Wednesday, May 27, 2015

How to Design Organizations to Maintain Viability

If the organization understands itself in relation to its context, it should be able to determine whether it requires changing something to become viable.

Digital organizations are a complex ecosystem with the blurring line between functions, organizations and geographic locations. How to design organizations to maintain viability and deliver tactical actions for strategic effect, given weak, noisy and evolving feedback signals due to systemic adaptive complexity in its environment? What would be an inclusive set of theories to accommodate a complex system? How would such a set be integrated? How would be an organization experiencing that type of feedback know it's viable? How would it or its parts know it needs to change itself? How would it or its parts know what to change?


Multifaceted perspectives unfold into wider multi-dimensionally enhancing systemic continuum. You are going to touch on the notion of change in simple terms to start with, from different perspectives. If the organization understands itself in relation to its context, it should be able to determine whether it requires changing something to become viable. It can do this by choosing to
(1). Change something about the other actors.
(2). Change the environment and
(3). Change something about themselves. This, however, is dependent on forming a sufficient understanding of itself in relation to its context, in an environment that is most likely significantly degraded, having a significant impact on the ability to acquire information. Some perspectives below unfold into wider multi-dimensionally enhancing systemic continuum, which would perhaps invoke further reflections both for the focal original-case scope and purposes, but also for more generic purposes and perspectives.
  • how to orchestrate the hybrid-“truth”- from an epistemological competition perspective;
  • how to maintain or transform the dense novel-vs-legacy-inertia narratives’ meaning-structures spanning across abstract or cognition levels into real-world systemic?
  • how the hybrid-narratives’ systemic integration or separation is orchestrated;
  • how to orchestrate and elaborate with the dense systemic-fractal “hybrid-truth-narratives” and respective meaning-structures from an ontological competition perspective;
  • how the systemic narrative-advance and value shall be formed, delivered, sustained, and shared in a through-life-mission-resilient way, including the mission-outcomes-targets-driven “adversary-related” narratives' value-decay, etc.


The highly complex and dynamic system needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort: To deliver any real outcomes, probably such a highly complex and systemic target case would need to be elaborated in a serious real and well-organized through-life-effort. It goes beyond the possibilities of any community-platforms' limited intensity and action spectrum. What reflections might be seen valuable to share or discuss the effective systemic stakeholders' integration, and across such engage-deliver-decoupling, and living thereon with the full-spectrum intended, reached and positively-emergent outcomes plus the unintended portfolios of emergent, or other residual outcomes, legacies, or commitments, etc. The system is operational in crisis and conflict environments and is 'designed' to couple with them, influence the emergent properties of the environment and enable emergent change in its own behavior, function, and structure to propagate through itself change how it couples with the environment in order to:
1). Reduce the coupling in a crisis or conflict environment;
2). Destabilize the existing environment;
3). Influence towards strategic stability preferred by a legitimate process;
4). Stabilize the environment.


A core challenge appears to be discerning systemic understanding from a feedback mechanism (PRY); that is a dynamic flow of cumulative stress or pleasure (drives change or reinforces) across a network of evolving interconnections. What would be the balanced design principles to enable successful emergent behavior and function of the organization (within safety, legal and ethical constraints) in order that its structure is emergent as a self-organizing or self-redesigning team of teams? In order to gain insight over the paradigm-bound-relevance of the system or subsystems thereof, one should distance oneself, at least for the holistic whole-system-evaluation away beyond the systemic-expanding boundaries-envelopes (each containing respective systemic-envelope-bounded feedback PRY described below ) of the prevalent paradigms, to gain distant trans-paradigm- and respective. Maybe better outlined as three slightly overlapping/cascading upside-down curves, where P is leftmost, R is middle, and Y is rightmost, and time flows to right: first you start to create or advance with the idea and potential, then implement it, and then get the yield.
a) feedback on action/impacts/outcomes/Yield Y [of a paradigm]
b) feedback on Realization/implementation R [of a paradigm]
c) feedback on Potential P [of a paradigm]

It’s the strategic-choreography perspectives (whether intentional or emergent paradigm-shifting bifurcations unfolding there) of the relative and absolute P/R/Y developments and endogenous within-paradigm-relevance vs. exogenous systemic-enhancing paradigm. In the context of the systems, the adding-kinetic-energy-long-enough/-dense-enough means appropriate interventions, which
- need to be converted into multiple dense-enough strategic-leverage-points,
- need to be applied in such concerted way for long enough time span to turn the systemic vessel into appropriately systemically-liquid-mode for an overall-systemic-paradigm-shifting mode to emerge or be enforced intentionally.


The balanced and effective-outcomes-driven design approaches and principles then, obviously highly related to the various systemic-kaleidoscopic. The systemic “strategic growth through-life orchestration, influence, steering or governance for such complex hybrid orchestrations, might be worth reflecting the following “full-spectrum-integrative” frame across the multiply-interference perspectives:
(1) The core focus, the through-life-profiling across the full spectrum of the mission, and the kaleidoscopic views to theaters, epochs, episodes, etc;
(2)  Strategic “ownership” characteristics over the full-spectrum phenomena;
(3) full-spectrum characteristics, interests etc across the engagement/ delivery-operations/ decoupling.
(4) systemic platforms/capabilities/operations/positioning/growth/integration etc profiling across the systemic through-life stakeholders;
(5) stakeholder’ mission/theater/episode etc action profiling and operations preparation/ assignment/ execution;
(6) Systemic value-delivery-assurance; full-spectrum compliance and integration

Digital system themes with all the aggregates-spanning challenges/pathologies/paradoxes and opportunities bring organizations further towards the challenges of constructing and enacting such systemic-spanning "hybrid realities," across such systemic- dynamic autonomous-induced mixtures of "real" and "intentionally created" processes of "constructing and enacting the hybrid realities." It also brings organizations into the full-spectrum dynamically transforming a mixture of systemic-spanning and full-spectrum-issue-distributions of such systemic-intensity-related capabilities, maturities challenges, paradoxes, pathologies across individuals, teams, looser groups, organizations, network-enterprises, and holistic digital ecosystems.

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