In this reflection piece, I study human organisations from a system thinking perspective. More precisely, I explore the system we set together to organise ourselves in this course and the place we took in the whole institutional system that is the university. The idea of human organisation was central to the development of this course. Indeed, one of our main question at the beginning of the year was: How can we organise ourselves following principles that we value such as collaboration, creativity, time to learn and reflect as well as, being continuously critical of our own system (see our vision and goals in WordPress)? My aim is to elaborate four points that explain a bit more how we build our structure. I believe that this can be useful for future project as well as for the continuity of this course.
First, we refused any institutionalised structures. Nowadays, institutions are perceived as machines. These machines are controlled from a top-down hierarchical system. They need to be continuously maintained and controlled or they run down. Machines are designed by engineers and not by the people “using” them. Machines do not change over time or they break. Machines follow instructions and not intuitions. Machines are not human. However, it seems to me that this mechanistic approach does not represent reality. I believe that human organisations are living systems. Fritjof Capra in its Capra course, that I happen to follow, defines a living system as autopoietic, which means that a living system continuously creates or recreates itself by transforming or replacing its components. From this approach, a social group would be a self-generating network of communication (shaped by the people in it). If we start from this assumption it is clear that the mechanistic view of social group/institution does not fit. It is harmful to the people shaping the social group as well as for the sustainability of the organisation itself.
Would the university institution be a living system? Does the university hold communities?
The university, like most organisations, lives from an interplay between a formal structure and an informal, naturally-occurring network. The formal structure defines the rules and the regulations, the boundaries and the power relationships. The informal network is the fluctuating network of communication between people through which skills and tacit exchanges of knowledge are created. The formal structure is alive to the extent it is in touch with the informal network. A healthy institution will be the product of the good balance between these two necessary components. However, it seems to me that the current organisation of the university does not support its informal network. Moreover, its formal structure has been set based on contradictory goals. Indeed, according to me, universities’ principal purposes should be to educate and empower people to tackle the issues of tomorrow, to learn from others, to be a hub of knowledge and to be accessible to as many people as possible. However, it is not the case. Like a business, the university follows economic-driven approaches to education. The current economic environment encourages a mechanistic approach to social organisation. This creates instability because the informal network and the self-generating interactions are not considered or given voice. However, communities exist within this environment. The occupation emerged, in part, from these concerns and formed a rapid-grown informal network. From the occupation’s disturbance, from discussions and creativity, from passion and patience, this course emerged.
Second, we used a different kind of power. Power seems necessary for me to resolve the conflict of interests within social groups. Whilst some kinds of power assert, dominate, submit, and threaten, others can be empowering and acknowledge the diversity of opinion as feeding to discussions and as dynamism for changes. For me, when people are invested in the power making (decision-making, structure-making, etc) they are empowered which more likely lead to peace within the group.
How to organise the distribution of power?
Who chooses? Everybody.
How do we make decisions? With time and reflection.
How do we arrive at an outcome? We compromise. We listen with our ears and with our bodies.
How do we listen to each other? We facilitate. With respect.
Does it work? We do not know. If it does not, we come back to it and we start again.
We chose to be dynamic in our process. After all, why should we not try?
Some people in the group knew about consensus decision-making which is a participatory system where someone facilitates discussions. In a nutshell, we listen, debate and speak, we shake our hands to agree or disagree and we come to a compromise (see our document on consensus decision-making on WordPress). This process has some disadvantages. One of them would be the fact that some people do not feel confident in speaking in big groups. Moreover, as it is a dynamic discussion, the physical presence of a person is necessary for its voice to be heard. Although this process is not the best, it was useful to take the first big decisions.
