Dark Matter

I don’t know about you, but I still get excited when I see things like this. My physics is way in the past now, but this level of almost primal discovery and understanding fascinates me. The BBC whose news item brought this to me have a wonderful phrase For astronomers, the challenge of mapping the Universe has been described as similar to mapping a city from night-time aerial snapshots showing only street light. That phrase would also apply to a lot of narrative work in organizations, and as I said yesterday, when you can start to visualize complex environments you get the equivalent (to use another BBC phrase in respect of this Hubble image) the equivalent to seeing a city, its suburbs and country roads in daylight for the first time. Of course, for many years we have known that Dark Matter exists, even thought we could not see it, we also have known that only about a sixth of the mass in the Universe is represented by ordinary matter. It’s the same in organisations. The visible stuff that gets management attention is a sixth at most. The underlying narrative structures and unarticulated culture is hidden. we are starting to discover ways to represent it, and gain perspective but its all about discovery and essential ambiguity. If we limit our vision to the conventional and the acceptable aspects of process and formal structures then we are incomplete, and our actions inadequate.