Template:M intro design System redundancy: Difference between revisions

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 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.
+[[Complex system]]s seek out their own equilibria. (A complex scenario that does not is not a system. It will fly apart).
-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”.
+It finds its equilibrium not from by divine command from the centre, but by countless decisions by the autonomous components that comprise the system. Over time, those autonomous components — people, mostly — react to stimuli, settle into habits and contrive ways of working, as they to, creating their own sub-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.)
-In a fight between logic and gravity, gravity always wins.
+These priorities will be personal to each component: they may partly coincide with the organisation’s but 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 paid, while minimising personal risk and responsibility'', but thus, we submit, motivates most corporate employees more deeply than ''ensuring immaculate shareholder return''. But we digress.
-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.
+In any case the systems and subsystems evolve their ways of working. They create their own efficiencies — efficiencies that yield to those personal motivations, and may be quite perverse to the organisation’s stated mission.
+They wear in grooves, smooth down edges and naturally, through the adaptive process of usage, seek out “local maxima”, judged from the perspective of the local components.
+We should not be surprised that systems which have found such an equilibrium are hard to shift from it. Call that equilibrium an “operating paradigm”. They will, through force of habit, precedent, template, and agreed ways of doing things, drift back to it.
+In a fight between logic and gravity, gravity always wins. The only way to beat gravity is to work with it, to find new maxima.
+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. Imagine an uncredentialised outsider presenting special relativity to the royal academy in 1700, a few years after Newton published ''Principia Mathematica''. It is hard to imagine such an outsider even getting an audience, let alone going over well.
 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 when they stop working ''on their own terms''. Even then, Credentialed practitioners go out of their way to reframe their data to ensure it is consistent with the paradigm. They make things up to make it work: cosmological constants, dark energy, even an entire multiverse. 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 they have, over the ages, grown into and dependent on, the way a beaver grows into and dependent on its dam. They will not easily give it up — cannot: they would be lost without it. We should not be surprised to see well-meant change initiatives foundering against this kind of entropy: this will for things to settle back to how they were.