Nowadays we have grown accustomed to reflect upon the world with the aid of computer metaphors. The author wants to make no exception and suggests describing organizations such as companies, political parties, offices, schools and other blessings of civilization that way, too. So let us assume they consist of two different components, namely the hardware and the software.
Let us further assume the hardware component comprises besides the common technical devices such as production capacities, information technologies the typically 'rational' aspects of organizations: administrative structures, rosters, contacts, organigrams, obligational hierarchies, functionaries. In contrast, the software component consists of executiing decision programmes, all in all what is old-fashionedly called human beings or person.
Providing that dealing with the worls in general, with other persons in particular, could be divided into the two domains hard facts and soft skills. Hard facts appeal to a fixed structure of states of affairs which are methodically strictly and rationally connected (the psychology of shape offers the term form); in contrast, the soft phenomena are more loosely linked. They constitute a kind of soft subsoil, th emedium, in which the form is embedded and with which it sharply contrasts. It serves as a background from which logic selects rules for fixed and factual connections. Apparently on this level logic is of no avail, since it can prove anything except its own presuppositions.
After all it is very comforting to use the hardware/software distinction. Especially software sounds somewhat more calculable than outmoded notions which still conjure up the Ghost in the Machine, but between you and me: in the end it is all about that. And here the soft skills play their part. As is widely known, in controversies we rarely fare well at recommeding our opponent like a schoolmaster to stay matter-of-fact. Often logic becomes a boomerang. And whoever is warned beforehand not to take a statement personally is bound to do the opposite. So soft skills refer to everything the hard facts aficionados shrink form just as the devil balks at the holy water: the paradoxe, the hint that order is always temorary and can be undermined every second. While hard facts fans love playing the part of the impartial transmitter of information, the soft skill party knows better, because not exactly. Hard facts use codes which only seem to be definite, whereas soft skills open the world logic has roughly closed. They depend on the single cases, not on the general abstract. Their textbook is either empty or comprises innumerable volumes.
The scientific manner which is booming since everybody wants to be a member of the knowledge society ought not entirely concentrate on hard research, but should also take cultural education into account. It should not do so jovially but remember that the nearly mystical gesture wich points at the limits of modern Science stems from quantum physicists. Second order cybernetics seems quite right in saying it is the soft skills which make the hardest demands - demands reliable logic fails to meet. And from that point of view it might not be that absurd to think that it is not the soft skills which make a cold world of facts warm, but that the hard facts are meant to let us forget about the principle of imponderability. In order to make sure nobody will get the idea to disturb the alarmed society which struggles to calm down social claims to education are transferred into privacy, universities are reinvented as technical schools; for it is much more laborious to conceive a many-valued logic which replaces the idea of only one level with the binary true-false distinction and to grow accustomed to the idea irrationally applied rationality is only an insidious kind of idiocy.
In turn of course soft skills experts gain some profit by that opposition, too; only within their domain it is possible to talk that freely and cluelessly and to unleash group vibrations in seminar rooms. That kind of subjectivity to which tribute is paid lacks any logic at all. In a relieved mood the facts can be tackled for the rest of the day. But just as hardware and software remain interdependent, a logic of subjectivity is required. After all we never can tell beforehand when to proceed solely intuitively or logically. At best we can logically prove intuition in retrospect.
Let us further assume the hardware component comprises besides the common technical devices such as production capacities, information technologies the typically 'rational' aspects of organizations: administrative structures, rosters, contacts, organigrams, obligational hierarchies, functionaries. In contrast, the software component consists of executiing decision programmes, all in all what is old-fashionedly called human beings or person.
Providing that dealing with the worls in general, with other persons in particular, could be divided into the two domains hard facts and soft skills. Hard facts appeal to a fixed structure of states of affairs which are methodically strictly and rationally connected (the psychology of shape offers the term form); in contrast, the soft phenomena are more loosely linked. They constitute a kind of soft subsoil, th emedium, in which the form is embedded and with which it sharply contrasts. It serves as a background from which logic selects rules for fixed and factual connections. Apparently on this level logic is of no avail, since it can prove anything except its own presuppositions.
After all it is very comforting to use the hardware/software distinction. Especially software sounds somewhat more calculable than outmoded notions which still conjure up the Ghost in the Machine, but between you and me: in the end it is all about that. And here the soft skills play their part. As is widely known, in controversies we rarely fare well at recommeding our opponent like a schoolmaster to stay matter-of-fact. Often logic becomes a boomerang. And whoever is warned beforehand not to take a statement personally is bound to do the opposite. So soft skills refer to everything the hard facts aficionados shrink form just as the devil balks at the holy water: the paradoxe, the hint that order is always temorary and can be undermined every second. While hard facts fans love playing the part of the impartial transmitter of information, the soft skill party knows better, because not exactly. Hard facts use codes which only seem to be definite, whereas soft skills open the world logic has roughly closed. They depend on the single cases, not on the general abstract. Their textbook is either empty or comprises innumerable volumes.
The scientific manner which is booming since everybody wants to be a member of the knowledge society ought not entirely concentrate on hard research, but should also take cultural education into account. It should not do so jovially but remember that the nearly mystical gesture wich points at the limits of modern Science stems from quantum physicists. Second order cybernetics seems quite right in saying it is the soft skills which make the hardest demands - demands reliable logic fails to meet. And from that point of view it might not be that absurd to think that it is not the soft skills which make a cold world of facts warm, but that the hard facts are meant to let us forget about the principle of imponderability. In order to make sure nobody will get the idea to disturb the alarmed society which struggles to calm down social claims to education are transferred into privacy, universities are reinvented as technical schools; for it is much more laborious to conceive a many-valued logic which replaces the idea of only one level with the binary true-false distinction and to grow accustomed to the idea irrationally applied rationality is only an insidious kind of idiocy.
In turn of course soft skills experts gain some profit by that opposition, too; only within their domain it is possible to talk that freely and cluelessly and to unleash group vibrations in seminar rooms. That kind of subjectivity to which tribute is paid lacks any logic at all. In a relieved mood the facts can be tackled for the rest of the day. But just as hardware and software remain interdependent, a logic of subjectivity is required. After all we never can tell beforehand when to proceed solely intuitively or logically. At best we can logically prove intuition in retrospect.
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