Completeness

Groupware Configurations of Challenge and Harmony: an alternative approach to alternative organization (Part #4)

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The communication net experiments were designed around laboratory problems which did not call for extensive functional differentiation between those in the net.

An extreme contrast is to be found in a mature self-reliant community when a complete range of functions - from agricultural to cultural- is required. It is characteristic of this degree of functional differentiation - found to a lesser degree in large, complex organizations - that there is no theoretically grounded logic to the relationships between some of these functions. Allocation of resources to functions can only be justified by experience, possibly disguised by 'good' public relations (e.g. a harvest cultural festival keeps the agricultural workers happy, etc.).

The question is what are the functions in a 'complete' range if only 4 or 7 or 12, etc functions emerge in a given case ?

How is the absence of a function sensed (e.g. a self-reliant community may feel the need for some cultural, religious, psychotherapeutic or other expression) ? If some functions are not expressed, what dependence does this create on the external environment ?

Clearly it would be useful to clarify the nature of

• completeness in narrow, highly specialized groups
• incompleteness in mature, self-reliant, richly differentiated groups.

The question is how much variety can be usefully incorporated and expressed within the group without tearing it apart or rendering it incapable of functioning as a whole ? - given that a rich variety pool is a guarantee that the group can formulate many survival strategies in response to possible crises and that it offers many different opportunities for personal fulfillment (Note that the current tendency is to aim for structures which will operate effectively with the minimum functional variety).

It is clear that completeness in a spherically symmetrical tensegrity is structurally explicit. The consequences of removing an element in the simpler structures are immediately evident for the whole. Completeness in this sense is not explicit in hierarchical organizations from which whole divisions may be removed without raising questions as to the implications for the functioning of the whole.

In a tensegrity each relationship constitutes a different kind of challenge or a different kind of harmony, depending upon its position (and orientation ?) within the configuration. It is the totality of these qualitatively distinct relationships which defines the whole although it is at the level of their distinctiveness that they are operationally comprehensible rather than through the abstractions of 'challenge' and 'harmony'.

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