The Starfish and The Spider

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 "Put people in an open system and they will automatically want to contribute."
- the sixth principle of decentralization in  The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom

 The Starfish and the Spider is a new book that adds to the growing body of knowledge about leadership, collaboration, and emergent organizational design.  The bi-line is The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. To me, this book speaks of Sapient Leadership.  The book is interesting because it reinforces the reality that design, creativity and collaboration are natural to human beings. It compliments our own Value Web model. 

I speak of my experience with young children in my blog on Group Genius.  What the authors of the Starfish and the Spider reinforce is the natural tendency of people to play ... to tinker with ideas, to find a difference, and to add to the stockpile of ideas.  Indeed, it seems to me that examples in the book are child's play ... Wikipedia, E-bay, Internet, P2P sharing, open source, etc. ... wonderful child's play!

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Shifting to a Creative Economy

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Over the last twenty-five years, there have been a number of overlapping descriptors of the economic systems in which businesses live. Regional and global economies have moved through the Industrial, Informational and Knowledge Economies to the Network, and now into the Creative Economy. All of these shifts have been rapid and each has incorporated and built upon – but certainly not eliminated – the previous ones.

So begins a Shift Paper that Tomorrow Makers published earlier this year in preparation for our workshops at Davos and which has drawn considerable interest and engagement since. Though we published it as a pdf, we realize it becomes much more useful as a living document, with which to engage our collective thinking...

This shift paper is written not as a wrong way/right way to think about and do business, but rather as a way to have a dialog about our assumptions and ways of working in order to increase our fitness for the kinds of situations, decisions and responsibilities that a Creative Economy imposes on us.

In this spirit, we thought it would be fun to list the "emerging patterns" of organization we identified in the shift paper, using them as a source from which to link to ideas, conversations, illustrations and other examples of these patterns in the world around us. Some of these may be familar to you, but hopefully we've uncovered a few new discoveries, as well.

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Emerging Attractors for Escaping Communities

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Structural coupling, then, is the process through which structurally-determined transformations in each of two or more systemic unities induces (for each) a trajectory of reciprocally-triggered change. This makes structural coupling one of the most critical constructs in autopoietic theory. -Encyclopedia Autopoietica

I have been thinking about the structural coupling processes that help create and define a community.

Of all the elements and relationships of elements that make up a community at any given time, those with the greatest attraction tend to produce the strongest coupling behavior. Which elements are the strongest at any given time is dynamic. Some elements and relationships of elements have appeared as strong coupling agents for hundreds or thousands of years. Others grow strong and dissipate with more fluidity.

At times, a new coupling agent or a new relationship among agents emerges and the social structure of the community undergoes a phase change -- a perturbation in which a new (relatively) stable-state is achieved.

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