Building the best team (dream). Social engineering. Part 2
You can read the first part of the article Here
At the end of the previous part, we examined Luhmann’s fourth concept of the internal confrontation in the Social environment between the Supersystem that enforces the rules and the Element System that resists it. There are also more advanced cases when the Supersystem biologically ages, and the Element System only gains social weight. At the same time, despite everything, the Subjective reality of the Supersystem still imagines itself as topical and urgent. Such a collision affects the stability and stability of the entire Community, affecting the structure of its deep “inner world”. As a result of these changes, the product of the Environment – Social reality – is also transformed, which cannot be ignored when constructing the Community.
From the point of view of systems engineering, such processes reflect the seventh property of the system:
“Variability of the system over time”. In any system, changes occur that must be taken into account: provided for and included in the design of the future system.
Changes do not occur only due to internal confrontations. The opposite effect is also possible when, for example, in a team, Residents form a pair, and the horizons of their interests begin to drift from the general goals of the Environment to the proprietary needs of the social unit. This does not mean that the community element is lost, just that the ways and forms of interaction with such groups must be adjusted.
Concerned with this fact, it is important to constantly monitor deviations in significant vital signs of the Environment, which determine its stability. In case of deviation from the norm, it is necessary to determine the conditions (impacts) influencing the changes, classify them, supporting those that contribute to the evolution of the Environment and stopping those that hinder. Therefore, the most complete establishment of these indicators is a guarantee of the stability of the Environment.
It is obvious that changes are not only taking place within the Community. All systems existing around us (solar, planet Earth, world order, state, family and others) interact with each other in one way or another.
From the point of view of systems engineering, this is explained by another property of the system:
“Existence in a changing environment”, based on the fact that not only this system changes, but also all others.
The environment in which we live is changing, and we must change at the same speed in order to remain in the same place and not disappear.
Bernard Weber
There is a fact that the Architect must respond to events occurring outside the Environment, but directly drawing it into interaction (exchange of various types of resources). Otherwise, the community faces degeneration.
The need for the Environment to react in response to external influences explains the following property of the system:
“Stimulability” – change in the behavior of the system under the influence of processes and resources arriving at the inputs of the system, influencing it and turning into its functionality.
In contrast to this kind of foreign interference (stimuli), the Social Community is forced to change or increase its Functionality. A similar phenomenon is explained in the fifth property of the system:
“Functionality” The processes occurring at the outputs of the system are considered as its functions. The functions of a system are its behavior in the external environment; changes made by the system in the environment; the results of its activities; products produced by the system.
When talking about this property, it is important to consider two aspects:
1) The functionality of the Environment is clearly manifested only outside the Community in the surrounding world.
2) the surrounding world does not directly control the activities of the Community, but can influence them, requiring adjustments in management from the inside, changing the internal structure of interaction.
Average Residents, by their nature, most often avoid analyzing external threats and do not build strategies to respond to them. On the contrary, they just join the Community for the opportunity to protect themselves from problems, acquiring a “cover” for a calm existence in a complex world.
Accordingly, the Architect of the Social Community, existing in an aggressively evolving world, must provide this protection to the Residents, confirming the current Functionality in the reference representation of Social Reality. It is important to convey the essence of these new options to the Residents themselves, synchronizing their Subjective representation.
This message is critically important, because if Residents feel the community’s constant reflection on changes in the world around them, then they feel their position is predictable. And their sense of security increases the degree to which they accept the Environment. Otherwise, Residents, who have the opportunity to compare the community with similar but more successful ones, cease to fully accept (share) the model proposed by their Environment and their loyalty to it decreases. This rebirth will either push Residents into other similar, but more attractive Environments, or force the most active ones to build new Functionality for the Community, allowing them to solve emerging problems.
Thus, another important effect manifests itself – “Self-organization” In the theory of self-organizing systems, systems are considered that can use their own output (Functionality) as an input (Stimulability). Social environments organized in this way can perform analysis within the Community and change the model of their structure using their own activities, which makes them in a sense “autonomous”. “In a sense” because processes of self-organization can only occur in interaction with the surrounding world and only in relation to the surrounding world. Another important clarification: only a part of the Functionality of the Environment can be incorporated into the processes that support self-organization, and this part can either increase or decrease, with all the ensuing consequences.
Thus, some “healthy” pushing of the Community to manifest self-organization most often awakens its internal potential.
