Life and Leadership : A Systems Approach

I am a great believer in "Complexity Theory" which attempts to explain an underlying order among the various chaotic patterns we see around.

I did some reading of Fritjof Capra lately (titles added to my shelf). He is certainly one of the greatest proponent of systems thinking. I was extremely intrigued with these excerpts from his website

The new understanding of life implies the following four lessons for the management of human organizations.

Lesson 1
A living social system is a self-generating network of communications. The aliveness of an organization resides in its informal networks, or communities of practice. Bringing life into human organizations means empowering their communities of practice.

Lesson 2
You can never direct a social system; you can only disturb it. A living network chooses which disturbances to notice and how to respond. A message will get through to people in a community of practice when it is meaningful to them.

Lesson 3
The creativity and adaptability of life expresses itself through the spontaneous emergence of novelty at critical points of instability. Every human organization contains both designed and emergent structures. The challenge is to find the right balance between the creativity of emergence and the stability of design.

Lesson 4
In addition to holding a clear vision, leadership involves facilitating the emergence of novelty by building and nurturing networks of communications; creating a learning culture in which questioning is encouraged and innovation is rewarded; creating a climate of trust and mutual support; and recognizing viable novelty when it emerges, while allowing the freedom to make mistakes

I think it explains a lot of things about organisations and how as living systems they thrive in an extremely complex environment. The subject has created a lot of curiosity in me, i am going to dig deeper!