Resilient Structures
by chet ~ May 22nd, 2008. Filed under: Boyd's Theories, Conflict, Latest News.[Note; links to Boyd's presentations go to the John Boyd Compendium page on DNI, where all of Boyd's work is available free of charge in a variety of formats.]
After a while, human organizations seem to deteriorate. Often the individuals in them will be busy, spending long hours going to meetings, producing PowerPoints, etc., but the amount of useful work — measured by successful new products, for example — keeps going down. This isn’t a description of every organization, but you have to admit it’s depressingly common.
You also know, however, that the pattern can be reversed IF energy primarily in the form of ideas is brought in from outside to keep the organization fresh and competitive. It’s not easy, but through techniques like lean production, it is possible to reverse organizational decline.
John Robb has an interesting post on this subject over on Global Guerrillas. As he notes, classical thermodynamics shows that closed systems will run down, eventually reaching thermodynamic equilibrium and stopping — the fate of early attempts to build steam engines, for example. But by using a cooling mechanism to dump the waste heat back out into the environment — opening the system, in other words — the machine can be kept operating.
Robb goes on to point out that the late physicist Ilya Prigogine generalized this conclusion by noting that there are a whole class of systems that not only need a flow of energy to function but need such a flow in order to exist at all. He called these “dissipative structures,” and a whirlpool is a common example. Life itself is another.
Prigogine and Strenger observed in Order Out Of Chaos,
When we examine a biological cell or a city, however, the situation is quite different: not only are these systems open, but also they exist only because they are open. They feed on the flux of matter and energy coming to them from the outside world. We can isolate a crystal, but cities and cells die when cut off from their environment. They form an integral part of the world from which they can draw sustenance, and they cannot be separated from the fluxes that they incessantly transform.
[This is quoted in Strategic Game, chart 18.] Boyd made extensive use of the concept both in describing the nature of strategy and ultimately in his definition of the OODA loop. Boyd looked at strategy not so much as a subject to be learned but as a game to be played. The game was Isolation and Interaction, isolating your opponents while interacting with the environment, and it is played at all levels, from tactical through grand strategic and in the physical, mental, and moral domains.
Successful participants in this game become open relative to their opponents, who begin to show the negative effects mentioned above. Boyd’s idea was that if entropy is bad, let’s give our opponents as much of it as we can.
Dissipative structures also form the theoretical underpinning of Boyd’s concept of “orientation” (Organic Design, Chart 15):
orientation is an interactive process of many-sided implicit cross-referencing projections, empathies, correlations, and rejections that is shaped by and shapes the interplay of genetic heritage, cultural tradition, previous experiences, and unfolding circumstances.
Later he began to add “far from equilibrium” to this definition, and in his last briefing, he made this point explicit:
By pulling all this together, we can see that the Key Statements, OODA Loop Sketch, and related Insights represent an evolving, open-ended, far-from-equilibrium process of self-organization, emergence, and natural selection.
So in a sense, Boyd saw conflict not just as a contest between two (or more) knowledge / novelty-generating systems but between dissipative structures. In particular, confused or panicked opponents — say, as a result of our operating inside their OODA loops — may be generating lots of energy, but little is available for countering us, and their ability to self-organize in response to our threat is very low. They are not, in other words, effectively dissipating entropy (suggest you stop and read Robb’s piece if you haven’t already done so).
Good enough, but then how do we do it? How do we create such structures? How do we train people to operate under stressful conditions as systems that are more open than their competitors? Our experience with Hurricane Katrina showed that this is not a trivial problem, even for a superpower.
Boyd gives a lot of suggestions in his work, particularly in Organic Design, where, drawing heavily on the German experience from about the time of Clausewitz until the Blitzkrieg, he concluded that we should:
Suppress tendency to build‑up explicit internal arrangements that hinder interaction with external world.
Instead
Arrange setting and circumstances so that leaders and subordinates alike are given opportunity to continuously interact with external world, and with each other, in order to more quickly make many‑sided implicit cross‑referencing projections, empathies, correlations, and rejections as well as create the similar images or impressions, hence a similar implicit orientation, needed to form an organic whole.
As one of the scientists working in this area, Odd Arne Nissestad (StatoilHydro and Sr. Commander, RNoN, Ret.), put it:
The key is expanding the members’ role repertoires among the various group functions (Control, Nurture, Opposition, Dependence), which involves pushing people out of their comfort zones. As the group works on this, Einheit improves along with increased confidence and adaptability. When a team is very good at this, it is as if it is able to dissipate entropy very efficiently, that is, a high percentage of its energy is available and is in fact being used to accomplish the mission of the group and little is wasted in internal friction. Furthermore, this is true even as the uncertainty in the external world increases.
