 parameter in the context to its immediate environment. It is argued that a population in an environment will maintain a certain number and there would be some external forces that will actively work to ensure that the population will maintain at that standard number. It is a very Malthusian analytic, but what is interesting is that there could be some new and meaningful influences on the number that might increase the scale. In our current meaning, a change in technology or ingenuity could significantly alter the natural homeostatic number. The fact remains that forces are always at work on a system. Some systems are autonomic – it self-organizes and corrects itself toward some stable convergence. Other systems are not autonomic and once can only resort to the laws of probability to get some insight into the possible outputs – but never to a point where there is a certainty in predictive prowess.
Organizations have a lot of interacting variables at play at any given moment. In order to influence the organization behavior or/and direction, policies might be formulated to bring about the desirable results. However, these nudges toward setting off the organization in the right direction might also lead to unexpected results. The aim is to foresee some of these unexpected results and mollify the adverse consequences while, in parallel, encourage the system to maximize the benefits. So how does one effect such changes?
It all starts with building out an operating framework. There needs to be a clarity around goals and what the ultimate purpose of the system is. Thus there are few objectives that bind the framework.
- Clarity around goals and the timing around achieving these goals. If there is no established time parameter, then the system might jump across various states over time and it would be difficult to establish an outcome.
- Evaluate all of the internal and external factors that might operate in the framework that would impact the success of organizational mandates and direction. Identify stasis or potential for stasis early since that mental model could stem the progress toward a desirable impact.
- Apply toll gates strategically to evaluate if the system is proceeding along the lines of expectation, and any early aberrations are evaluated and the rules are tweaked to get the system to track on a desirable trajectory.
- Develop islands of learning across the path and engage the right talent and other parameters to force adaptive learning and therefore a more autonomic direction to the system.
- Bind the agents and actors in the organization to a shared sense of purpose within the parameter of time.
- Introduce diversity into the framework early in the process. The engagement of diversity allows the system to modulate around a harmonic mean.
- Finally, maintain a well document knowledge base such that the accretive learning that results due to changes in the organization become springboard for new initiatives that reduces the costs of potential failures or latency in execution.
- Encouraging the leadership to ensure that the vector is pointed toward the right direction at any given time.
Once a framework and the engagement rules are drawn out, it is necessary to rely on the natural velocity and self-organization of purposeful agents to move the agenda forward, hopefully with little or no intervention. A mechanism of feedback loops along the way would guide the efficacy of the direction of the system. The implications is that the strategy and the operations must be aligned and reevaluated and positive behavior is encouraged to ensure that the systems meets its objective.
However, as noted above, entropy is a dynamic that often threatens to derail the system objective. There will be external or internal forces constantly at work to undermine system velocity. The operating framework needs to anticipate that real possibility and pre-empt that with rules or introduction of specific capital to dematerialize these occurrences. Stasis is an active agent that can work against the system dynamic. Stasis is the inclination of 