Friends reported he’d been talking about differentiation and integration again
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I was asked to speak at a mini-symposia of the International Systems Sciences Society — so no pressure, then! I talked about the positive and negative dynamics of differentiation and integration when people get organised together.
Here are twelve points I think people might find interesting — what do you think?
Any time a group of humans gets together — in a big corporate, a startup, a community network, or a workshop, a bunch of patterns start:
1. differentiation and integration are key concepts in human dynamics: we need separate functional groups and enough freedom that people can offer their particular expertise but we also need stability, for the whole organisation to be a whole, to work in some sense as one (even in looser forms, we still need something that makes it meaningfully different from just a bunch of individuals or groups)
2. group dynamics quickly make things messy, though: separate groups and teams get into turf warfare too much autonomy leads to chaos too much blending of everyone together means nobody knows what their job is, everyone’s in everyone else’s business all the time and too much ‘harmony’ means enforced groupthink
3. (each of these forces, in the extreme, also leads to its opposite: turf warfare creates a strong team identity in the combatant teams too much ‘sameness’ and people will burst out with their differences, etc)
4. (and each of these forces is fractal: within one division, team, or subgroup, you have all four dynamics at play)
5. what’s worse, whether done well or badly, these human dynamics create different ‘worlds’ inside the organisation — different experiences of organisational life, where people see things entirely differently. This leads to misunderstanding, taking things personally, an inability to stay in partnership, failure to achieve what we set out to do in the first place.
6. and it affects whole cultures: when one group of people is dominant, the rest are ‘others’, excluded, judged, operating in a world not designed for them. Attempts to address this either increase the conflict or reinforce the sterility of different worlds
Barry Oshry saw this in experiential events he organised. Stafford Beer saw this in organisations. Sandra Janoff and Yvonne Agazarian saw this in group and meeting dynamics.
7. what people actually want is something like ‘optimal distinctiveness’ they want to feel special by being part of something they want enough of their life to be unchanging and unchallenging that they can get into interesting areas of uncertainty and variety
8. organisations need this too — see the first point!
9. So we need to understand the flows of integration and differentiation, and use them for a dynamic and productive balance. The four dynamics essential for success are segment blend empower and harmonise segmentation and empowerment are associated with power and separation, while blending and harmonising are linked to love and connection.
10. facilitation and work with group dynamics involves sensing and managing the flows within a group to balance differentiation and integration: blending different perspectives together to share different knowledge and experiences. looking for dissent, disagreement, the excluding, and creating function subgroups to explore and deepen the thinking in a safe space before integrating them into the larger group.
11. in organisation, we need to pay attention to the pulse and rhythm of the four dynamics: segmenting into similar groups to be able to work in specialised ways and adapt to the demands of the world, while blending the separate groups so they can play together well and maintain stability empowering individuals and giving them the autonomy to use their unique skills, while harmonising and integrating their efforts into the overall mission
12. in cultures, we need to respect the need for all four dynamics, for power and love to play out in healthy ways, to allow engagement with ‘other’ cultures in a robust and dynamic way
…and all of this is about giving people the experience and the potential of shifting between identities: ‘I’, ‘MY group’, ‘being part of groups working together’, and ‘being part of something bigger’.
An informed approach which senses, understands, and responds to these dynamics can get things done in the short term, and build in active adaptation to these dynamics in the longer term.
Here’s the video of the talk: https://link.redquadrant.com/ISSSdifferentiation-integrationvideo
And here are the slides https://link.redquadrant.com/ISSSintegration-differentiation
Thanks to Gary Smith for inviting me.
