Dynamic Hierarchies Theme Week

As you may know, I work for a unique organization, in a very unique capacity. Our company, The Morning Star Company, is organized in a completely non-hierarchical manner. We have no formal fixed authority structure, rather we organize utilizing the principles and systems of Self-Management. This yields an organization that really looks more like a neural network than a command and control hierarchy. And authority is far more contextual, lending itself to a hierarchical structure that is far more dynamic and contextual.

I received an email this weekend with an invite to the Santa Fe Institute to participate in a Business Network Theme Week on the topic of Dynamic Hierarchies. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), it's one of the nation's foremost interdisciplinary research institutions; their faculty are widely regarded as among the best in their respective fields. Obviously, considering our organization and my role, I couldn't pass up the opportunity. It's a small group setting: 6-10 of us around a conference table with researchers, discussing their findings and exploring ideas and ways to apply them to our organizations.

And I thought, what better way to capture important topics/content than to "live-blog" my way through the conference. So, I'll post here multiple times throughout each day; keep an eye out, and feel free to post comments or questions.

We'll see where it goes.