on complexity, chaos and self-organisation

Just the other day, I was reading a post by Dave Snowden on management vs. self-organisation that triggered a few questions in my mind... This is what I commented:

chaos and anarchy are not the same thing at all. anarchy would imply not having any ruler but this does not mean chaos since a group can be self-governing and leadership a dynamic and distributed process... take for example the classical example of a jazz quartet doing improvisation (would it mean anything to say that the underlying form of the music manages the player's interactions)? now, can the same thing be said of management? can a system be said to display self-management or self-organising properties?

i often come up across this question in the context of my work... is it about the coordinator 'coordinating' the team or is it about there being 'coordination' within the team and does thinking about it differently lead to different ways of trying to achieve the end result (i.e. a team operating with a high level of coordination or coherence)?

For some reason, I also thought that self-organisation was supposed to be a property of complex, not chaotic (= lacking any organisation or coherence) systems... tipping a system into a chaotic state may be a way of temporarily unlocking the system so that it has greater chance of self-organising in new ways (this would also be where the role of the 'manager' comes in - creating the container/parameters within which all this can happen)... It's also worth pointing out that self-organising does not mean 'good'.

I also think that you can call it management if you prefer the horse analogy but there can be many other words for it... one, possibly more appropriate one - given all the connotations - might be facilitation... but then perhaps there is a scale from command and control (absolute micro-management) to not doing anything at all (with facilitation somewhere more towards not doing anything)?

but what I understood from what I have read, practiced and reflected on of systems theory is that the whole point is that regardless of what you are doing in the system (i'm talking about an organisational -i.e. complex - system here), the system has its own complex dynamics, attractors, etc. - which leads to self-organisation (which could be good or bad)... so, like you said (but in different words?), the manager has to work with the self-organising characteristics of a complex system in order to help it continuously transition to levels which secure it a better fit with more of its external environment... in a social (human organisational) system, this would entail communication and quite possibly involving the whole system in the management of itself...

for some reason this always gets me thinking about the fact that little organisms had a big hand in making our atmosphere into something breathable... and plants which continue to play a critical role in regulating the earthly climate...

sorry for the rambling! does this make any sense?