Razumevanje inteligentne organizacije

The notion of organisational intelligence is a relatively new one that has come through from the area of management cybernetics, itself concerned with system viability. Intelligent organisations are connected to learning and knowledge organisations. While defining intelligent organisations outside a cybernetic framework is possible, this is not as comprehensive an approach as it might be. An illustration of this is provided by adopting one model of the intelligent organisation, and illustrating how it can succumb to inherent pathologies of the organisation. Key words: Intelligent organisation, strategy, collective intelligence, management cybernetics.Razumevanje inteligentne organizacije Pojem organizacijske inteligence je sorazmerno nov. Nastal je na področju upravljalske kibernetike, ki preučuje sposobnost sistemov za preživetje. Inteligentne organizacije so povezane z organizacijami znanja in učenja. Čeprav se da inteligentne organizacije opredeliti izven kibernetskega okvira, pa to vseeno ni tako vsestranski pristop, kot bi lahko bil. Ponazoritev tega je razvidna iz prevzema enega modela inteligentne organizacije in predstavitve tega, kako ta lahko podleže notranjim patologijam organizacije. Ključne besede: inteligentna organizacija, strategija, kolektivna inteligenca, upravljalska kibernetik

Agency Mindset Theory

A culturally based socio-cognitive agency generic model is developed. The agency has a normative personality with an values/beliefs indicated by its formative traits. These can take bi-polar epistemic values (“enantiomers”). These may be combined together, giving 8 different cognitive types that are personality type mind-sets. These types are influenced by the culture and the social environment that the agency is bound to. The traits can be used to explain the what, why and how of dynamic agency behaviour in complex situations

From Solid Evolution to Liquid Evolution: Challenges to Public Administration and Institutions

This paper aims to explain some forms of development and the relationship between development adaptations. Development has a cultural perspective, and culture can be explored in terms of the relationship between institutional values and norms. Changes in internal and external climate affect and challenge prevailing culture, which includes values, beliefs, and norms. These changes (socio-cultural) have an impact on the social meaning, norms, and development of society. Development within a socio-political context is defined in terms of institutional processes, enabling a wide class of complex situations to be addressed. Development is an adaptive attribute of a changing socio-political agency with interactive ties to its environment. It is connected to globalization, which is part of that environment, as the global COVID-19 pandemic or Ukraine war clearly shows. The period of change creates instability and cultural uncertainty because values may become confused, and so, sociocultural processes may become a liquid society. The changes challenge public administration, public policy, and their capacity to answer changing situations. This study uses Bauman’s idea of a liquid society and Yolles’ Cultural Agency Theory (CAT). A political agent will be generically modeled using CAT, and the neo-institutional processes and their capacity for development will be explored. Keywords: liquid evolution, uncertainty, sensate, Ideational, populis

Understanding Culture through Knowledge Cybernetics

These days, countries around the world continue with their process of globalization in the digital business and marketing. However, they find themselves straddling different national cultures, which lead to problems of cross-cultural communication management resulting in, for instance, miscommunication and misunderstanding. Consequently, an understanding of the characterisation or mapping of culture is significant, and while there are not many theories of cultural mapping, most stem from the base work of Hofstede. Basically, most people begin with a categorisation of culture through the creation of an ontology that differentiates relatable levels of reality, as a theory of levels allows culture to be broken down into parts that can be analysed more easily. It also helps them to facilitate the creation of a set of generic or universal dimensions of culture which can be used to map different cultures. However, a problem with this theoretical approach is that it does not offer a very dynamic representation of culture, and it has manifestations that impoverish the way that phenomenal manifestations of culture can be explained. On the other hand, there is an alternative approach was adopted by Schwartz. This approach does not discuss ontology but it creates a value inventory in which respondents assess ‘comprehensive’ cultural values. Consequently, there is some relationship between outcome of Hofstede’s and Schwartz’s results. Yolles has developed a theory of Knowledge Cybernetics that delivers a new ontology and a dynamic modelling approach. Schwartz’s results have been merged into this, resulting in a new theory dynamic theory of culture quite distinct from Hofstede’s level theory

Understanding Corporate Life-Cycles

This paper considers the nature of the dominant corporate paradigm, its change, failures or successes, and its relationship with the homeostatic organization. There is a popular way of understanding the dynamics of organizational change and that is through the pre-configured sequence of stages in a corporate life-cycle. Through there are a number of competing models for this kind of analysis. In all of them, the sequence of stages is defined by that which configures the life-cycle deterministically. However, there is little discussion given for how these models of organizations shift between stages, and none appear to dominate in the literature. A major criticism of these models is that they do not represent complex organizational processes of change. Therefore, this paper represents an alternative model, called “the paradigm life-cycleâ€, which is connected to the homeostatic processes that maintain an organization, and which is, in principle, capable of generating corporate life-cycles under conditions of complexity.&nbsp

