The Nature of Organizational Size and Complexity
While social philosophers, historians and organizational consultants might not be able to agree upon much, they inevitably acknowledged two trends: growth and complexity. I will briefly explore each of these trends and then begin to consider the implications for leaders of these trends.
Growth
First, they acknowledged that organizations over the years have tended to become larger. One of the obvious reasons for this growth is the massive increase in the size of the human population on this planet, which, in turn, leads to increasingly dense human populations in all areas of the world. However, the increasing density of human population is not simply a matter of population growth. It also has to do with a remarkable dynamic that is to be found in most complex systems—what many theorists now label “the strange attractor” phenomenon.
This dynamic concerns the tendency for all elements in a complex system to cluster around some central point. There are forces, entities and events in many systems that attract other forces, entities or events. One of the primary contributors to contemporary complexity theory, Ilya Prigogine (1984) observed that larvae in a specific insect population will tend to distribute widely when there is low density (small number of larvae in a specifically defined space), but will tend to cluster as the density increases and to form multi-clusters with very high density. There is a similar tendency for people to cluster as they increase in number. The attractor principle is apparently not unique to the human race or even to sentient beings. Potholes, for instance, tend to attract particles from the roadway as well as water and residue from de-icing materials (sand, salt and so forth). Avalanches similarly attract snow from neighboring snow-packs and one species of fish attracts other fish species that, in turn, attract yet other species.
The noted sociologist and social theorist, Emile Durkheim (1893/1933) was one of the first to observe the strange attractor phenomenon as it operates in human societies. He noted that as the number of people inhabiting a particular area of land tends to increase, there is a tendency for these people not to spread out evenly (which would provide each person with the maximum amount of space that is available), but rather for these people to cluster together (to form villages and, at a later point, cities). Why did this clustering occur? Several good reasons have been offered.