Third, the people (we) had the power to choose the formal structure. To create this structure based on our values we had to decentralise the power. The authority was not in the hands of a few people anymore, but everybody was part of the decision-making. This choice led me to question the involvement of people (are we aware of this responsibility?). However, I realise now that the question is not the involvement but the collective choice we are making. What “rules” are we choosing? Where do we set the boundaries of acceptance? For our common agreement, we set a bunch of social rules such as:
We interact through consensus decision-making processes
There will be a minute-taker and a facilitator for each “meeting”
People will need to send their apologies if they are unable to come
We meet every week on Wednesday from 2-4pm in ECA
Everybody creates a reflective piece on our work each semester
Everybody reviews two reflective pieces of their comrades
Everybody will be involved in at least one of the sub-groups created (Permaculture, Bureaucracy and Radical pedagogy)
The social rules marked in bold were sanctioned if they were not done. It affected the pass/fail of the individual for the course. These formal rules were agreed on at the beginning of the course but were always open to changes. It was tried and reflected upon. The formal structure evolves depending on the people who make the group. Next years’ participants to this course will hopefully create new social rules, and adapt the ones we created. From my personal experience, I think that the subgroups should have their own internal rules from the beginning such as a certain time to meet, certain outcomes that they want to achieve (goals on the process, or on specific tangible or intangible outcomes). Moreover, I think that the consensus decision-making method should be dynamically changed. For instance, specific times should be given for reflection on the structural method used. Questions (written below) should asked in groups and reflected upon using different methods (maybe not speaking in groups but using papers or body language).
Does everybody feel at ease with the method? Does everybody feel confident to speak and express themselves? Are they any points that could be improved in this method? Do you have any ideas? Does our decision-making structure follow our principles?
Moreover, this set of rules have been an on-going discussion with the university. The institution disagreed with some and we had to find a compromise as it has also a set of certain rules. This on-going discussion with the university is extremely valuable for me as it triggers discussions and could lead to potential institutional changes in the future.
Nevertheless, I am genuinely impressed by the work we did. We managed to create a safe atmosphere for sharing knowledge and emotions, letting space for both equally. We have created a structure that allows for the emergence of new ideas, new emotions, new opinions and reflections as well as creativity. A big part of the process of emergence is the recognition of the periods of instability and the emotions that are related to it (such as fear, stress and, angriness). Whilst we went through different ups and downs we acknowledged it and gave time to reflect, to learn and to feel collectively.
Fourth, we strengthen the informal structure. We challenged the current formal structure of the university by letting more space for informal network and community. I believe that there are informal interactions arising naturally (friendship in classes from common interest) however, the emergence of ideas and creativity from these communities depends on the space we are giving to these informal networks. This informal network was strengthened by the time we took to build relationships as well as, by existing friendship and common experiences. I believe that more time could be given to this in future experience of this course. Although people were busy with other commitments, activities and events open to the public could be organised to create a real network.
To conclude, only by creating our course, we disturbed the university even passively. We triggered questions and hopefully discussions. However, I think that our experience should be more open and communicated. Create disturbances to the university could be one of the goals within our formal structure. This goal can be set indirectly through events and actions within the university (workshop during the reading week, exhibitions and communication of our experience) and with the local community. Second, a clear formal structure (based on the first-year course) should be written. From that, people can agree on or not and can change it over time and depending on their experiences.
What is this formal structure for? What are the goals? For what purpose do we create this structure and not another one? Are we critical of our own structure-making?
Thanks everybody for this beautiful experience and I wish all the best for the future creators/contributors/artists of this course.
Thank you for this rigorous text, Lucie! It is a great document for what we have achieved and what we lacked, a good perspective to include next year.
Thanks so much for this Lucie, I really appreciate the amount of work you obviously put into it, and I learned a lot!
Like Laerke, I think this would be really useful for the participants of the course next year to read.
Your idea about having a formal written structure of the course that can be amended by future participants is intriguing, would be interesting to see if they consider doing this next year and how they go about it.
Hi Lucie,
I liked the way you outlined your refection with your four points that you came back to this gave your reflection a good structure. The questions you lay out through your reflection also are effective in pinpointing your ideas about the course structure and also help serve the second intention of the post which is to inform the reader about our course from the outside. I agree with your second point about changing the consensus decision-making process giving it more of a structure in order to make sure everyone feels included. Overall your reflection is very good at both evaluating our course over the year and adding suggestions for making it better.
Thank you for writing this, I learnt a lot and would love to talk to you more about it at a future date!
Firstly I really appreciate that you involved the idea of systems thinking into this piece. I think a strength of this course was that having come from a wide range of disciplines and experiences, we were able to learn from each other and how we think in a way that we wouldn’t have done if we all studied history for instance. The fact that you incorporated wider knowledge in the pursuit or exhibition of knowledge for the education of others should be what the university is pursuing in terms of interdisciplinary, not the futures institute.
I also think a strength of this piece is that it is able to act as a building block for the future of this course, as you acknowledge, the course was at times hampered by the fact that it was the first of its kind for all of us, yet I agree with you that we should be proud of what we achieved. When we consider how we were on that first day I think we have come far.