Autopoiesis and Its Efficacy—A Metacybernetic View

This paper seeks to explain the nature of autopoiesis and its capacity to be efficacious, and to do this, it uses agency theory as embedded in metacybernetics. Agency, as a generalised intelligent adaptive living system, can anticipate the future once it has internalised a representation of an active contextual situation through autopoiesis. The role of observation and the nature of internalisation will be discussed, explaining that the latter has two states that determine agency properties of cognition. These are assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is an information process and results in implicit cognition and recognition, whereas accommodation uses assimilated information delivering explicit cognition, recognition, and conscious awareness with rationality. Similarly, anticipation, a required property of the living, has two states, weak and strong, and these correspond to the two states of internalisation. Autopoiesis has various properties identifiable through the lenses of three autonomous but configurable schemas: General Collective Intelligence (GCI), Eigenform, and Extreme Physical Information (EPI). GCI is a pragmatic evolutionary approach concerned with a contextually connected purposeful and relatable set of task processes, each undertaken by a team of subagencies seeking collective fitness. Eigenform is a symbolic approach that is concerned with how observations can be suitably internalised and thus be used as a token to determine future behaviour, and how that which has been internalised can be adopted to anticipate the future. Extreme Physical Information (EPI) is an empirical approach concerned with acquiring information through observation of an unknown parameter through sampling regimes. The paper represents the conceptualisations of each schema in terms of autopoietic efficacy, and explores their configurative possibilities. It will adopt the ideas delivered to enhance explanations of the nature of autopoiesis and its efficacy within metacybernetics, providing a shift in thinking about autopoiesis and self-organisation

Consciousness, Sapience and Sentience—A Metacybernetic View

Living systems are complex dynamic information processing energy consuming entities with properties of consciousness, intelligence, sapience, and sentience. Sapience and sentience are autonomous attributes of consciousness. While sapience has been well studied over the years, that of sentience is relatively rare. The nature of sapience and sentience will be considered, and a metacybernetic framework using structural information will be adopted to explore the metaphysics of consciousness. Metacybernetics delivers a cyberintrinsic model that is cybernetic in nature, but also uses the theory of structural information arising from Frieden’s work with Fisher information. This will be used to model sapience and sentience and their relationship. Since living systems are energy-consuming entities, it is also natural for thermodynamic metaphysical models to arise, and most of the theoretical studies of sentience have been set within a thermodynamic framework. Hence, a thermodynamic approach will also be introduced and connected to cyberintrinsic theory. In metaphysical contexts, thermodynamics uses free-energy, which plays the same role in cyberintrinsic modelling as intrinsic structural information. Since living systems exist at the dynamical interface of information and thermodynamics, the overall purpose of this paper is to explore sentience from the alternative cyberintrinsic perspective of metacybernetics

Organizations as complex systems: an introduction to knowledge cybernetics

Managing the Complex is an ambitious title - and it would be an audacious one if we were not to begin with a frank admission: to date few to none of us have a skill set which includes managing the complex. We try various things, we write about others, and we wonder about still others. When a tool, perspective, or technique comes along which seems to evoke success, we emulate it probe it and recoil at the all too often admission that it was situation and context which afforded success its opportunity, and not some quality intrinsic to the tool perspective or technique. Indeed, if the study of complexity has done anything for managers, and for those who espouse managerial theory, it is in providing a 'scientific foundation' for the notion that context matters. Those who preach abstract ideas have then to reconcile themselves to the notion that situation and embodiment matters. Those who believe in strong causality and determinism are left to wrestle with the role of chance, uncertainty, and chaos. Those who prefer to argue that men move history are confronted with the role of environment and affordances, while those who argue the reverse are left to contend with charisma, irrationality of crowds, and the strange qualities we know as emotions. A series on complex systems has less ambitious goals to contend with than this. Such a series can deal with classifications, and categories, and speak of 'noise' as if it were not the central focus of the problem. Managing the complex is about managing 'noise' or perhaps we should say it is about 'dealing with' 'accepting' 'making room for' and 'learning from' 'noise'. The articles in this volume and in volumes to come will each be considered as 'noise' by some and as 'gems' by others, but we hope that practicing managers and academics alike will find plenty of fuel to drive their personal explorations into understanding, and perhaps even managing, the complex