Organizational terraforming
Mar. 31st, 2012 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davvConsider the Party from 1984. It holds that reality is what it says it is; as O'Brien says, a form of "collective solipsism".
However, reality itself does not agree to take on these characteristics merely because the Party wants it to. The Party needs some way of altering objective reality to fit. It does this through its ministries: the Ministry of Plenty to impose the economic plan on reality, the Ministry of Peace to keep the Party stable through warfare, and the Ministry of Love to nullify forms of thought that might otherwise be dangerous to its continued existence.
I mention the Party because it gives a very clear example of a certain pattern. Organizations, to stay the way they are, or to move in a desired direction, need some way of aligning their own states with those of the surrounding reality. It is like a domed city on Mars, or a space station: the "terraformed" interior is protected from the harsh outer realm by some form of mechanism - either active, like the Party's ministries (or AC), or passive, like the glass of the dome.
One interesting consequence of seeing the pattern is that "control" (staying the way one is) and "planning" (for lack of a better term; changing course) really becomes the same thing. In the former case, the desired environment inside the dome is the current environment, and one acts to cancel out the influences that would otherwise pull the environment in another direction. In the latter case, one sets the desired environment to be based on the goal, and then pretends to be in a control scenario with an environment quite a bit away from the state to be held constant.
Or, from the perspective of control: if the environment starts to diverge from what one wants, then control consists of finding the appropriate action to go back to keeping it the way one wants. Planning is then control where one alters one's own idea of what one wants; in both cases, the action itself involves moving the environment from what it is to what it should be.
Now that I think about it, "terraforming" isn't that strange. If you want to get a single thing done, you might find the best way of doing it, then do it, and then clean up. But if you want to do many things, then it can very well pay off to prepare a number of methods, maintain them, and only get rid of them once you're done. An organization, then, terraforms a piece of the environment to maintain a range of actions, and to maintain its own integrity. The former is needed to act, the latter to know how to act.
Still, the generality of the concept is surprising at first. It exists among organizations. It exists in habitats like the Martian city. It exists in biology; and given a description of what to look for, now we can recognize it more easily.
(If something about this seems strange, do reply. I don't want to become too fond of my own theories! Particularly not to the point where I can't see their weak spots.)
However, reality itself does not agree to take on these characteristics merely because the Party wants it to. The Party needs some way of altering objective reality to fit. It does this through its ministries: the Ministry of Plenty to impose the economic plan on reality, the Ministry of Peace to keep the Party stable through warfare, and the Ministry of Love to nullify forms of thought that might otherwise be dangerous to its continued existence.
I mention the Party because it gives a very clear example of a certain pattern. Organizations, to stay the way they are, or to move in a desired direction, need some way of aligning their own states with those of the surrounding reality. It is like a domed city on Mars, or a space station: the "terraformed" interior is protected from the harsh outer realm by some form of mechanism - either active, like the Party's ministries (or AC), or passive, like the glass of the dome.
One interesting consequence of seeing the pattern is that "control" (staying the way one is) and "planning" (for lack of a better term; changing course) really becomes the same thing. In the former case, the desired environment inside the dome is the current environment, and one acts to cancel out the influences that would otherwise pull the environment in another direction. In the latter case, one sets the desired environment to be based on the goal, and then pretends to be in a control scenario with an environment quite a bit away from the state to be held constant.
Or, from the perspective of control: if the environment starts to diverge from what one wants, then control consists of finding the appropriate action to go back to keeping it the way one wants. Planning is then control where one alters one's own idea of what one wants; in both cases, the action itself involves moving the environment from what it is to what it should be.
Now that I think about it, "terraforming" isn't that strange. If you want to get a single thing done, you might find the best way of doing it, then do it, and then clean up. But if you want to do many things, then it can very well pay off to prepare a number of methods, maintain them, and only get rid of them once you're done. An organization, then, terraforms a piece of the environment to maintain a range of actions, and to maintain its own integrity. The former is needed to act, the latter to know how to act.
