Synchronization and Self-Organization in Organizations. The Combinatory System© View.

In any organization people may be observed from two different points of view: first of all as organs (or components of organs), in the sense that organizational relationships assign them a precise spatial and temporal placement, they carry out a specialized function in relation to the entire structure, they have a specific functionality that delimits the admissible interactions with the other elements, and they show a particular functioning; secondly, as members of a social collectivity in which, independently of their organizational role and connections, they appear as similar agents, moved by private objectives, capable of producing micro decisions, behaviours and effects relatively analogous to that of the others. My study considers the second aspect of human behaviour in organizations and aims to present a simple theory - the Theory of Combinatory Systems - which may allow us to describe, explain, and to a certain extent control many relevant and intriguing collective phenomena and their observable effects, which are produced by agents acting as unorganized social systems, even if they are also members of an organizational structure. In plain words I define as a combinatory system any collectivity (composed of individuals or organizations) whose agents, consciously or unconsciously, act (exclusively or prevalently) on the basis of global information which they direcly produce and update as the consequence of their micro behaviours. On the one hand, the global information is - or derives from – a synthetic variable whose values are produced by the combination of the micro states of the agents (hence the name Combinatory System) but, on the other, these values affect the subsequent states as a result of a micro-macro feedback, acting over a period of time, that produces self-organization in the agents’ micro behaviours. If we accept the traditional definition of self-organization as the macro behaviour of a collectivity of agents in which the micro behaviours appear to be “directed”, or “organized”, by an Invisible Hand, or Supreme Authority, in order to produce the emerging phenomenon represented by the formation of ordered structures, of recognizable patterns, then it is easy to recognize that the macro phenomena produced by the macro behaviour of the system become factors in self-organization, since they are interpreted by the agents as information they can base their decisions on. In other words, the invisible hand is nothing other than the synergetic effect of the micro-macro feedback action (or circular causality) that generates and updates the global information that produces self-organization and emerging macro behaviours attributable to the collectivity. A very special and important combinatory system is the one I have named the Improvement and Progress Combinatory System, since its particular effect is to produce progress, according to commonly accepted value judgements regarding an improvement in the overall state of a collectivity. When an improvement begins (“by chance” or “by program”) in one or all of the agents of the system, then “by necessity” progress occurs throughout the system and all the Agents seem to synchronize their micro behaviours and self-organize; the improvement spreads and the progress continues, until a limiting state is reached in which no further improvement can be carried out and no further progress can occur. On the basis of the previous definitions it is possible to understand some evident phenomena derived from combinatory systems composed of business organizations: the genesis of industrial clusters (systems of accumulation and diffusion); the spread of ideas or practices within organizations, or of a fashion in markets (diffusion systems); the continuous improvement of productivity and of quality levels (improvement and progress systems); path dependence and chaos in collective behaviour (irreversible and reversible stochastic diffusion systems).