On the Boundaries of OD: A Journey from Fractals to Light and Beyond
An interest in fractals awoke in me at the turn of the Millenium. I was a business consultant with A.T. Kearney through the latter half of the 1990s and countered my disillusionment with organizational practices in general, by reading poetry.
These lines from Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri had a particularly deep impact on me — A subtle pattern of the universe, It is within, below, without, above… — perhaps because they described a fractal and it struck me that what the poet goes on to elaborate of the pattern in the epic poem, provided practical insight into the nature of people, teams, organizations, and even markets that I continued to encounter.
I was inspired to write a couple of journal articles on fractals and a different view of organizations in the early 2000s and even interacted with Benoit Mandelbrot — the father of fractal geometry and an IBM Fellow at the time, who acknowledged my applications of the concept of fractals to the field of Organizational Development (OD).
I had come to know of the power that small patterns at the individual level — assumption, perception, belief — had in shaping larger, even removed circumstance, and based on the two journal articles, received a three-book Advance Contract from SAGE to elaborate a fractal framework for organizations (2009–2015).
The first of these books, Connecting Inner Power with Global Change: The Fractal Ladder resulted in a 13-episode radio show (2010) sponsored by Gap, Inc. This was due to the forward-thinking Dan Henkle, SVP of Global Responsibility at the time, with whom I had been in general dialog over the years.
Interestingly Dan flipped between the roles of SVP for Global Responsibility and SVP for HR for Gap. This I feel foreshadows an important trend which in my perception is in line with a deep fractal reality that could drive major global change — be it Climate Change, the reversal of general ecosystem services degradation, or of environmental pollution — by influencing small acts at the margin, at the individual level. This was also an emphasis of a major report on the connection between HR and sustainability that I, as a fractal systems architect at Aurosoorya, had partnered with SHRM and BSR to create in 2011:
Now, I did not realize it at the time, but in reality, I was already operating on the boundary of what had been conceived in the field of OD and was in a manner of speaking looking out, proposing ways to change it. This became apparent to me due to the mixed reception I received when I was invited to present a workshop on some of my work on the power of emotions — proposed as a fractal construct that provides insight into the nature of organizations — at the 50th Annual OD Network Conference (see the Tools & Technology section) in 2014.
The workshop combined concepts in Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), Emotional Intelligence (EQ), and OD, and was set up as live scenarios that teams had to work through using an EQ-based SaaS tool. I had developed this tool over the years as a passion project. Participants were divided into groups and had to record emotional responses which were aggregated in real-time, and allowed teams to make ongoing decisions to work through the live simulations based on the aggregated emotions.
This work though followed several years of experimenting at Stanford University Medical Center, under the aegis of Todd Prigge, Administrative Director of OD, and a supporter of the fractal ideas. Earlier this year I summarized the EQ-based experiments at three organizations including those conducted at Stanford. For those interested, this summary also links to a couple of journal and other articles on the use of the EQ tool. Note that Todd also collaborated with me on a Field Guide to implement some of the fractal ideas I had been developing, and this appeared as an entire section in book 3 of the fractal-series books, The Fractal Organization: Creating Enterprises of Tomorrow (2015).
Now shortly after that, I began work for Arun Rajan, the then COO of Zappos. The work was in the area of pricing — which by the way — I viewed as an OD problem, where “organization” can be thought of as extending into the market, and comprising of complex dynamics that from a fractal point of view are similar to the nature of dynamics experienced at the level of the person, or between persons, or between teams. Such a perception allowed me to approach the behemoth pricing problem involving hundreds of thousands of products in another way, using complex adaptive systems (CAS) as a framing mechanism and I have summarized my point of view in Dynamic Pricing in Complex Adaptive Markets, which for the interested reader also has links to other journal and technical articles.
By the way, book 2 in the fractal books, Redesigning the Stock Market: A Fractal Approach (2011), connects patterns experienced at the individual level with global patterns, to thereby implicitly position OD as something different. But perhaps it is the case that the intention and framing I have afforded to OD has always been about CAS. Nonetheless, the point is that artificial boundaries that exist for OD seem to be unnecessarily constraining when it comes to solving more and more complex problems.
