Most of what makes the thing heavy is the relationship, not the parts.
I was listening to an episode of In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 this morning. My mother-in-law texted me that I might be interested, and I was. It was about particle accelerators, and it connected to several books I've been reading this year: Geoffrey West's Scale, Tom Griffiths's The Laws of Thought, Marcus du Sautoy's Blueprints and Steven Strogatz's Sync. Together they give me a feeling that everything, including the parts of organisational life that seem random, the falling-outs and the moods and the sudden departures, is working to some set of laws we only partly see.
The radio broadcast told me that physics divides the universe into two kinds of things. Matter particles hold positions; two of the same kind can't occupy the same place, and that exclusion is what gives anything shape. Force carriers do the connecting; they overlap freely and exist mainly as the link between other things. Quarks and electrons make up the stuff. Photons and gluons carry the interactions that let the stuff hold together.
Some Googling later….. almost all of a proton's mass doesn't come from the quarks inside it; it comes from the energy of the field binding them. Most of what makes the thing heavy is the relationship, not the parts.
I've spent time arguing that organisations get this backwards. We draw the boxes, fill the roles and treat the informal layer, the trust and habits and working relationships, as something that will form around the structure on its own. Physics suggests the binding is where most of the substance is.
There is more to this in that in modern particle physics, the forces aren't added to the theory afterwards. You start with a matter particle and require that its description stays consistent from one point in space to the next, and the equations won't hold unless you introduce a field connecting those points.
The structure calls the connecting layer into existence. The dependence runs the other way too; a force with nothing to act on does nothing, and matter with no binding forms nothing.
Consistent structure demands a connecting layer, and the connecting layer has no purpose without structure to connect.
Pause for effect….
Where the comparison breaks is people. West writes about putting energy into a system; heat a gas and the particles move faster and collide more, in the random jostling of Brownian motion. He applies the same idea to cities. However, particles forget each collision the moment it happens, and people don't. We choose who to meet again, we remember, and we build on what happened. Energy put into an organisation can go the way of the gas, showing up as churn, meetings and busyness that dissipate as heat. Or it can settle into relationships and shared knowledge that persist.
Particles have no say in which of those happens; people have some.
I still have the thought I started with, and I'm not sure what to do with it. West's cities follow their laws even though they are made of people making purposeful choices, so purpose doesn't obviously put us outside the laws. Strogatz makes the same point. In Sync he describes order that arises with no one directing it: fireflies that flash in unison, heart cells that keep a shared beat, and the crowd on London's Millennium Bridge when it opened, who fell into step with its slight sway and made the swaying worse without anyone intending to.
Each person was choosing where to put their feet, and together they behaved like coupled oscillators. Maybe being able to notice the laws is the only thing separating us from the fireflies. Whether noticing is enough to act differently, or whether the laws already account for that too, I don't know.
I’m off for a lie down.
