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A hierarchical form of system organization in which one element of the system tells other elements what to do.
Systems thinker John Gall in his talk “how to use conscious purpose without wrecking everything”:
That approach, which I call Command-and-Control or One-up, One-down, works if you are building a physical machine to perform a mechanical task, but it does not work at all well with people or with organizations of people—that is to say, with self-correcting, autonomous entities.
And to even work in physical systems, command and control requires some nuance:
Command-and-Control applies to systems at the level of solid objects and physical forces, and even there you have to have at least two levels of cybernetic recursion to maintain stability because the system will still “hunt” around the calibration point.
Gall recognizes an alternative:
There is an alternative to Command-and-Control. It is simply the understanding that autonomous entities like human beings or pets or committees or parliaments must interact with other autonomous systems as equals to equals, not as master and servant. Each has the power of choice. Each choice changes future potentials. The future of both depends upon the choices of each, which are made in real time. That mutual process is stochastic, not deterministic. By definition, that means you can’t even predict it, much less control it in advance. It is a dance.
Relation to Parenting
A key insight of Peaceful parenting is that once you give up the illusion that you have to (or even can) control children’s behavior, it fundamentally improves how you interact with them and your relationship with them, as well as your own happiness.