Still, the generality of the concept is surprising at first. It exists among organizations. It exists in habitats like the Martian city. It exists in biology; and given a description of what to look for, now we can recognize it more easily.
(If something about this seems strange, do reply. I don't want to become too fond of my own theories! Particularly not to the point where I can't see their weak spots.)
no subject
Date: 2012-04-04 01:41 pm (UTC)In a way, it's specialization of labor with regards to the goal-seeking process itself. Instead of each individual component needing to translate what's desired (either to keep the parameters static, or do something about the environment), the components are protected by specialized parts that translate between a reality that's relatively easy to handle, and an outer universe that's significantly less so.
In the literal terraforming analogy, it's like having a domed city in contrast to everybody using space suits. For IngSoc, there's no alternative: if they could convince the people to go along with collective solipsism, there would be no problem, but the people don't by themselves, so the layer is needed no matter what.
As for governing through tweaking a few key parameters, that's an interesting thing in itself. At least for biological organisms (and I'm getting the suspicion that to some degree it's true of minds as well), you have recursion. If you can slip a parameter change through all the levels of recursion, you can do a lot with little; but then the parameter has to survive the translation of each barrier (dome, cell membrane).
Are organizations recursive in that manner, too? I know too little about very large organizations to say. Some recursion is implied in the political realm: governments divided into departments organized hierarchically, organization charts, and so on, but it isn't as straightforward as in the example of biology.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 11:36 pm (UTC)I imagine that some social organizations are structured in a way to allow recursive modification -- religions are the best example. At least in the past, an individual at the lowest level of the hierarchy, or outside the hierarchy completely, could institute changes that propagate throughout the organizational structure and add a new component to it: the best example I know of here is St. Francis of Assisi. Speaking more broadly, activism can be seen as a systematic effort to institute recursive changes in the social body. However, I'm not sure I know of a government, past or present, that has been organized in a way that facilitates recursion.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-10 05:06 pm (UTC)In one way, it is. The neurons that support the mind are probably based on fewer "blueprints" than the enormous variety of cells that exist in the body - and the same thing if you go a level up, with different areas of the brain in contrast to different areas of the body. However, the mind is a lot more adaptable and reconfigurable, I think, so in that regards, the mind is more complex, because it can take many more shapes than the body can.
If an economic metaphor makes sense, it's a bit like a conventional planned economy (the body) vs a small-scale market economy (the mind)[1]. The former has lots of explicit specialization in the form of the different state-owned enterprises, while the latter just runs a simple algorithm based on supply and demand. However, the latter can give a lot more variety out of that simple algorithm, given time, than can the former without explicit reshaping.
I imagine that some social organizations are structured in a way to allow recursive modification -- religions are the best example.
Many hierarchical systems at least claim that they support recursive modification. The claim goes that there are simple rules to whether you're permitted to advance through the system, so you could feasibly ascend to the very top and then implement your change; or your success with the change at lower levels can inspire change on the higher. Reality is not always that simple: informal oligarchies can easily arise.
Recursion in structure might be easier to see. Not a literal self-replication at smaller scales, but a self-similarity with modification, sort of like a fractal. I was going to write about that, but I think I should make a proper post for it.
[1] Of course, since I'm less opposed to planned economies than is the norm, I think that they can be made more adaptive - but the point stands.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-12 02:01 am (UTC)As for recursive modification: a change to such a recursive system (a social one, in this context) would, at least potentially, propagate through all levels of complexity. An aristocracy would not be recursive in that sense: there are various details you can change (social position, the treatment of your own subjects, some political matters), but the social system itself does not allow for its basic structure (power in the hands of a few, who alone determine the heirs that power) to change. Ideal democracies would be recursive, but in practice they have so far turned out not to be. Again, so far it seems to me that religious social structures, noxious as they are in some respects, provide the best, and most lasting, examples of ones open to recursion.