{"id":700,"date":"2012-02-02T01:18:00","date_gmt":"2012-02-02T05:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=700"},"modified":"2018-12-19T08:49:31","modified_gmt":"2018-12-19T13:49:31","slug":"organizational-rigidity-as-a-natural-limit-of-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/organizational-rigidity-as-a-natural-limit-of-growth\/","title":{"rendered":"“Organizational Rigidity” as a natural limit of growth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From a Pharaoh hardening his heart to confused children refusing to budge… complexly organized systems pushed to their limits often display emergent rigidity.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

Things that develop their\u00a0organization\u00a0by new parts being\u00a0added\u00a0\u00a0to existing ones, develop accumulative\u00a0designs that become harder to change over time. \u00a0 It leads to organizational rigidity, that can either be seen as\u00a0inhibiting\u00a0change or enabling structure. \u00a0 These are aspects of the systems physics of self-organization.<\/p>\n

Accumulative\u00a0designs become harder to change over time<\/h3>\n

Crystallization works by replicating a pattern from a starting pattern, that remains the origin of the pattern throughout the process, like the process that creates snow flakes of a single design. \u00a0 It’s similar with road systems, that as you add connecting roads it becomes both\u00a0unnecessary\u00a0to add more and harder to change the established network.<\/p>\n

Even with advanced computers the world financial system gets built around trusted expectations, leaving a rigid imprint of past thinking in our models for the future. If it becomes unmanageable and overwhelmed by floods of new kinds of information the models don’t contain, the system is not designed to make any response.<\/p>\n

\"\"
At the limits of Lucy’s organizational abilities, confusion reigned<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Organizational rigidity is natural, and develops in any system built by accumulation. \u00a0 A bureaucracy may be built to be very efficient and resourceful, for example, in responding to the original scale and kinds of demands. \u00a0It’s initial designs may have been highly versatile for the variety of problems it started with. \u00a0It naturally becomes\u00a0mired\u00a0in inefficiency at some natural point of piling on ever increasing demands of new kinds.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You could say that is “the scientific explanation” for the famous inefficiency of government: not possible to design for managing an ever more rapidly growing and complex world. \u00a0 We keep multiplying the new kinds of tasks government is asked to do, and it’s design for doing the tasks of the past keeps failing.<\/p>\n

In general, any kind of system that is built by a series of additions to its original design, faces breaking points at the organizational limits of each scale. \u00a0 That’s very visible in the waves of “creative destruction” that increasingly characterize economic growth.\u00a0 It also limits economic growth, needing to build only on it’s own foundations. \u00a0 That becomes its downfall if the old design was not flexible enough to adapt.<\/p>\n

Kodak was unable to make use of its own invention of digital\u00a0photography, for example. The networks and ideas of the new industry were so different from the old ones, it couldn’t prosper as an extension of the old one.<\/p>\n

These are examples of developing “functional mismatch of variety” similar in meaning to \u00a0“information\u00a0mismatch in variety” described by\u00a0Ashby’s “Law of Requisite Variety” for\u00a0communication systems. \u00a0There may be valid statistical equations for\u00a0communicating\u00a0information. \u00a0 \u00a0For the nature of organization in complex\u00a0systems, though,\u00a0there may be no meaningful equations, due to the mismatch in functional design between\u00a0equations and complex systems.<\/p>\n

________<\/p>\n

These were the kinds of insights that\u00a0in 1979\u00a0prompted me to write about the very real danger of pushing our economy to a “Growth induced collapse<\/a>“, pushing it past its natural\u00a0organizational\u00a0limits. \u00a0 Taking the demands of growth toward exceeding the organizational limits of people and institutions is part of the “The Unhidden pattern of events<\/a>” we see today much more clearly than then.<\/p>\n

I’ve yet to write effectively on the subject thought, and should try now that a few extra pieces of the puzzle are falling into place. \u00a0I’ve being overwhelmed by needing to invent a new science to substantiate it, and searching for how to explain the complementary opposite process, the part of “The Unhidden pattern of events<\/a>”\u00a0that answers the riddle. \u00a0The riddle is, “How do things that begin by growth\u00a0*so<\/strong> often*<\/strong> not end in chaos, but with find endurance and perfection in their designs instead. \u00a0 \u00a0There’s a very real answer, that the mental rigidities of our growth culture, keeps hidden from view.<\/p>\n

The way growth systems of many kinds change from a course of multiplying their own complications to reducing conflict in seeking perfections, is also naturally hazardous. \u00a0It’s one of those profound kinds of changes where very small differences make a huge difference.<\/p>\n

The danger of attempting it and reward of success are often closely intertwined. \u00a0 You see that in how “birth” ends growth and begins maturation and commonly a very\u00a0parlous\u00a0moment. \u00a0 Maturation is the path to security and perfection, but to get on that path requires cutting the umbilical chord and being thrown into an exceedingly complicated new environment. \u00a0 Nature does it so often in so many ways, you have to admit the method does seem to work, though.<\/p>\n

– Google finds interesting papers on organizational rigidity<\/a><\/p>\n

_______<\/h2>\n

Recent good blog comments.<\/h2>\n

On John Baez’s Azimuth<\/h3>\n
\n

Frits Smeets<\/strong>: <\/strong>1 February, 2012 at 10:29 am<\/a> On Azimuth, discussing “What’s up with solar power<\/a>“<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Frits suggests the social rigidity of economic power structures, termed “geopolitical entanglement” as a barrier to a solar transition….<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

