Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Supervisor: Dr. Brent Davis, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta

This thesis, a speculative essay, examines a collection of theoretical concepts and principles, largely drawn from the still-emerging domain of the complexity sciences, which can be used to describe, model and understand learning organizations like schools and other educational settings that might be thought of as healthy learning organizations.

Through a set of analogies with healthy and unhealthy physiological organizations, broadly speaking, this work offers a view of healthy learning organizations.

This work begins with an examination of a few key theoretical frames about dynamical systems most appropriately described through the frames of chaos theory, catastrophe theory and critical self-organization, as well as their attending conceptual underpinnings and assumptions.

The notion of surprise is then examined for some of its phenomenological aspects with the anticipation that this might lend to some possibilities for thinking about the phenomenon from a complexity science perspective. Some insights into the ways in which people might perceive surprise in the context of organizations when framed by different metaphorical images for organizations are also considered.

Thinking about metastable patterns, I offer a view about robust coherent qualities of organizations that attempts to move away from a metaphorical framing of organizations as if they were either machines or holistic phenomena. Thus, I invent the notion of “comparative dynamics” to highlight different organizational metastable patterns with tendencies for particular qualities.

The final sections of this work examine my own experiences with a “learning organization.” The organization, which is not a formal educational institution, offers up some useful insights and possibilities for thinking about and enacting some different sensibilities for diverse educational settings and configurations. In so doing, I offer and reflect upon some of my own experiences as I think about what a school might look like as a healthy learning organization.

To assist my readers along the way, I have also provided a glossary of terms that are highlighted as boldface text throughout this work. These are terms that my readers might find a bit more technical and are flagged in this way so as not to disrupt the flow of the main text.