Mgmt without Mgmt

cork | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Thursday September 21, 2006 21:15 by Denmann - Reliable Writing, LLC

Pointers to organizing a purpose-driven group without relinquishing control to a boss.

RE: Dolphin's Barn Community Garden

Faced with allegations of anarchism, while gleefully asserting individual independence, how can a small multitude manage any thing or activity without a boss? That lack of "a control point" threatens every government -- whether a local board, organized criminals, a nation, or a corporation, and self-appointed neighborhood "guardians." Cohesive independents, thus, need to offer would-be controllers something that can give them "comfort," something managerial, some entity, that can be named, blamed, and held accountable. And such a thing exists.

I found -- after hearing about it on the radio last year -- http://www.chaordic.org/ which provides a methodology for management without a centralized authoritarian. Structure without a boss!

Basically, as best I can understand, it comes down to like-minded people defining a set of rules that each and every individual will follow, but only as regards achieving some core purpose. Then everyone does whatever they want according to the rules for reaching the goal, e.g., "free," healthy, local food.

It's a lot of long, hard, interactive work among like-minded people. And that's before you can even begin. That's the purpose of winter. It has its origins in the extremely academic-scientific field of "complexity studies" (search it, or read M. Waldrop's book "Complexity" [1996.])

The science suggests that the entire universe creates itself, self-organizes, simply by beginning with individuals (atoms, cells, whatever) that each follow identical simple rules. E.g., "if A, then B, if not, then C," if it's an oxygen atom, grab it, if not pass it. A trillion occurences of internal rule-following (vs. a boss's or creator's) lead to self-functioning entities composed of independent units, or agents. Our bodies consist of cells that each do as they please, but effectively act as a single entity because each causes no harm to another, that cooperate, and yet care little about each other's well being.

To manage a community garden without a boss managing from the top down, the chaordic method encourages freedom, creativity, and positive action that both denies concentration of power and control, yet could exactly answer the fear of anarchism that standard command-and-control governments want to suppress. The hard part is defining the rules, the next is keeping them simple enough to remember when your hands are covered with mud. Watch out for anyone who wants to control how the rules are made. (The U.S. has a good constitution, but corporations & wealth have usurped the rule-making.)

Not part of the method, but worth noting. Two business people independent of each other told me that a "good size" company is 30-90 people; less means everyone's overworked; more means it's an unmanageable group of strangers. Also, anthropologists have shown that apes max out at groups of about 35, while humans don't even consider it a group until there are 35 (& max out at 135.)

I can't offer much more (other than a wealth of book and academic references), but it seems that any and every impulse to organize around a purpose or a cause could benefit from chaordic.org, from knowledge of complexity, or (from a business professor) "Harnessing Complexity" by Axelrod & Cohen. Academics should see www.santafe.edu.

Would love to help, but I'm out of work, middle-aged, not expert in the subject, and struggling to make my own ends meet in Michigan.

Good luck to any who pursue organized freedom to live.
-denmannº
www.freewebs.com/reliablewriting