There\u2019s this thing I can\u2019t get out of my mind. The real problem with solar energy isn\u2019t technological, I\u2019m confident engineers can & will take care of that. Nor is it a matter of finance, although I agree with P.F. Henshaw\u2019s point about reform of the financial system, i.e. allocation of investment funds on the basis of real cost calculation.<\/p>\n

The problem is that solar energy is the ultimate threat to (geo)political entanglement of interests. Let\u2019s face it: since the breakdown of the Berlin Wall international politics is not about territory, it is not about ideology, it is mainly about securing fossil energy supplies. Solar energy is the sword that threatens to cut the knot. Again, I don\u2019t doubt that engineers and financial project-managers can take of their bussiness \u2013 if we let them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

AZ response 1: <\/strong>Henshaw 2 February, 2012 at 1:22 am<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Frits, It\u2019s very true that changing ideological systems takes more than having a practical reason to do so.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just the \u201cvested interests\u201d, it\u2019s all the kinds of systemic integration of systems to work as a whole, making them more resistant to change than the popular \u201csingle value theories\u201d might suggest. John Sterman of MIT has looked at the great effort it takes to build models that will expose those \u201chidden infrastructures\u201d of systems that develop by growth. My work is often about discovering the hidden barriers to change, and understanding why they seem so easy to grow and unexpectedly hard to change.<\/p>\n

Tonight\u2019s news was about the storm damage to overhead power lines. It seems to never pay to put them underground if they started above, so much other stuff has to be moved. It\u2019s the same for technologies, that become uniquely integrated as they grow, as people fit in new things to complement what was already there. The starting points of growth (as a process of accumulative design) generally need to be part of any future. You see that in diverse examples to how evolution never loses its origin to how the roads around Boston are generally just expansions of old cow paths and wagon trails.<\/p>\n

For solar one of the problems is fueling, that where electric cars get recharged won\u2019t correspond to where people get other kinds of services for their cars. The distribution of gas stations was based on getting full service at a quick stop. Electric recharge will be for only one service, leaving the car for a long time\u2026 and so incompatible with the geometry of car service habits without a other kinds of change too.<\/p>\n

Ideological rigidity of that kind develops too. How professional and social languages generally adapt to fit their environment produces history dependence. Local language often becomes integrated with social roles and \u201cfrozen in place\u201d as a \u201csilo\u201d of thinking, and a mental fixation for the social networks involved. How \u201csustainability\u201d developed as a social movement around increasing resource supply rather than reducing demand, extends supplies by accelerating actual depletion, is a kind of trap that frozen thinking in a changing world produces.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d love to know it there\u2019s an actual literature on the subject. The problem is also discussed as \u201csystems inertia\u201d or as \u201cscar tissue\u201d, neither of which gets at the real source of the natural resistance to change for things that are already built. It\u2019s that changing things that are already built means reorganizing them too. I discovered that as a pivotal insight as I started my work in the 70\u2032s, and that it conflicted in a big way with growing the economy by changing resources and technologies ever faster as a way to solve resource depletion by substituting new ones all the time.<\/p>\n

So, I agree with you, that various kinds of \u201cgeo-political entanglement\u201d will create stubborn resistance to converting to solar. Organizational rigidity is also a natural property of all things that develop by growth. I first noticed it affecting my work on passive solar in the 70\u2019s, which has been economical in many ways all along but mostly never adopted. To make good use of passive solar you need to adopt a \u201csolar ideology\u201d of a sort, and become attuned to the variations in weather as a way to live. \u201cThat\u2019s just not how people think\u201d, is what I ran into.<\/p>\n

\n

AZ Response 2 <\/strong>Frits Smeets:\u00a02 February, 2012 at 10:10 am<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

P.F. we\u2019re talking about natural resistance to change things that are already built. For one thing, we must not forget that we got were we are through our policies \u2013 and policy is the only way out. There\u2019s no way around it. So try this as an execise. Changing from fossile to solar implies the relocation of the bigoilwar taxdollar, for starters. Which means transforming the military-industrial complex into something else. For obvious reasons that\u2019s not going to happen unless people get lured into it. And the only way is \u2018show, not tell.\u2019 Now imagine a mayor or senator who wants to start a pilot project and asks your advice for the trip. I don\u2019t know what your advice would be but you\u2019d better take account of five epistemological rules of thumb:
– goal-oriented design is rigid, means-oriented design is plastic.
– energy demand (question) is quantitative, supply (answer) is qualitative.
– quantity is a product of measurement, numbers is counting.
– you never know what rule operates to explain any open series of numbers. New facts change rules.
– maximisation of the value of any variable equals shortcuts equals loss of flexibility.<\/p>\n

I guess any mayor or senator gutfeels that the risk of rigid design is its sudden death. What he probably doesn\u2019t know is that the risk of flexible design is its possibility of new pathology. There\u2019s no easy way out of fossile energy and no easy way into the sun, yet it has to be done and since we\u2019re consciously trying we\u2019d better be prepared for mistakes during the process. The way to be right is to accept the possibilty to be wrong. That\u2019s as far as my imagination gets and why I end up with the above rules of thumb.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n