Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

facilitating its ability to deal with challenges and opportunities posed by the environment.
(G. Morgan, 1997)
Some other concepts or principles are equally important for understanding the contemporary view
of organizations. We will try to describe them as briefly as possible, based on the ‘free
encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, definitions (en.wikipedia.org)
“A dynamical system is a concept in mathematics where a fixed rule describes the time
dependence of a point in a geometrical space.” Parameters of dynamical systems are in
continuous change. “The mathematical models used to describe the swinging of a clock pendulum,
the flow of water in a pipe, or the number of fish each spring in a lake are examples of dynamical
systems. A dynamical system has a state determined by a collection of real numbers. Small
changes in the state of the system correspond to small changes in the numbers. The evolution rule
of the dynamical system is a fixed rule that describes what future states follow from the current
state. The rule is deterministic: for a given time interval only one future state follows from the
current state.” Organizations are definitely dynamical systems, because they involve a lot of
dynamical parameters and components, but they are of a special nature, because they are nondeterministic
and non-linear.
“A deterministic system is a conceptual model of the philosophical doctrine of determinism
applied to a system for understanding everything that has and will occur in the system, based on
the physical outcomes of causality. In a deterministic system, every action, or cause, produces a
reaction, or effect, and every reaction, in turn, is also an action that becomes the cause of other
subsequent reactions. The totality of these cascading events can theoretically show exactly how
the deterministic system will exist at any moment in time.”
The behaviour of “nonlinear system is not expressible as a sum of the behaviours of its
descriptors. In particular, the behaviour of nonlinear system is not a subject to the principle of
superposition, as linear systems are. Crudely, a nonlinear system is one whose behaviour is not
simply the sum of its parts. Linearity of a system allows investigators to make certain mathematical
assumptions and approximations for easier computation of results.” In nonlinear systems these
assumptions cannot be made. That is because “the response of non-linear systems to the small
accidental change of the state is not in direct proportionality with the distortions. In some points of
so-called dynamic equilibrium even a very small influence may determine the way of further
development (butterfly effect). These may be really points in the phase space, or lines, or surfaces,
etc. Such points were called by Puancare bifurcations; Prigogine called them later polifurcations.”
The noun bifurcation (from Latin bifurcare, to split into two) became one of the most popular terms
in any discipline considering any kind of development within social systems. Being dynamic and
10