The Creative Forces of Self-Organization

Consider a group of workers. If they act jointly under the direction of a leader to produce a product or service, we consider their behavior organized. If they act as a team without external orders, we would consider them self-organized. People self-organize all the time. Business associates create partnerships, children invent games, students organize elaborate pranks, and employees take the initiative in handling an unusual problem during a supervisor’s absence. In another organization, employees invent a subtle, collective way to resist an unpopular supervisory policy. We have tried with only moderate success to understand the self-organizing phenomena from the standpoint of behavioral psychology, military science, management science, and even operations research. Recent discoveries in systems theory, however, are giving new, clearer insights into self-organizing, insights that offer both managers and staff powerful new tools to increase productivity. Remarkably, they could implement these with simple additions to currently existing organizational structures.

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