The last point follows from the ability of a “mature” group, that is, one where the members can shift easily between the various functions, to self-organize rapidly to deal with new information and situations. As Robb notes, this is a critical feature of dissipative structures in general (again, think of a whirlpool — who “organizes” it?) It will also be a critical feature of future disaster responses, whether to natural or manmade catastrophes, because resources are useless if they cannot be provided where they’re needed when they’re needed. I’m not saying that these resources must be provided by outsiders.
As a note, the SPGR methodology, which I mentioned in connection with CDR Forsdahl’s thesis posted on DNI, is a technique for measuring how far along the group is in this process, and it may also provide a way to begin to measure how resilient our resilient communities actually are.
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:05 pm
there is plethera of related issues
orientate can be used for understanding … and lack of understanding can result in non-productive expenditure of energy. processor chip technology has been experience this for several years. as traditional chip circuits were shrunk, a higher & higher percentage of energy was being wasted and showing up as heat. this effectively put a limit on how much energy you could pump into the chip as part of making it run faster. there has been a huge amount of investment regarding changing chip circuit paradigm looking for new mechanisms that eliminates the current wasted energy/heat brick wall.
one of the stop-gap approaches is to have different parts of the chips run totally independent (rather than running faster, they are doing more things concurrently) … this is the “multi-core” crisis … requiring figuring out how to break a single task into multiple, parallel, concurrent operations. the current comments are that the industry has been trying for at least 20yrs to turn out programmers that are capable of this, and so far has failed miserably.
in the past, we had done a high-availability computing product and did quite a bit of studying about how/what things fail and how to adapt and/or mask failures. one of the issues was having alternate resources available for handling outages (in this period we coined the terms “disaster survivability” and “geographic survivability” to differentiate from disaster/recovery). in the past, telco “provisioning” has been held up as example to emulate … including looking at things like “five-nines” availability (five minutes of downtime per year). where there is a lack of redundant resources also plays into various asymmetric warfare scenarios.
there is a lot going on now where the event horizon is three months, and there is frequently little provisioning for 100yr, 20yr, or even 5yr events. this extends to not needing people to understand how things work, just the minimal training for doing those same things that have been done for the last three months.
this has been highlighted in other ways with studies about impending baby boomer retirement crisis. the “how” of much of the current infrastructure operations are in the “heads” of these retiring baby boomers. the worry is that when they are gone, those remaining don’t actually understand why something is being done … and will be unable to adapt to exceptional, unusual, disaster, and/or changing conditions.
May 26th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
so what are some common ways that organizations bring in new ideas? and how do they filter the good from the bad, or don’t they?
May 26th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
jason,
That’s a great question, possibly the single most important issue in modern business.
This may sound like a cop-out, but I cover this in some length in Certain to Win. Here’s one quick suggestion: Be the customer, that is, buy and use your service exactly the same way your customers do. Experience interacting with your company exactly the way your customers do. This includes trying to get help!
This sounds so simple, but few companies do it. Any company with a special website or telephone number for employees, for example, is not doing this. Any company where execs get special treatment (airlines and automobile manufacturers used to be notorious) is not doing this.
The other part of this suggestion is to use your competitors’ products and services at least half the time. If you’re a software manufacturer, half of your office computers should be running competitors’ systems. Unfortunately, too many companies make using only company products & services into some kind of misguided loyalty check.
Just a couple of ideas - a very rich and important subject.
Anybody else want to share ideas?
June 13th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
You ought to look at Clayton Christensen’s books on The Innovator Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution.
June 13th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Rob –
Thanks for the recommendations. Before I add to the 6-foot stack of books in my reading list, could you please elaborate?
June 16th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Christensen addresses the same problem that you did with your opening observation about the decline of human organizations, but he tackles it from a different perspective.
