Overview and Introduction

Abstract

The Process of Organizational Development Human group coordination naturally progresses from the first stage, chaos (barbarians ravaging the landscape, "Raahr!"), to decentralized organization ("Let's all agree to band together to defend ourselves from the barbarians"), to centralized organization ("Long live the king").Abstractly, the first stage is chaos, completely disorganized individualized power centers, or nodes in the network.We imagine chaos as random uncoordinated actions, the first moments after the Big Bang, the static of your television screen flooded with turbulent Brownian motion.These individualized power centers proceed to decentralized organization when the powers become more correlated, aligned by a common principle, a transcendental goal, an ideal.The individuals may begin to partially imitate each other as they seek to progress toward this common goal.The individual nodes remain autonomous; the network does not have fixed roles for each member.But they are all responding to a higher calling as they unite in purpose.This newfound harmony makes the group more efficient than before, as they find varying ways to collaborate in more complex cooperative behaviors."The values are the organization."The final stage is a centralized hierarchy.The harmony and cooperation of the decentralized organization filters the group into an ever tighter and more complex hierarchical structure, raising some individuals into positions of power over others (see Figure 0.1).If successfully completed, a tree structure emerges, a hierarchy, Figure 0.1: Centralized hierarchy emerges from decentralized structure by prioritizing some connections over others.