BLACK HOLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION - PART TWO

 

BLACK HOLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION



PART TWO



The structure of dystopian behavior

Once you become comfortable with the idea of dystopia as an attractor, because that’s how it behaves, you can look for the particular functionalities of dystopia that all attractors require to attract outliers. The mechanisms of action that animate dystopia comes in a set. Identify any one of them in service and you can be assured the others are operating as well. Unlike the situation with dystopia’s counterpart, Utopia, the mechanisms of action that drive organizational dysfunction lock into a mutually reinforcing static state. If any contributing player should deviate, the others automatically take up the slack.

One example of the self-healing nature of dystopia is the Nash Equilibrium of Natural Law, which led to Nash winning the 1994 Nobel Prize in Mathematical Physics. John Forbes Nash, Jr. (1928 – 2015) and his wife, Alicia, died in a car crash while riding in a taxi on the New Jersey Turnpike on May 23, 2015. Before this terrible accident, he was the subject of the popular film, “A Beautiful Mind” (2001). Nash is best remembered for his fundamental contributions to game theory.

Nash’s Law shows that any part of a dystopia that attempts to break the mold of “business as usual” practices will be pressured by the other parts to return to its statistical null position. It is the reason why the piecemeal approach to reversing organizational dysfunction is doomed from the start.

To understand how dystopia remains so “popular,” and number one around the world is to understand why Utopia is wrongly considered unobtainable. Start with the primitives of how collectives choose. Everyone gets a genetic inheritance at birth and years of social conditioning. Genes supplied us with a plethora of instincts, phobias, reflexes, and other knee-jerk reactions to events and perceptions. The express purpose of enculturation is to coerce you to suppress some of your instincts, like survival and productivity, and magnify others, like obedience to authority.

Social conditioning trains you to go with the flow. Don’t think for yourself, do as you’re told. “Ours is not to question why. Ours is but to do or die” (British poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1809 - 1892). To be a member of society in good standing you have to sleepwalk through the paradoxes just like your peers. Since the other members in your collective received the same enculturation as you did, that pretty much is it for crushing individual variety.

There are more ways than one to get things stuck on Tar-Baby Dystopia. Separate routes end up at the same place. Having the attribute of equifinality, each route to dystopia acts as a reinforcing rod. No effort, physical or mental, is required to hold on to dystopia. You are pummeled into emotional submission. The Pilgrimage to Utopia (P2U), in contrast, is on a single winding road up to the inflection point. Once the pilgrim gets his “zero entropy” message, he will choose routes to Utopia he thinks will best get him there. When the inflection event occurs, responsibility for a successful relocation switches from the interventionist to the individual pilgrim. Progress accelerates.

Using the Yin/Yang attractor axiom, it is easy to understand the opposite/complementary nature of dystopia/Utopia. Dystopia can perpetuate itself without the maintenance of any kind. For its trip to hell, blind drift brain-off works just fine. Utopia, in contrast, requires incessant and intelligent husbandry to remain viable. Never-ending effort, physical and mental, keep the characteristics of Utopia up to date. It’s a jolt on the psyche to emerge from a situation that punishes independent thinking to one that depends on it.

Turnpikes to dystopia

For an autocrat who wants to fashion a dystopia, there are many options. Abuse the employees, for one, works just fine. Most people think that organizational dysfunction, obviously bad and lose-lose, must be the handiwork of intentionally bad people. After all, what reason could good people have to sink their ship except divine destiny? So, the search goes on to find qualifying good people to construct the bridge, call them leaders, to drive the floating concerns away from dystopia towards Utopia. The fetish of attributing the cause to evil potentates thrives today. What organized religion has anything good to say about its pious impotent, bureaucracies?

The spotlight for this pilgrimage is on those roads to the dystopia that good people have built with implicit psychological coercions that drive organized society today. Three separate roadways to dystopia will be discussed as examples:

The Second Law of Thermodynamics (when energy changes from one form to another form, or matter moves freely, entropy (disorder) in a closed system increases).

When ideology is deemed infallible.

When labor relations are reduced to a zero-sum game.

