The New Johari Window: #8 Unpredictability

Another middle aged corporate executive stated this point quite eloquently in his description of a moderately large corporation that he helped to found:

Our people spend their time looking for the insignificant events; the events at the margin that can add order or stability to the complexities they live in. This reduces our effectiveness as an organization and ultimately limits our ability to survive in a very competitive marketplace. They are constantly looking for ways to reduce their frustrations and uncertainty by seeking and challenging the vision and leadership of the company. While we the senior management focus on growth and largeness, they focus on transitions. Our continuous play between chaos and order is reflected [in] our need to constantly be in meetings. Someone finds a chaotic situation and quickly calls the group together for resolution. Instead of making clear and concise decisions that are communicated to the organization we tend to increase the ambiguity in the company and clarify only the smallest of issues. We do not address with clarity the process required to make uncertainty easier to resolve for the organization.

Perhaps, as some system theorists would have us believe, the primary function of any postmodern relationship is to (somehow) snatch structure and certainty out of the mouth of the dragon of chaos and uncertainty. System theorists described this as the process of postmodern entropy—it is the tendency of all systems to move toward disorder or chaos (the second law of thermodynamics) and of postmodern relationships, in particular, to move quickly toward this unpredictable state. Many systems in our world, it would appear, can be best described as entities that hover on the edge of or move back and forth between states of certainty and uncertainty.

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