Blog on Patch: Unhelpful Enumeration

It was only in reading an excerpt from Alvin Toffler’s book, The Third Wave, that everything clicked.

I finally grasped the root of my offense, taken early and often, in response to myriad of techno-optimists and mystics who speak of “new generations”, “higher thought patterns”, “next levels”, “stage n+1”, etc, etc. Toffler makes an argument in the excerpt for a Third Wave of organization that is beginning to crest after the crush of a hierarchical, rigid, Second Wave institutions. The same arguments occur elsewhere, and they’re not wrong; there are new organizational dynamics that companies and other organizations are taking on and adapting to.

What’s wrong isn’t what Toffler says, but what he doesn’t. The implication for many readers is that the Second Wave institutions are going to disappear, that there is a Marxist inevitability in the supremacy of these new social orderings; that it simply becomes a matter of getting on the bandwagon and waiting for the future.

That future never comes. At least, not as we expect it to.

Instead, the Second Wave institutions persist, despite the Third Wave institutions making inroads in certain arenas. Hell, there are still some vestiages of the First Wave lurking about. What’s going on? Why is this the case?

I’d like to give this fallacy a name, as it occurs repeatedly, particularly in futurist circles; I call it the evolutionary fallacy. Evolution, as we all know, involves the process of intergenerational differentiation over time, resulting not only in speciation but all manner of localized adaptations.

What we consider less, however, is that the temporal character of evolution and that of our own lives are discontinuous. That is, evolution operates at all scales simultaneously; it is fallacious to assume that I, as a human, am more evolved than my goldfish or the ant crawling across my desk. Even arguing that I am more complex as an organism does not always produce a clear answer. To compound the confusion, the majority of me isn’t even me; my own body consists mostly of other microorganisms, many of them highly evolved for the ecosystem that is my body.

This fallacy also appears in discussions of the mind, where conscious cognition is favoured over the unconscious (the ocean that the rubber duck floats upon) and the body and the environment which gives rise to it.

In organizational theory, it may mean that Third Wave organizations eventually develop the kinds of reflexivity, self-awareness, and capacity to enact environmental changes that has so marked the rise of humanity in the past ten millenia. But even if that is the case, it will result not in an organizational environment of supreme dominance and monopoly, but more probably an environment mutually determined by its predecessors.

Some organizational models may be dinosaurs relative to their furry, mammalian counterparts. But rather than die out, some, like crocodiles, may opt for minor modifications and restrict their scale and scope, and others, like birds, may make an evolutionary leap of their own.