Biological Systems: When stability means change

The basis of a group's stability is the freedom of its members. When individuals join together, new properties emerge. The ability to change keeps organisms alive. Here are the keys to rethinking our role in the world via the formula of life.

Claudio Fabian Guevara

*originally published September 2019 

The basis of the of a system's stability is the individual freedom of its members. And at the same time, the stability of a system depends on its members' capacity to change.

This paradox about the creative principles that seem to govern living systems is exposed by Margaret J Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers in “A simpler way”. The work is a frontal criticism of the highly controlled mechanistic systems that create robotic behavior, and suggests instead that a philosophy that preserves the freedom of individuals and free collaboration is closer to the principles of life's organisation and gives greater guarantees of survival.

“People and ideologies are pitted against each other, believing that in order to survive, they must destroy the opposition,” says Margaret J. Wheatley. But “if we change our way of seeing things, the things we see can change.”

What do biological systems have to teach us?

The authors propose to stop worrying about the design of perfect structures or rules:

“There is no ideal design for anything, just interesting combinations that arise as a living thing explores its space and possibilities.”

They suggest learning from the way life creates itself, in order to manage our lives less rigidly, and cultivate more open and creative relationships.

 

►The dance of life

Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers describe life as a pulsating experience, collaboratively built in networks, in a dense and dynamic dance of relationships between individuals and systems, where change is a constant.

They point out a first paradox: the stability of each system depends on the capacity of its members to change. And when a system stops its offering of new ideas, then the system becomes moribund. Without constant change, the system sinks into the death of equilibrium and no longer participates in co-evolution.

A second paradox says that the stability of systems lies in the individual freedom of their members, not in conformity and compliance with determined rules. We may think that the survival of our organisation is guaranteed by finding the right way and insisting that all people conform to it. But the “same for everyone” formula is not an equivalent of stability. What creates stable systems is individual freedom.

A third important aspect is that when individuals come together, they create new systems with properties that “emerge” suddenly and mysteriously. “Emergence” is the surprising capacity we discover when we do something together. The new properties that will “emerge” from the union cannot be predicted. No matter how much we know about individuals, we will never have the ability to predict how each one will behave within a system. Once individuals are linked, they become something different. 

►The Seven Principles

Life combines all of these elements and unfolds itself following these seven principles:

• Everything is in a constant process of discovery and creation. Everything is changing all the time: people, systems, environments, norms, the processes of evolution. Even change changes itself. Every organism reinterprets norms, creates exceptions for itself, creates new rules.

• Life uses disorder to obtain neat solutions. Life does not seem to share our desires for efficiency or neatness. It uses redundancy, fuzziness, endless trial and error until it finds what works.

• Life is the intention to find what works, not what is ‘right’. What is important is the ability to find solutions, and any solution is only temporary. There are no permanently “right” answers. The ability to keep changing until you find what works now is what keeps organisms alive.

• Life creates possibilities as it engages with opportunities. The possibilities for generating more possibilities are endless.

• Life is drawn to order. It experiments until it discovers how to form a system that can contain diverse members. Individuals search within a wide range of possible relationships to see if they can be organized into a sustainable living system. Explorations continue until a system is discovered.

• Every organisation is an identity in motion. Life is organized around identity. Every living being acts to develop and preserve its identity, which is the filter that each organism or system uses to make sense of the world. Everything is interpreted through a sense of self. This tendency toward self-creation is so strong that it creates another paradox: an organism will change in order to maintain its identity.

• Everything participates in the creation and evolution of its neighbors. No system dictates the conditions to another. All participate together in creating the conditions of their interdependence.

Identity, the center of our perception

We perceive the world on the basis of our identity. At any given moment, the greatest influence on what we see comes from what we have decided to be. At least 80 percent of the information in the brain works with information that is already in the brain. Therefore, we will only be encouraged to change our minds, or change ourselves, if we believe that the change will preserve our identity. 

 

Source: https://vibromancia.com/sistemas-biologicos-para-aplicar-en-la-vida-cotidiana/