Our societies have progressively extended a logic of mastery to realities that evolve through adaptation, interaction, feedback and emergence. This way of acting has produced remarkable results wherever a problem could be isolated and its parameters sufficiently stabilised. It shows its limits when faced with living, ecological or social systems, whose reactions continually transform the very conditions of action.
An overly rigid command reduces the capacity to adjust. The system may appear better mastered in the short term while becoming more vulnerable to the disturbances it had not anticipated.
The misunderstanding about science
Science produces revisable knowledge from observations, hypotheses and explicit methods. Difficulties begin when partial results become certainties for steering, or serve to legitimise a decision already taken. Four confusions then recur regularly:
- mistaking an indicator for the phenomenon it represents
- applying a closed model to an open system without measuring what escapes it
- reducing complexity without examining the cost of that reduction
- expecting technical mastery to replace adaptive capacity
Controlling is not regulating
Control seeks to maintain a trajectory defined in advance. Regulation monitors deviations, takes the system's reactions into account and modifies the action as conditions change. Both can be useful, depending on the nature of the problem. Confusing them becomes dangerous when reducing variability also removes the margins, the diversity of responses or the local autonomy that made it possible to absorb a shock.
An organism, an ecosystem or an organisation does not preserve its viability by remaining identical. It maintains it through permanent adjustment. An apparent stability can thus mask a gradual loss of suppleness, up to the moment when an ordinary disturbance becomes impossible to absorb.
Toward a culture of co-evolution
A culture of co-evolution starts from this mobility. It sets objectives, observes the real effects of decisions and keeps correction possible. Indicators remain necessary, provided they are confronted with information from the ground and revised when they cease to represent the situation correctly. Governing then amounts to preserving the conditions of adaptation while setting the limits indispensable to collective viability.
Orientation
Robust structures combine intelligible rules, explicit limits, reliable feedback and room for initiative. They seek less to eliminate all variation than to prevent a local variation from turning into a general rupture.