Now, it ended up that Arun, the late Tony Hsieh, and I began regularly reading and discussing books and articles on CAS. It was a book club of sorts to which others were also invited, but for a couple of years, we were perhaps the most consistent of the readers. I have described how I met Tony in Mathematical Encounters with an Exceptional CEO, and as I transitioned to becoming an employee of Zappos through the invitation of Hollie Delaney, the then CHRO of Zappos, he continued to be actively interested in many of the CAS/OD initiatives I subsequently got involved in. Note also, that once Tony retired from Zappos in 2020 I continued to work with him, and had a chance to frame a more massive OD problem of interest to him — that of the necessary conditions for achieving World Peace. I have written about the back story of the world peace paper, “Simulations of Necessary Conditions of World Peace Leveraging a Quaternary-Based, Quintuple-Layered Complex Adaptive Systems Model”, that I dedicated to Tony and presented just a couple of months ago at IAMOT 2021 held at Nile University in Egypt.
Hollie is an exceptional leader who believes in creating the conditions to allow each person to excel as per their unique nature. She actively supported and advised several initiatives that were of interest to me including using the SaaS EQ tool to help Zappos further operate as a CAS, the ambitious mapping (aka the holy grail) to connect people practices with bottom-line business results — which by the way was summarized in a technical IEEE paper simply titled Constructing Leading-Indicator Sustainability Metrics for a Corporate Complex Adaptive System Using Graph Algorithms, and the incorporation of Light as an OD Approach.
The general CAS work I was involved with — which perhaps added a bit to the extensive work Zappos had already been engaged in to operate as a CAS — has been included in a ten-part series I authored for Forbes, Becoming a CAS Organization: Mastering Wealth. Note, I was interviewed by a number of external parties while I was at Zappos who were interested in learning more about CAS in general, and the live dialogs appear in Dialogs on Practical and Also Deeper Aspects of Complex Adaptive Systems.
The Light work followed a long journey where I articulated the mathematical power in light through a series of ten books that I framed as a Cosmology of Light. I had begun conducting live workshops on Light to Facilitate Organizational Change at Zappos. With global lockdown, I ended up conducting about 100 workshops during the course of a year. About half of them were internal to Zappos, with the rest being offered externally to various audiences and with various themes. Prompted by Tony I summarized the gist of the internal workshops into ‘6 Light Maxims for Organizational Change’ and also authored a two-part series on using light to facilitate change for Forbes, A Radical Driver of Change for Radical Times.
The two Forbes series ended up being an integral part of a Forbes Organizational Sciences Certification Program that I designed with Forbes. It was a multi-month program offered in 2020 and executives from close to 250 companies enrolled in parts of it. Executives from 75 companies completed the entire certification. The following is a short youtube extract from the third part of the certification program that focused on using light to facilitate organizational change:
The writing of the ten books on Cosmology of Light was an ambitious exercise in defining a fractal, holographic mathematics true for any level of organization — whether at the level of persons, companies, markets, and beyond. For me, this attempt was a milestone and signaled the time to reverse direction to now look into the field of “OD” from its boundaries, to see how to practically make effective change happen.
This now is what we have begun to do at Galaxiez, a boutique consulting company I joined as a partner in 2021. Through an efficient multi-disciplinary modeling approach leveraging complex adaptive systems, organizational development, game theory, psychology, mathematics of organization, and chaos theory, our clients are tangibly experiencing extraordinary results in a range of areas.
I have begun writing a third series of articles for Forbes to highlight parts of the unique approach Galaxiez uses in solving complex problems. The first article just appeared a couple of weeks ago, How HR Can Begin To Reduce an Organization’s Complexity. Note that my insistence on emphasizing even difficult terminology and concepts when communicating about complexity or Cosmology of Light is something I learned from Daryl Conner. I had the privilege to work closely with him in the first decade of the 2000s and realized then that it is important that clients know that what is being discussed is different through the distinct terminology. Realizing difference affords power by opening pathways that may not have existed before.
It is my hope that were I to turn to poetry again, it is rather to express the triumphant integrality that can come to bear with the meaningful meshing of individual, business, societal, and global goals.
Perhaps that possibility will be afforded by an OD bound in a different way.
