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Template:M intro design System redundancy: Difference between revisions
Template:M intro design System redundancy (view source)
Revision as of 23:11, 1 August 2023
, 1 August 2023→Regulatory human capital?
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Why not, as well as regulatory ''share'' capital, encourage our institutions to hold excess [[human capital|''human'' capital]]? Or at least be less cavalier about systematically ''removing'' it, in the name of short-term cost savings. | Why not, as well as regulatory ''share'' capital, encourage our institutions to hold excess [[human capital|''human'' capital]]? Or at least be less cavalier about systematically ''removing'' it, in the name of short-term cost savings. | ||
Just as we must hold share capital in fair weather as well as foul, we should not expect to run expertise in fair weather on a shoestring. You can’t buy-in institutional knowledge in a time of crisis. You can’t buy institutional knowledge ''at all''. Even un-contextualised expertise, at a time of panic, will command outrageous premiums. | Just as we must hold share capital in fair weather as well as foul, we should not expect to run expertise in fair weather on a shoestring. You can’t buy-in institutional knowledge in a time of crisis. You can’t buy institutional knowledge ''at all''. Even un-contextualised expertise, at a time of panic, will command outrageous premiums. | ||
===Redundancy as a key to successful change management=== | |||
{{Quote| | |||
But gravity always wins. | |||
: Radiohead, ''Fake Plastic Trees'' (1992)}} | |||
Damon Centola’s research about concentration and bunching of constituents to ensure change is permanent. | |||
[[Complex system]]s seek out their own equilibria. Over time, the autonomous components in the system — people, mostly — settle into habits, ways of working, creating their own networks, dependencies and generally acquiring their own meta theories of what they are there to do and how best to do it (some do this more consciously than others, but all, at some level do it.) These priorities will be personal to the agent, and they may partly coincide with the organisation’s, they won’t entirely — it is no part of a corporation’s plan, above all else, to make sure I stay here, and thrive, and get well paid, while minimising personal risk and responsibility, and these,we submit, motivate most corporate employees more deeply than ensuring immaculate shareholder return. But we digress. | |||
The systems and subsystems evolve ways of working that create their own efficiencies — efficiencies that yield to those personal motivations, remember, not corporate ones. They wear in grooves, smooth down sharp edges and naturally, through the adaptive process of time, seek out local maxima. We should not be surprised that systems which have found an equilibrium are hard to shift from it. Call that equilibrium an “operating paradigm”. | |||
In a fight between logic and gravity, gravity always wins. | |||
It stands to reason that a single “change agent” who arrives from outside and says, “hey, fellas, wouldn’t it be great if we fixed this?” won’t get far with the veteran crew who run the process now. The thing about an operating paradigm is that it is operating. On its own terms, it works. It ''isn’t in crisis''. Now in {{author|Thomas Kuhn}}’s conception of them,<ref>{{br|The Structure of Scientific Revolutions}}. Wonderful book.</ref> paradigms generally only break down if they don’t work. As far as its constituents are concerned, it is working ''fine''. They may regard it as a thing of beauty, a many-splendoured contraption that | |||
===''Jidoka''=== | ===''Jidoka''=== | ||
But what, a finance director might ask, would these expensive experts do if they are technically “redundant”? | But what, a finance director might ask, would these expensive experts do if they are technically “redundant”? | ||