humpty dumpty lives! – this is how i’m thinking about our work in organizations today. humpty dumpty. yes, that humpty dumpty. sat on a wall, had a great fall humpty dumpty. and all the kings horses and all the kings men, couldn’t put humpty together again. so the story goes… but wait! a quick search just turned up this by philip hunter in the scientist magazine…

For 50 years, biologists have focused on reducing life to its constituent parts, first focusing on the cell, then working their way down to the genome itself. However, such achievements created a new challenge–making sense of the huge amounts of data produced. As professor Denis Noble, Oxford University, puts it: “It took Humpty Dumpty apart but left the challenge of putting him back together again.”

but fear not…

Systems biology attempts to reconstruct Humpty Dumpty as a series of overlapping mathematical models. It exploits all the theoretical and experimental advances of the various genome projects, allying them to computational, mathematical and engineering disciplines in an attempt to create predictive models of cells, organs, biochemical processes, and complete organisms. It has the potential to unravel how complex biochemical systems, from cells to organisms, really work, and to take a leap forward in preventing and treating disease. “Diseases … are often a fault of a whole complex network rather than a single element…” notes researcher Thomas Sauter, Stuttgart University, Germany.

in the same way, a series of overlapping conversations… with people from different departments, functions, offices, levels, etc holds the possibility of renewing the organization. when people and orgs are pushed, by so much horsepower and analysis, they tend to fall apart. and no amount of additional pushing or putting will make things right or whole. but when they are invited into conversation about core issues and critical projects, they tend to show up. they exploit all the theoritical and experimental advances throughout the organization, for the benefit of the whole organization. …and humpty dumpty lives!