From the Conversation with Professor Thomas Johnson
Portland State University
August 20^th, 1999
Claus Otto Scharmer

Toyota looked at Henry Ford’s continuous flow system like Goethe looked at color, and basically said, let’s look at the many particulars in the process. What they concluded was the costs were low because of the continuousness of flow….

Tom Johnson: I think the underlying question of the book is how would you think differently about an organization if you viewed it as a living system rather than the way we have typically viewed it in the last 60 or 70 years. …

Along the way I implicitly bring the reader to the understanding that if you make this transition and you’re viewing your company as a living system, you will move toward working more in harmony with nature’s principles. This will have profound consequences for the ecological environmental crisis that we perceive surrounds us today. Once we get straightened out and manage companies as if they were living organisms, living systems, that will take care of itself.

We use words like self-organization, interdependence, diversity to describe these three principles. I said you’ve got a universe which for 15 billion years has been showing a pattern of development that manifests these three principles at work. … what would a human organization look like if it emulated these three principles?

Laws in the mechanistic view of reality are, as you say, "behind the curtain," kind of hidden. In the second case, in the living organism view, the laws are visible only through the minute particulars of the system itself. The whole is manifest in the parts. I think one of the biggest changes is for managers to start to see the whole mirrored in the parts…

At the most elemental level you’re mindful of how the work of each and every individual in the organization is somehow manifesting the union of company and customer. I think this is the ultimate reality, the reason organizations and business organizations exist.

One of the things he finds out and always shows his clients is that you never ever gain much, if anything, by getting rid of losing customers or losing products...

He says I want to go in and I want to create stories about the order lines. And I want to talk about what were the conditions. He uses the phrase "neighbors." What were the neighbors to profitability? What were the neighbors to loss?

That’s been a big mote in our eye that’s caused us not to see reality. We’ve been piling cost upon cost upon cost in what I call an information factory that’s got nothing to do with the real work that it takes to satisfy customers. We talk today about non-value activity, about waste, about getting lean, and all of these things. But I think most of the guys who talk those ways still don’t understand what the problem is, which is we’re not pulling work to order…. I call it whitewashing the decks of the Titanic.

I think we ought to think about companies more that way. We’re riding the wave, we’re not sitting back in the control booth. You know, [if] you try to run a surfboard with a control booth, you’re dead…

You can see the universe as objects that are there because they embody a pattern that in effect bodies itself forth uniquely every moment. I think there is a generative process at work throughout the entire universe which follows certain principles or a pattern that we are aware of in this bodying forth in what we see around us...

I think in general it means managers and leaders have to be concerned more with how the details are orchestrated…

Tom Johnson’s recent work is organized around the following underlying question: How would we think differently about an organization if we viewed it as a living system rather than as a machine.? Living systems evolve according to the same universal principles that have guided the evolution of the cosmos over the past 15 billion years. The evolution of the cosmos embodies three fundamental principles: self-organization, interdependence, diversity. This change implies a fundamental shift of mind. A shift of mind from a mechanistic, "Newtonian" type of thinking to another perspective that conceives of reality as a living system. Following Bortoft, Goethe, and Bohm, Johnson suggests that the whole is manifested in (and between) the parts. Says Johnson: "I think one of the biggest changes is for managers to start to see the whole mirrored in the parts." As a consequence, leaders will have to pay more attention the detail: "Leaders have to be concerned more with how the details are orchestrated" such that "the work of each and every individual in the organization is somehow manifesting the union of company and customer."