![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Organizational terraforming
Mar. 31st, 2012 04:10 pmConsider 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.)