Discussion of the topic of manifestation of the potential of the Environment brings us to another important property characterizing the ability of the system to survive and develop:
“Inherence“- consistency, adaptability to the environment, compatibility with it. This property is already synthetic and requires consideration of the role of the Community in the metasystem.
Inherence is based on feasibility of potential systems in specific external situations by the environment, provided that the integrity of the system itself is maintained.
This is explained by the fact that Inherence is not an absolute property of the system, but is correlated with some specific function. For example, a section of wrestlers will be more intentional in confronting a hooligan on the street than a section of chess players. But the chess community will be able to more effectively deal with the behavioral manipulations of swindlers.
The degree of inherence can be influenced, thereby increasing the efficiency of realizing the system's potential. In natural systems, inherency increases through natural selection. In artificial ones, it should be a special concern of the Architect. By correctly identifying threats that could potentially come in the form of Stimuli from the outside world, it is possible to provide the potential in the Environment that can resist them.
The most important, key function of a community is the cooperation of its members to jointly achieve goals. And perhaps the most amazing opportunity for such overeating is Emergence (Synergy).
“Emergence” – the combination of parts into a system gives rise to qualitatively new properties in the system, which are not reducible to the properties of the parts, are not derived from the properties of the parts, are inherent only to the entire system and exist only while the system functions as one whole.
Emergence, just like inherence, is a synthetic property and characterizes potential functioning of the system, relying on its internal integrity.
Gradi Booch illustrated this phenomenon as succinctly as possible using the example of an airplane:
An airplane is a collection of parts, each of which itself tends to fall to the ground. But through their continuous joint efforts, they are overcoming this trend.
Emergence is the reason that the most detailed consideration of individual parts of a system cannot provide a comprehensive explanation of the whole. And therefore, to analyze the emergent properties of the Community, it is necessary to use a synthetic approach.
The synthetic method consists of sequentially performing three operations:
1) identifying a larger system (metasystem), of which the system we are interested in is included as a part;
2) consideration of the composition and structure of the metasystem (its analysis);
3) an explanation of the role played by our system in the metasystem, through its connections with other subsystems of the metasystem.
The final product of the synthesis is knowledge of the connections of the system under consideration with other parts of the metasystem.
At the same time, the potential of the system can either significantly exceed the simple sum of the potentials of its parts, or be inferior to them. For example, a large number of people in a stadium who come to a concert are able to charge each other with “crazy” energy, but in case of danger, this super-positive party will turn into a maddened crowd, trampling each other, in an animalistic desire to be the first to escape from a limited space.
Most often, a “miracle” occurs when a system that has the potential to reproduce emergent behavior grows to a certain scale. And then the application of the rules that governed it previously begins to lead to different, sometimes super-positive results. For example, the Facebook network was conceived and created as a means of communication and finding new useful contacts. When the number of subscribers exceeded 2 billion, it turned out that the network turned into a political instrument capable of influencing the will of voters in elections. At the same time, the state's lawsuits against its founder and unprecedented pressure indicate the toxic consequences of this supernatural result.
One definition of the system reads: the system is a means to an end. Therefore, the purpose for which the Social Environment is created determines what emergent property will ensure its implementation, and this, in turn, dictates the choice of the composition and structure of the Community. In view of this, it is necessary to take into account that the involvement of some employees who represent low efficiency (professionalism) in the production component of the enterprise can provide invaluable constructivism in the social component.
When considering synthetic properties, we always mentioned an important limitation: maintaining the integrity of the system itself. What does this affect? When a part of a whole is removed or replaced, the following occurs:
1) what remains after the part is removed is a different system. It has a different composition, and therefore a different structure, and therefore different emergent properties;
2) the part removed from the system is not at all what it was in the system. The connections of the withdrawn part with other parts of the system are broken, and other connections are established in the new environment;
Remember Bulgakov's “Heart of a Dog”? An operation to transplant a human pituitary gland into a dog gave a completely unexpected result. The “dog” system, having received a qualitatively new composition of parts, was transformed into another system – “man”.
This effect reflects the tenth property of the system:
“Inseparability into parts” – this property is a simple consequence of emergence. If we need the system itself, and not something else, then it cannot be divided into parts.
In the next part we will explore such properties of the Social Environment as: Openness, we will touch upon issues of managing the Environment and consider the Community as a living organism.
