Organisations tend on the whole towards an inadvertent orientation for the reproduction of the policies and procedures (as axioms) that were originally cultivated to assist that organisation to perform its defining task, to address its asserted problem space. In this way, we observe the reproduction of procedural systems and behavioural, cognitive or otherwise normative grammars […]
Tag: Organisation
Diversity in Organisational Leadership
Monocultural or ideological hegemony in organisational leadership is a recipe for disaster. As a general observation, when organisational systems fall into overtly biased configurations and power symmetries, it is rarely a consequence of willful misdirection. From the interior surface of a half-mirrored labyrinth of self-validating justification and institutional logic, this kind of monocultural percolation may […]
Context: Would you trust an AI Operative in the field? This (quote from the above article) is an assessment of limitations in current AI: “…tend to respond well to what they’ve been trained to detect, but responses can become erratic when confronted with unexpected circumstances…” is in fact, and perhaps not coincidentally, an operational and […]
Semantic Ambiguity
The dynamism and flexibility of language is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. This is a corollary of the abstract/logical and concrete/material extensibility that haunts technology as cyber (in)security but is by no means limited there. It is an irreducibly discontinuous symmetry of uncertainty that plagues all organisations and institutional contexts. The incessant invention of […]
I would never suggest that any of us should let the truth get in the way of a good story (or sales pitch and project management agile scrum), but observe how often we end up with the developmental and technological cart placed (well) before the horse. Developments in AI tend towards various unknown (perhaps – […]
This is an age-old competition between efficiency and resilience, aesthetics and utility. While efficiency and resilience are clearly placed here, aesthetics (as perception or experience) and utility (as effect-multiplication or intentional consequence) oscillate across arbitrary boundaries and definitions. There is an unacknowledged dimension to this binary model; that is, not so much that any reductive […]
Organisational Philosophers?
The art of the concept (as Philosophy) is one which, perhaps, largely sits outside the grammatical and behavioural constraints of non-trivially sophisticated (i.e. complex) organisational or corporate systems, and for all that it remains as plausibly unintelligible to those systems as it simultaneously embodies inestimable value for them. It is in many ways not that […]
One thing humans do share with the machine intelligence we are so enthusiastically refining is a conspicuous (or at least institutionalised) absence of aptitude when it comes to smoothly and efficiently negotiating unexpected events and volatile environments. The benefits of integrated logistical automation are clear but when it comes to training the machine intelligence that […]
In our darkest hour, the breadth and depth of institutional insolvency unveils itself – as though we were not all already aware of the compound ethical, economic and intellectual bankruptcy of our era – and stands naked and useless like a balance sheet providing shelter from a storm.
Communication is not Consciousness
An interesting article: A Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind Mind is certainly built around nested hierarchies, but the general structures built here (in this article) are too dependent upon loosely unverified correlation and analogy; “X implies Y, so then Z”, where X is unsubstantiated. The structural constraints of communication and narrative cognition derive from, are […]
Such a principle (of Fallibilism) should indeed be taken as implicit to science and (indeed) all ordered systems of knowledge or organisational practice. The indefinitely extensible essence (and raison d’etre) of all material, biological, cognitive, cultural and technological systems is irreducible; it is simultaneously strength and vulnerability in (and as) everything we build, cultivate and […]
Cognitive diversity represents that useful, recombinatory information entropy from which insight and innovation assert and reproduce or replicate themselves. A subtle, adaptive balance between self-propagating continuity and incessant metamorphosis is the source of as many evolutionary wonders as it is of the abstract information origami of psychological, cultural and technological enigmas with which we are […]