The unavoidable tollway everyone must travel throughout their lifetimes is owned and operated by Nature’s 2nd Law. When they do nothing about the accumulation of entropy, toll unpaid, aspiring freeloaders are shunted to dystopia. When you do the exacting work of extracting entropy buildups, paying the toll and rent of Utopia, as you go, you are there.

Because it is project-challenged, dystopia is functionally unable to attenuate entropy. Every time it tries, usually, in crisis mode, entropy increases at a faster rate. In Utopia, viability husbandry, also known as entropy is the top priority activity. Nature has strict rules for extracting entropy and a blend of creativity and serious cognitive effort is Her directive #1. Avoiding entropy extraction, sooner or later, dystopia has to go parasitic to survive, like a government bureaucracy.

Infallible ideology

A second highway that gets you to dystopia also uses 2nd Law pavers. It starts with the hierarchy and its zeal for eliminating variations in human behavior to handle the multiplicity of obstacles. To have its workforce act as one, operationalizing the whims of its Big Kahma, the ideology of the concern is declared infallible. At first, it seems like a fair deal. After all, why change a system that is bringing prosperity to the organization? Why indeed.

The problem with any infallible ideology is that it is inherently unsustainable. Any way of life, good or evil, is constantly being degraded by the 2nd Law. That means every tick of the clock everywhere in the universe brings higher, never lower, disorder. In dystopia, entropy extraction, as a necessary chore, is ignored by its members as a threat to infallibility. How could infallibility need correction? In dystopia, the energy otherwise available for a positive task is spent in defensive routines. When infallibility is at stake, the utility function payoff is irrelevant. The 2nd Law is a nemesis to infallibility that cannot be defeated. When a conscious activity is not performed, for any reason, say hello to dystopia. You’ve arrived.

Nature will not allow defiance of Her laws to go unpunished, She will not intervene in how you leverage them. The 2nd Law allows you to reduce disorder locally by raising it faster globally. The mechanism of entropy extraction and relocation is a structure imposed on local disorder by work (force x distance). You do this disorder-extraction trick every time you make a bed.

Zero Sum

A particularly nasty road to dystopia is cemented in place by control theory. In any hierarchy of 4 or more tiers, ground-truth information about the operation can rise no more than 2½ levels without morphing into fiction. That means the top tiers are functionally excluded from issuing direct orders that can increase productivity. If it issues commands, based on GIGO, because it has the authority productivity dissolves away.

Here sits management, slowly learning that every time it meddles with the organizational profit-generator, the revenue crew, things get worse. It is face to face with the manifest limitations of the “unlimited” social power vested in them. Here’s 75% of the organization’s population, the workforce is outside of management’s span of control – for making things better. In due course, the head shed (i.e., the hierarchy) learns that the only tool in its workshed that influences anything below is its financial control. Frustrated that its unlimited authority and discretionary power no longer translate into control of organizational prosperity, management uses the only lever it has, which is financial, to assuage its now-raging retreat from dominance by attacking its revenue crew otherwise known as the workforce. The empirical dividers are filled with examples.

The challenge management has to face is to figure out how to use its iron grip on the treasury to dominate the people that populate its lower-level organization. Abandoning good sense to use the one effective tool they have to feed its hunger for domination ultimately drives the operation to ruin. Its answer, as history shows clearly, is to engage labor in a zero-sum relationship. Management exchanges organizational viability for direct control of how the non-management workforce lives. It can only affirm its domination by punishing its profit center. Say what?

Zero-sum gaming enters the scene whenever potentates acquire control of the chain of command. Holding all the financial cards is why management relishes zero-sum labor-management interaction. It is a tug of war full of emotion and competition – and rigged in management’s favor. Watch it navigate the organization over dystopia’s spillover, oblivious to the wreckage being generated. The fact that wage control makes productivity worse, known for two centuries, is deemed secondary to the satisfaction of its domination instinct. POSIWID (Purpose of the System is What it Does).

The Establishment spotlighted its dependency on financial control to get emotional payoffs during the 2016 political circus. One candidate, immune to financial influence, has shown the Establishment to be otherwise incompetent. While it is brilliant in raising money, it is clueless as to how to spend it to get what it thinks it wants.