More specifically, he addresses the question of why so many well established companies suddenly collapse. The reason, he posits, is that they fail to provide innovative new products or services and get stuck in a pattern of producing simple line extensions. The reason for this is that as companies become more successful, the certainty of existing, high value profit is more valuable than uncertain profits from new innovations. If there were no competitors for a company’s revenue, this situation might be acceptable, but disruptive innovators from outside the company come along and incrementally provide replacement products at the lower end of the margin spectrum of an entrenched provider. The disruptive innovators, of course, are hungry for increasing profit margins, and they continue to take risks to acquire the next higher layer of margin. Thus, the collapse that eventually occurs did not actually happen suddenly. Its erosion began years earlier. But managers are blinded by their bias (do you see hints of The Black Swan?) and increasing layers of bureaucratic processes (e.g., process becomes more important than people) to the threat of the disruptive innovators. In fact, they may acknowledge the presence of the innovator and willingly conceded market share in the lower margin product lines. The really ironic thing is that while revenues for the entrenched provider may decline, their margins actually begin to increase. Management becomes convinced that it’s doing a good job. Christensen provides several examples of this, but I think my favorite one is the story of how minimills replaced the old integrated steel suppliers.
The reason I pointed this out is because companies don’t get to this situation because of busyness, or a lack of fresh new ideas, per se’. It’s their singular focus on a limited objective (continued high margin profitability) that causes their eventual downfall. Their very success causes their failure.
Christensen offers several solutions to the Innovator’s Dilemma within the larger organizrions. First, innovation needs to be cultivated in flexible, agile, small groups that are isolated from the bureaucracy of their parents. From a profit perspective, they have to feel as if their backs are against the wall, that the only way to success is up. The innovator must also be patient for growth but impatient for profit in the early years of the new business.
Finally, Christensen highlights the three roles that senior executives have to play in leading new growth:
1) Short-Term: To be at the juncture between disruptive growth businesses and the mainstream businesses to decide on the allocation of the company’s resources and processes
2) Longer-Term: To lead what Christensen and Raynor call a “disruptive growth engine” to repeatedly launch successful growth businesses
3) Perpetual: To anticipate when the circumstances are changing, and to pass on their know-how to others to identify these signals.
(Note - I copied this last paragraph from the review written by Serge J. Van Steenkiste at Amazon of The Innovator’s Solution.)
I hope that helps.
June 16th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Rob –
Thanks for the observation.
This all gets into the question of how does orientation get “locked,” and what can be done to unlock it. Boyd, as I noted, considered orientation as a “far-from-equilibrium” dissipative structure, analogous more-or-less to a whirlpool. If it were ever to really lock, it would cease to exist at all!
A better meaning, and perhaps more in harmony with Christensen’s concept, is that what is “locked” is the pattern of actions that can flow from orientation — it becomes limited and predictable and doesn’t seem to be learning in any way that might have a favorable outcome on the situation. Blinded, as you say, by their biases.
June 16th, 2008 at 10:54 pm
I have no empirical evidence of my own to back this up, but I am becoming increasingly convinced that motivational bias actually becomes cognitive bias at some point.
Are you familiar with the Asche experiments (1956) in motivational bias?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
Looks like empirical evidence that demonstrates how orientation can become locked.
June 18th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Rob –
Excellent point. I think that’s what Boyd was driving at with the “implicit guidance and control” feed from orientation back into observation.
The influence of orientation on observation can also be seen in “change blindness” and other phenomena that affect perception. Christopher Healey of North Carolina State has an interesting article on this (scroll down to “Change Blindness”). Be sure to play some of Dan Simon’s videos to experience the effect first hand.
By the way, Gary Klein has a strong caution against using a similar effect, which he calls “expectancy bias,” to explain too much. See Sources of Power, pp. 84 ff.
July 7th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Rob-
I agree that motivational bias becomes cognitive bias over time. We are fortunate enough that nature intervenes when businesses fall victim to this blindness. The business that will not adapt to the environment goes out of business while failing to see opportunities. This however is not always the case in a bureaucracy that suffers the same blindness. They (bureaucracies) are kept alive by public life support and soon begin to loose other critical senses. After a while the organization doesn’t know it doesn’t know and can’t feel, hear or smell anything either. It becomes the ultimate case study of the spiral, cognitive bias, non resilient organization. Organizational coma may be the analogy to describe reaching this state. William Bridges tackles this to some degree in Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change when he discusses being in the “neutral zone”. Even in a coma the heart still beats and some systems function.
Having experienced this first hand I don’t think an entire organization ever reaches the (locked orientation) state. The problem is when the leadership reaches this state. There are always resilient groups within non resilient organizations but they become such a minority that they can not overcome the cognitive bias or blindness of the organization as a whole. These small groups maintain great orientation and are more than willing to lead the organization in right direction. Often rejected, these small groups or individuals can become even more resilient because of the experience (but not without mounds of frustration). The experiences gained are not always used within the blind organization but have been the catalyst of many successful new organizations or independent ventures.