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Welcome to Emerging Futures - Volume 160 -- Organizations of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Abstractions!
Good morning strange outcomes of surreptitious substitutions,
Last week we started a series on organization and organizations—two very different but densely entangled topics. And as always, our perspective on all of this is from the question of engaging effectively with creative processes.
If we quickly and briefly jump back to our last newsletter, our focus was twofold:
Now, we understand that this might feel like quite an eccentric place to start a discussion of organizations. But, for us, it is always a question of going slow to go fast—after all, how one begins, those implicit starting assumptions—their configuration is going to shape how you can go...
Let’s pause to remember some of the suggestions we left you with:
If last week we made an argument for how everything is part of some grouping—some assemblage—and that everything is organized—now, this week we want to build upon all of this by slowing down and turning our attention to how organizations are most often presented to us.
Organizations are truly strange things. But to grasp this, we have to first realize that we don’t really know what they are, despite how seemingly obvious they are to most of us.
Of course we know what an organization is!
OK, so what is it?
What is an Organization?
When faced with this question, what is the image that first comes to the forefront of your thinking?
Is it some type of enclosed body with various “organs"—or departments: the C-Suite, Management, HR, Production, etc:
Or is it an “Org Chart”? With it, grouping of functions and clear hierarchy of decision-making:
Perhaps it is neither of these. So, how do you define and visualize an organization? Not when you think long and hard about it—but what concepts intuitively and immediately come to mind?
It is really worth taking a moment to do this.
Write it out or make a quick sketch. Additionally, Google it. Do an image search. Query AI…
We did that—and it was really fascinating—the two above images were the standard; additionally, here is a brief video that feels pretty exemplary.
So, “What is an Organization?”
It is a formal structure that brings a group of people together to act towards a purpose, via a chain of command and the sequential distribution of tasks.
We could expand on this and get far more nuanced, but this is what it seems an organization "is.”
PAUSE: It is time for a brief disclaimer: we understand that these models of understanding organizations are both simple and have been criticized. But, for our point right now, this is not so important. Next week we will address some of these criticisms and go more into alternative conceptualizations of organizations. What is critical for our argument in this newsletter is that broadly speaking, most approaches to organizations retain most of the basic logic we are describing—even if they nuance it with various subtle corrections.
This hierarchical “body with organs” model of organization has a clear processual logic. The process of action involves going from an Idea produced in the C-Suite down to the Production level of an organization, where the idea is made and then distributed out into the world.
It is top-down and goes from inside the “brains” of the organization via production to the outside; hence, we like to call it a “down and out” approach:
This schema of an organization and its process of making is roughly as follows:
What is most interesting about these abstractions is that they track in a direct manner to what we call fondly “the God model of innovation." The anthropologist Philippe Descola terms this the “heroic model of "creation"—"involving the imposition of form upon inert matter by an autonomous subject, whether God or mortal, who commands the process by a preestablished plan and purpose.” The God model of creativity is worth laying out in detail, as it has been the central abstraction that has organized western approaches to making since the classical Greeks. And as such, it also organizes how we approach understanding organizations and their internal logic of production/creation:
then:
and finally:
This logic can be laid out as a four step process:
And why this all matters is that this process is utterly incorrect in every aspect in regards to how it frames creative processes. The God model ascribes to individual powers, attributes, and actions that are actually the emergent result of a diverse organized assemblage operating in a non-linear manner.
Taking this further:
And this organizational model fails us in all these regards:
This cannot be what an organization is, any more than we are immaterial minds floating in bodies or creativity is about ideation.
Here it would do well to remember how we ended last week's newsletter discussing groups—for what if not groups (assemblages) can replace the God model of organizations?
But let’s return to the God model. It is not enough to make the connection from this model to how we frame organizations and their agency (wrongly). The connections run rampant. This approach to creation and creativity (the God model) operates in all of the most significant sites of human activity: It gives us the abstract frame to understand our own individual agency, our collective agency (in organizations), and any agency in general:
Obviously we are dealing with broad generalities here, but these are informative. Our use of organic metaphors of the human body with organs to frame organizations not only reproduces a profoundly inaccurate logic of action across the total spectrum of life—equally dangerously, it reproduces a profoundly anti-democratic and anti-worldly logic. It is radically anti-democratic in its top-down belief in both where ideas come from and the agency they have in organizational processes. It is anti-worldly in its denial of the agency of the body, matter, relations, and intra-action.