The establishment's influence on media bias, through its financial control, also became obvious to the public. Establishment powerlessness is no flaw in the people in leadership roles. Impotent to solve big problems is built-in to Nature’s limits to hierarchy. The head shed is given legal latitude to do whatever it wants, but the only thing it can do is harm stakeholders. Nature gave the exclusive power to deliver and sustain Utopia to the workforce. But, you already know that.

Your early assignment as a candidate pilgrim will be to falsify these concepts and claims. Find exceptions in the record. Audit an application site. Design and run tests to controvert the assertions of incontrovertibility. Your advantage is that in finding one exception you have discounted the claim of natural law connectivity. The platform of natural law can support no exceptions.

The signposts of dystopia

No one has any problem recognizing dystopia when they encounter it. The psychological signs are prominent and many. Most people can make the correct determination by visiting the facilities even when no employees are there. During business hours, dystopias are unmistakable. There are objective, quantitative ways to measure dystopia dysfunctionality as well. Gathering the facts will give you a big advantage. Facts may not always trump emotion, but they always drive it crazy.

No social system can hide its value system from a pragmatic assessment. In dystopia, all you have to check on is its productivity. The first thing to note is that all discussion and record-keeping in dystopia is about production – exclusively. The factors of productivity are unmeasured and undiscussable, especially turnover.

Productivity is production minus operating costs plus waste plus loss plus turnover plus stakeholder damage. The factors of operating costs include supplies, power, water, disposal, and rent on facilities. The factors of waste include what ends up on the scrap heap. The factors of loss include safety, quality, and turnover – all expensive insults to native instincts. Stakeholder damage control caused by dysfunctional operations is always material. The equation is not changed by politics or propaganda. In dystopia, no useful truthful accounting is made of these charges against production revenue.

When it comes to the effectiveness of what is produced, the mission, and accounting are even worse. Since the goal of the organization has never been defined in concrete terms, there is no way to measure what “effectivity” looks like. Management only measures what it values scratching productivity and effective ledgers from the list of candidates. How can you intelligently husband viability when no one knows how the place works? Well, you can’t. When it comes to productivity factors, none improve by themselves. If the factors are not tracked, the 2nd Law drives them worse. Causes sink to effects. Effects point nowhere. Another example of enigma damage:

In dystopia, a check on the training scene will provide an x-ray of the organizational value system.

What training does the organization do?

How does it set the goals of training?

How does it evaluate results against goals?

Training format?

Social science research has provided firm “rules” for running training programs. The science of training used the limits of human learning to determine the parameters of program delivery. In the same way, Starkermann used the stability limit of the social system to mark boundaries. The social science of training measures the line where learning stops and resentment begins. You’ve been there multiple times without being so aware. By using the ruleset as a reference standard, you can get an objective measure of the organizational value system.

The limits of human capacity, mental and physical, are of course non-negotiable. If the format of training sprawls beyond the limits to what knowledge humans can ingest in a training situation, training becomes counterproductive. In formatting the learning episodes, the rules established for productive, effective learning are accommodated. The requisite conditions are enumerated in the “stop-rule” list provided to the host. Experience shows management can be so jolted by the effectiveness of the episodes, that it will sometimes deliberately break the rules to halt the proceedings.

Training practices are a dead giveaway about dystopia policies – POSIWID. The charisma of the trainer does not affect a mismatched situation. In standard business-as-usual practices, training is conducted, if at all, without an objective basis. No effort is made to align training with organizational needs. Training is arranged to fulfill management’s political agenda but without explicit goals. The provisions of training are ridiculously outside effective limits. Measurements of training impact are never taken. Since the results of training are more often negative than positive, it begs the question – Why do it at all?”

Since training is tangible, the organization cannot hide the paradox of POSIWID. No organization that values its revenue crew would do negative-results training on purpose. Ineffective training fools no one. It does not fool the workforce as the objective of such training. It does not fool the faculty. It is a waste that tallies against production. When “good” training is done, such as the Pilgrimage to Utopia (P2U), it shows up quickly on productivity measures.

When you find a training environment incongruent with knowledge-based criteria, you are assured that all the other patterns of organizational dysfunction are also active. That’s why the social system is called dystopia.

