Proiectarea Unei Organizaţii Cu Capacitate De Autoregenerare

Ashby’s Design for a Brain [Ashby 1952] comprises a formal description of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a system to act ‘like a brain,’ that is, to learn in order to remain viable in a changing environment, and to ‘get what it wants’. Remarkably, Ashby gives a complete, formal specification of such a system without any dependency on how the system is implemented. In this presentation the authors will argue how Ashby’s formalisms can be applied to human organizations. All organizations seek to successfully carry out transactions that achieve their goals and assert their identity, whether to educate college students for employment, to govern a territory fairly, or to make money for shareholders. An organization’s transactions are predicated on agreements, and agreements in turn are based on conversations in a shared language. Thus human organizations are delimited by their operation in the domain of language, and Ashby’s ‘essential variables’ are the ‘shared truths’ of an organization—perturbed by the environment, regulated by employees’ actions, and carried in its language. We argue the validity of ‘social essential variables’ as extensions to Ashby into the social realm. Furthermore, corporations create ‘comparators’ in the form of people and processes that interpret market fluctuations against monetary and strategic goals (whether qualitative or quantitative). These goals are perforce expressed in linguistic distinctions held as internally relevant. Thanks to Ashby we can describe the limits of what is not possible under current constraints of an organization’s language, and therefore focus on changes that are required to operate beyond current limits. The authors apply Ashby’s framework to generate new desired states and to detail prescriptive action for change, enabling an organization ‘to make the impossible obvious.’ In business terms, this provides the ability to initiate specific investments and to track convergence on desired business outcomes. No other methodology for organizational change known to the authors has the formal logic or prescriptive power as this application of Ashby’s work. Through such interpretations—as rigorous as the application of Design for a Brain to mechanical systems—Ashby’s formalism enables the derivation of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a corporation to remain viable in a changing market. The authors claim that the only means for an organization to change from the inside and by design is through the creation and protection of processes that recognize the limits of present language and engender the continual introduction of new ones. 2 The vast literature of ‘organizational design’ and ‘learning organizations’ is usually descriptive instead of prescriptive. Some implications of the role of language are not palatable to most modern organizational experts and their executive clients because it is in their self-interest to lionize the importance of individuals as the means to achieve success (‘cult of the CEO’ and ‘leadership awards’). A cybernetic approach to organizational design instead emphasizes the requirements for the social system as a whole to support sub-systems that recognize and reward different types of creativity in the three phases of change: invention, discovery, and efficiency-making.