The a priori refutation

July 6, 2014

I've been having an interesting set of interactions  on a Linkedin discussion group with various followers of Jaques and the Requisite Organization community that continues to carry a torch for his ideas.  Well interesting in the main, the President.  I was asked to come in and comment on links between my work and that of Jaques.  Note I was invited in, I did not simply turn up.  

Now I have a general view on a whole group of theorists from Jaques generation which is that the better ones would have come up with very different ideas if they had been born thirty years later.  I am currently, when I get any time, working on linking Deming, Beer and Ashby's work to complexity theory on that basis.  Either way I made that point, suggesting that it really didn't make sense to try and directly map a pre complexity method onto a post-complexity one, which is not to say that learning was not possible.  I also expressed concern about any method or approach that assumes some hierarchical form of progression through levels of complexity.  At the pseudo-science and cultist end of this we have Spiral Dynamics (in the Wilber/Beck variation, I have more time for Cowan).

Whatever I provoked the ire of the President who admonished me not to make any comments on Jaques until I had studied him.  I think she has what I call the acolyte syndrome which generally reduces people's critical facilities.   Now I can be polite up to a point with this sort of thing but I had the same thing with the NLP page on Wilipedia with people telling me I could not comment until I underwent the two week indoctrination programme.   

So to criticise creationism, do I first have to become a Bible believing member of the tea party?  I suspect Jacques would have been as frustrated as I in response to this closed way of thinking.  

 

 

PS: Have just been told that the President, is also the daughter of the great man.  Things now become clearer.  Thank God my own daughter is not that loyal, she constantly criticises my work, my ethics etc. etc. ever since she studied Anthropilogy and especially now she know finishing her MA, moving on (we hope) to a Phd.  Each generation needs to move on, not just perpetuate the learning of the previous one.

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