Saturday, July 4, 2020


482. Entropy and organisational focus

In the previous item in this blog I discussed entropy. Here I apply it to the notion of organisational focus. First, let me present a puzzle.

Nature and society are full of so-called ‘complex adaptive systems’(CAS). Such a system consists of subsystems that come together (‘complexity’) and produce new functions, often spontaneously, in self-organisation.  Neutrons, protons and electrons together produce atoms, atoms come together in molecules, molecules in organs, organs in bodies, bees in a colony, people in organisations, people and institutions in nations, nations in supranational entities like the EU.

The puzzle is this. Producing complexity seems to add things and thereby increase entropy. But it also increases organization, which we associate with decreasing entropy. How can this be? The solution is that in coming together, the subsystems lose autonomy, are constrained to satisfy the coherence of the higher level system, and that loss of freedom of manoevering constitutes lower entropy.

I connect this with the notion of ‘organisational focus’ that I developed in research. To get things done, an organisation needs a certain focus, on shared ideas about what it does, what its product is, the technologies needed for producing it, the ways in which people treat each other, specialised jargon, organisational culture.

In other words, the focus is needed to not fall apart, to have a direction, in other words to keep the increase of entropy at bay. The focus is narrow when the organisation is directed at efficient production, which requires that people understand each other well, at limited ‘cognitive distance’.  The focus is wider when the organisation is oriented more at innovation, which requires larger cognitive distance to produce the ‘novel combinations’ of innovation. That initially increases entropy, with more mental states, perspectives, but when successful new combinations are made, with new things replacing old ones, entropy is decreased again.   

Thus, innovation can be seen as an alternation of rising and decreasing entropy, with the rising entropy creating more innovative opportunity in the form of diversity. A little chaos is needed to produce new organisation.

An alternative is to seek the variety for novel combinations outside, in collaboration between organisations, with different foci, in alliances. That, however, is difficult, with the risk of breakdown, in a conflict of interests and risk of misalignment and misunderstanding, with the break-up increasing disorganisation, entropy again.  To avoid that, the organisations may come together, in a shared focus, a new CAS, constraining the action space of the constituent organisations in a common order, reducing entropy.

A final comment. In the literature on freedom, a distinction is made between two forms of freedom: ‘negative’ freedom in the form of absence of outside constraint, and ‘positive’ freedom, in the access to resources. In the integration in a higher level system, the subsystems lose negative freedom, due to the restrictions imposed by integration, but gain positive freedom, in access to new functions.

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