I am also interested in the idea about informal and formal structures of organisations and agree with your belief that the formal structure of the course needs to be strengthened in order to take on the formal structure of the university.
Thank you for writing this, I don’t feel able to adequately ‘review’ it in this context but would love it if you were able to talk to me about it in the future.
Hi Lucie!!
Thank you for this well-though reflective piece. I appreciate that you have put a lot of effort and thinking into it, thank you! It is valuable that you draw on theories and other sources of your ow, giving some texture and background to your reflection. I like the fact that you link and direct us throughout to course content. It is quite a dense and thought-provoking piece so I have a lot of ‘answers’ and ‘critique’ to share, but don’t worry, it is a sign that it is successfully reflective! ?
It is interesting that there was already quite a lot of reflection rising up on structure in your first reflection, and see that it matured with you for this final reflection. While we spent a lot of time talking about the decision-making during the course, we did not really address structure. As you said in your first reflection, it is invisible and easy to forget about the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’. It would definitely be a good topic for our next year futures designers to think about and use your reflection to spark some good thoughts!
I’ve came across the notion of ‘autopoeisis’ in Designs for the Pluriverse of Escobar (2018). You would definitely love this book! I love this idea of biological autonomy being defined by interdependence rather than some sort of autarky.
To your idea that more contribution and spread of power leads to peace, I would ask what would you define by peace? Increasing the contribution and integration of people might actually lead to more conflicts. Indeed, power ‘elite’ can form out of affinity and similar interests. People from similar backgrounds and education. Adding people with different interest and perspectives, could bring more difficulties to reach consensus as there will need to be more compromise. Conflicts could arise from this, but I think that conflicts (as disagreements within a group) are necessary and healthy if handled well. They ensure that the group stays critical about itself and keeps evolving. However, we could argue that such disagreements are ‘peaceful conflicts’ as they are not violent if facilitated kindly and soundly.
In my opinion, not feeling confident in big group is more a ‘limitation’ of consensus decision-making than a disadvantage. What I mean there is that it can be worked around, and consensus can be reached without everyone having to physically ‘speak’ in the big group. Sub-groups can create and bring a proposal that they discussed separately in advanced, or the big meeting can be separated to discuss into sub-groups and then having one person feeding back to the big group (as we have done a few times), finally, the hand signals can be used to show you dis/agreement with people non-verbally. I was talking about this in the review of Ruairidh’s reflection if you wanna have more look about consensus decision-making.
The questions you outlined to gather impressions and feedback about our decision-making process are important. I feel like we did not reflect on this a lot throughout the course. When you say that we ‘acknowledged it and gave time to reflect, to learn and to feel collectively.’, my feeling is that we did do this so much more than any courses would do and I feel that there is still room for improvement. I recognise that a major constraint in us dealing with conflicts/disagreements was the very limited amount of time we had and the huge amount of things we had to figure out! We did a lot and did our best and I am really proud of us as well! Through this issue of time, I feel like we would have benefitted from more conversation with the university structure, but as you said the only fact that the course exist is disruptive to the university structure.
One of the suggestion that I would have to this question of time-constraint as well as people have divergent interest is one from thinking of ‘groups as gardens’. We can create ‘guilds’ of plants/individuals that work well together. Next year, some people could focus on outreach and disruption, others on producing a report, other on creating new methods of assignment and marking etc. In this way people could focus on what they are the most interested in, allowing more things to be done (I spoke about that in my final reflection). An issue to keep in mind would be to still keep those guild in the same system/garden sharing a common structure/soil that would have to be agreed on as a group. I like the idea of having a sub-group culture as well. Group culture is always under-rated! This could be linked to the wider group culture to keep the connection.
There are a few things that I don’t understand. ‘This choice led me to question the involvement of people (are we aware of this responsibility?). However, I realise now that the question is not the involvement but the collective choice we are making.’ I am not quite sure what you mean there. Do you mean that the challenge is about making choices rather than the fact that there are suddenly more people who have the responsibility to make those choices? ‘For instance, specific times should be given for reflection on the structural method used.’ I am not sure what you mean there neither. It was sometimes a bit hard for me to follow the argument, maybe section headings could help?
All in all, thank you very much again for this lovely reflection and the positive energy you brought to the course!