneously innovative and efficient; that is, how to best organize in order to learn and perform at the same time ?   The most efficient forms of organizing, like assemblyline manufacturing, are also the least able to adapt and change. Our business models for succeeding in complex, uncertain environments, like popular music or pharmaceuticals, are highly inefficient and spend lots of money on innovation hoping for one monster hit to pay it all back. Learning and performing are paradoxically related because when some