5: Understanding Pathologies

so far we have explored the organization in terms of exploring its fitness for engaging with the transformational change process. In exploring this fitness, two attributes were identified: pathology and coherence. Coherence tends to refer to global conditions of the organization as a social collective, while pathology tends to express more local conditions that can affect coherence. Pathologies occur when individuals and groups in a social system are prevented from autonomously regulating their collective existence in a way that opposes their capacity to be viable. So while coherence needs ultimately to be a concern of any social collective, pathology is important to understanding why particular types of perhaps undesirable behavior are manifested, and how they may be dealt with where they represent important degrees of illness.