A systems view of dystopia socio-technology

System dystopia has material pieces and parts of metal and flesh. It has a framework that holds these parts and pieces in place. The elements of dystopia are configured together in a dynamic system. Included is a subsystem that regulates its behavior by feedback to a set point. The system called dystopia is distinguished by how it acts through time, registers attributes, and disturbances. Understanding involves:

(1) Pertinent, significant natural laws

(2) Natural Law corollaries that clock organizations

(3) Doctrines of psychology

(4) Mechanisms of Action

(5) Toolsmithing

The first four inputs get processed into concepts that form the pilgrimage ideology – a paradigm that is incontrovertible. The fifth item is the experience-honed aids that help speed up the renovation process.

To understand what produces system dystopia behaviors, it is necessary to know the influence of natural law upon it. Since the system envelope of dystopia includes the humans that animate it, the dogmas of psychology in the arena need to be understood in terms of The action of the material system.

The choices of action the human elements make in dystopia are irrational by material and humanitarian standards, but that is where the canons of the psychological sciences come into play. In the husbandry of Utopia viability, actions of man and machine are natural-law rational – period. There is zero subjectivity in entropy extraction. Everything is in-your-face material.

Knowing the laws and doctrines that influence system behavior, leads to identifying and tracing the observable mechanisms of action that animate dystopia. Knowing the mechanisms of action (MoA) in play simplifies the task of quantifying dystopia before embarking on the Pilgrimage to Utopia. The difference is why you go.

Toolsmith provides implements for making sense of the paradoxes and dichotomies. Job performance aids are invaluable for seeing through the dystopian fogs and defensive routines to get at the truth.

Following the discussion of dystopia socio-technology, a walkthrough of what we find to be the most common life cycles of dystopia will be presented. This puts life into the interplay of Nature and men in groups. You will have no problems in recognizing the stations of the scenario, focusing on how dystopias are transformed by the pilgrims into Utopias.

Natural laws prominent in dystopia

It commences with the 2nd Law of thermodynamics focusing on viability, effectiveness, infallibility, and extraction. In terms of Control theory relative to the dynamics and Starkermann group social theory. With regards to Shannon’s Laws of Communication, it establishes that for any given degree of noise contamination of a communication channel, it is possible to communicate discrete data (digital information) nearly error-free up to a computable maximum rate.

The Conservation laws, also called the law of conservation, in physics, a principle that states that certain physical property (i.e., a measurable quantity) does not change over time within an isolated physical system.

Connectance is a measure of the number of links (L) or connections between species (S) expressed as a proportion of maximum connectance

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics

Much fuss has been made about the 2nd Law and for good reason. Its lightsaber action on degrading social systems is never off. Dealing with the incessant ravages of the 2nd Law is always first on the task-action agenda. Predicting the trajectory of any social system can be made with extreme reliability simply by noting how it handles 2nd Law entropy buildups. If productivity improvement is not the way of life, there’s no way that 2nd Law degradation is being neutralized. Business as usual cannot deal with novel challenges of any kind and entropy extraction is a creativity hog.

The 2nd Law is the major player in viability husbandry. Working at the atomic level, its insidious ravages on all things material are local and particular throughout the universe. It degrades the car and its driver with equal indifference. It is impossible to fool the 2nd Law, coming or going. That’s what makes the politics of infrastructure so unsavory to politicians. Lying to the public about neglected maintenance is a waste of time. They can see the degradation for themselves.

The effectiveness of any process is closely connected to the 2nd Law. Try and keep business as usual fixed and productivity goes down. Calling the operational dogmas infallible and then having to defend them as such makes for all sorts of contradictions and enigmas. There is no escape from this ridiculous relationship with infallibility. When productivity is not going up, it is going down. Keeping business as usual constant by edict destabilizes the organization.

The P2U elaborates on the work of entropy extraction. It is a central pillar of Utopia that keeps everything honest. Its effect on all things material is perforce measurable. Only the workforce, close to the action, can extract entropy. Anyone 2½ levels or more away from the production line is baggage.

Control Theory

As professor Starkermann often noted, control theory is a subject in the university’s engineering curriculum that no one is eager to take. It’s all about system dynamics. The mathematical physics of control is too recursive for a human brain to follow for more than a few cycles. Accordingly, all sorts of approximations and simplifications had to be invented to practice industrial control engineering. Like the 2nd Law, control theory equations feature the arrow of time. Computer horsepower has revolutionized the control designer’s workbench.

