The Paradox of Intentional Emergent Coherence : Organization and Decision in a Complex World

This article elaborates a framework for evaluating the growth and decline of organizations and other systems, determining what leads some of them to respond adequately to demands imposed upon them by their environment, and others not. The framework synthesizes two apparently mutually exclusive taxonomies. The first taxonomy concerns how organizations survive, emphasizing the creation of organizational structures to accomplish functional tasks necessary to survival. The second taxonomy adopts an epigenetic approach, concentrating on new behaviors that must be learned for growth and adaptation to occur. The functional framework is first-order cybernetic; the epigenetic, second-order cybernetic. Their integrated synthesis is denoted the Pparadox of Intentional Emergent Coherence, It lays stress on autopoiesis and concludes on a series of broader postulates that problematize the relevant theoretical questions. They in turn imply a coding scheme for assessing organizational development and performance that may be applied to any second-order cybernetic system