Hello Julian,
I really enjoyed reading your long post.
I am a control engineer, or used to be one until I turned a manager, and
see lot of parallels with what you have said.
In the old days feedback control with negative feedback was considered the
best form of control until people started realising that in some cases it
is too slow expecially when the process has a long delay.
I suppose this is like applying first order learning to a large company
where things take a long time to go through and error correction is slow
and when the environment changes fast like what is happening now the
company cannot survive with feedback control alone.
Then they introduced feed forward control where you can have some
prediction (about the environment by leaders like you say) and they
introduce changes in advance and of course this can create instability and
some feedback is necessary to prevent the company from becoming unstable
due to over correction.
When you make a change in one area it affects other areas as well. So
these days multivariabe control is used where the interactions due to
changes in one variable affecting another are predicted and changes are
carried out in parallel to optimise a process using a process model. This
I think is probably one of the failings of leaders. They seem to harp on
one aspect of the organisation without anticipating how it affects other
areas. So I feel a leader needs to be like a multivariable controller who
introduces changes that takes care of several distrubances in the
environment and the organisation at the same time - someimes by analysis
and sometimes by gut feeling.
But process models can change as well so we turn to new techniques like
fuzzy logic and neural networks. I suppose th leader or the managment of a
company really needs to be a neural network which can be trained (or
learn) to change the process model (how the organisation is coping) itself
by being fed with the latest reactions that are happening in the process
(or organisation).
Regards
Shankar
Shankar Sankaran
9 Upper Bukit Timah View #03-03
Bukit Regency
Singapore 588136
shankar@singnet.com.sg
Ph: (065) 4661244 (home)
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--shankar@singnet.com.sg (S. Sankaran)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>