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Template:M intro design System redundancy: Difference between revisions
Template:M intro design System redundancy (view source)
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, 2 August 2023→“Redundancy” as a key to successful change management
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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.) | 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.) | ||
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 | 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 this, we submit, motivates most corporate employees more profoundly than ''ensuring immaculate shareholder return''. But we digress. | ||
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. | In any case the systems and subsystems evolve their own 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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
This is the single virtue of the [[reduction in force]]. By arbitrarily removing a percentage of the system components, you might ''force'' it out of equilibrium, giving the components no choice but to find new ways of working. But their motivations as they do so are no less self-motivated than they were: you cannot shock a system into behaving selflessly. | |||
Damon Centola notes that change happens centrally | |||