But how did we get here? And why do these abstractions persist with such force?
One of the functions that the Anglo-American philosopher Whitehead gives to philosophy is “the criticism of abstractions which govern special modes of thought." And this is what we need in the context of the abstractions that shape our engagement with organizations. The abstractions of:
These are what we need to critique. As we do this, it is important to bear in mind that the goal of the criticism of abstractions for Whitehead is not the denial of abstractions and their value—it is not about getting rid of all abstractions to get to some mythic “pure experience"—but rather it is to reform them.
Abstractions are our necessary tools; life is lived necessarily in the midst of abstractions; it is just that they are also inherently dangerous and can lead us radically astray.
How? The big problem with abstractions is not that they inherently reify actual experience. That they turn the messiness of life into simpler, graspable tools for action—this is what we want from our abstractions. But, as we know, the tool shapes the user. And we become our practices. We need to be cautious and critical in how we make abstractions and how we deploy them. The question we need to ask is: What do we become—what do we come to sense, feel, know, and do as children of the “God model” and its full suite of abstractions? It certainly moves us down a path of reducing reality to mere stuff—resources, our bodies to mere vehicles, our organizations to micro-dictatorships, and our creativity to mere variation. As Spinoza said, we have come to love our own subjugation.
In reforming abstractions in relation to organization and organizations, it is certainly time to put aside the God model, the body with organs, dematerialized ideation, passive matter, etc. And experiment with abstractions that give rise to genuinely open futures that redistributes agency beyond the anthropocentric confines of our hyper-individualism, essentialized organizations, and all that follows.
The problem of abstractions is not just a question of which ones serve us. For Whitehead the real danger occurs when we take these abstractions for reality itself. Whitehead called this operation “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." And others might call it mistaking the map for the territory.
And in our case: We have taken the God model for reality. It is now how we see ourselves, our organizations, and, broadly speaking, creativity itself.
For example, when we point out that creativity is not in the head. We get vigorous pushbacks, "Of course it is in the head; because it is in my head." But when we ask them to experientially lay out the full extended process of how they came to have a creative thought, it is not reducible to any one location and certainly not the head.
This example, which is a frequent event for us, is a clear example of the inversion of the abstract and the concrete, where we now take the abstract for the real. The God model has become experientially real...
This is equally true of organizational abstractions: The C-Suite, Leadership, Organizational Culture, HR...
In regards to misplaced concreteness, the challenge with abstractions is twofold:
I (Iain) was skimming through LinkedIn earlier today when an image caught my eye:
It showed a wall bisected by a free flowing river. And on the wall, two guardians proclaimed “abstract concepts” while on the river, a boat floated past the wall with a passenger who said with relief, “personal experience."
If it were only that simple!
It is not abstract versus authentic experience. There is no pure, untouched personal experience to fall back upon. And abstraction in general is not the problem—it is certainly not the enemy.
But we need to reconsider which key abstractions we are willing to entertain and work with. In the space of organizations, individuals, and creativity, it is hard to see how we could do anything but refuse almost all of our most common ones. We need to test abstractions via experience—where do they take us?—and are we performing a surreptitious substitution?
And when it comes to considering organizations specifically, perhaps the first thing we need to do is to be both aware of and suspicious of what are taken as structural invariants:
We additionally need to reform many and invent far more; next week we will focus on these.
But, most importantly, we cannot confuse the abstraction for the territory. We need to remember—the danger is that it is not that hard to generate new structural invariants surreptitiously via the concretization of abstractions.
“Constraints" is certainly one we notice more and more…
But nor should we throw out our abstractions, for as Deleuze says of the map, “it does not represent the real, but it is entirely a tool to experiment with the real." We need conceptual tools—abstractions—to live in and of the creative emergent middle. But it requires a cautious and creative testing—what possibilities for action, sensing, and knowing emerge with which abstractions—what world are we co-emerging with?
Next week, we will share some of our thoughts on alternative abstractions that might help us engage with how we are organized and organizations in regards to creative practices.
Till then, experientially and experimentally, invent new abstractions!
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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