Control theory was used by Starkermann to calculate the 2½ rule. His models describe the progressive degradation in the quality of control information due to leak, lag, and friction. Starkermann’s work in the dynamic simulation of social systems, Starkermann.com, produced the tables of stability limits that led to the rule.

It is well known that the human brain has limits in its ability to remember, multi-process, and compute recursive equations, like French-American mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot’s (1924 – 2010) art which is provocative mathematics and subversive geometer on display. He left a beautiful legacy in visual art, for Mandelbrot was the man who named and explained fractals – those complex, apparently chaotic yet geometrically ordered shapes that delight the eye and fascinate the mind.

MANDELBROT FRACTAL ART

These limits show up in the 2½ rule and the ability to command and control towards a worthy target. By good fortune, it was discovered in 1960 that the technological limits in human processing approximated the limits of control engineering equipment then available for industrial application. This meant that the best strategy, hardware, and technology of industrial process control of 1960, clunky by today’s standards, was a good match for modeling human-human interaction. Accordingly, dynamic simulations of social systems made using the practical control techniques of the 1960s proved to be on-target. Rudolf Starkermann, who applied the control schemes to run his simulations, was extremely cautious in making claims of congruency. He didn’t have access to the proving grounds of reality that we exploit today. For the first decade of our collaboration, he held our testing antics in high skepticism in the social milieu.

Once the dynamic simulators were available for running experiments, it became obvious that Starkermann’s computer models were spot on. With the validation of model-man congruency, testing with the dynamic simulator exploded in all directions. To know how any two people in a group work together as a twosome is to know nothing about their behavior in a group.

The truth about the power gradient of the organization is appropriate subject matter for only one level in the hierarchy – the productivity protagonist level. To pass the truth of power, productivity, effectiveness, and stakeholder damage on to management will, in one stroke, affirm everything you ever learned about the “glue” that holds dystopias together. It is not a recommended experiment because it has no possible upside value, even if you weren’t smitten on the spot.

Shannon’s Laws of communication

Formulated by the mathematician Claude Shannon, his law is a statement in information theory that expresses the maximum possible data speed that can be obtained in a data channel. His law instructs that the highest obtainable error-free data speed, expressed in bits per second (bps), is a function of the bandwidth and the signal-to-noise ratio. Shannon’s limits fit right into the box with the 2½ rule. When you are in an error-intolerant situation, like entropy extraction, errors in the message devastate goal-seeking.

Shannon also defined communication messages as errors if their transmittal did not obtain the action by the receiver intended by the sender. This ties into POSIWID. If your transmissions don’t result in entropy extraction, your intent, then your communication failed. That is why the first business of the pilgrimage is to define what “done” looks like. Then, communications success has a reference benchmark.

Everyone knows the man has limits in thinking and acting (visual of human coping). If his psychic internal energy is tied up in defensive routines and angst, the conservation of energy removes that energy from the supply available for productive work. The energy required for the transformation and the work of viability husbandry is obtained during the P2U by venting off this accumulated angst. You can witness the blowdown event for yourself right after the second-way station of the P2U.

Not everything in social system life is subject to the conservation laws. Subjective factors like creativity, trust, and confidence are not limited to the allocation of a fixed amount. It is important to distinguish which factors are conservation-law constrained and which are not. It is a trait of dystopia, and a counterproductive one, to treat the factors of productivity as zero-sum. They are not.

Connectance

The mathematical physics of connectance is highly significant to dystopia because it is so prone to its paralytic action. The law of connectance shows that any (social) ecosystem of moderate or higher complexity with interconnected elements, goes catatonic in disturbances. Specifically, if 16% or more of the communication lines among system elements are activated at the same time, the system freezes up. Since dystopia has far more connections than Utopia, it is vulnerable to disturbances that Utopia can handle with ease. Crashes that get media attention are always caused by connection. Earthquakes and volcanism are triggers of connectance that often paralyze nations and their rescue efforts for days.

In Utopia, self-sufficient units do not need political channels. Disturbances are detected early when they are easy to neutralize within the unit.

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Black Hole of Organizational Dysfunction: Part Three – TRANSITION