Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

Control and self-regulation
For those who think that self-regulation leads to chaos, and external control,
on the contrary, may help to avoid it, it could be interesting to learn,
that self-organizing systems are being put in chaos most often
by externally controlled processes in particular.
Hermann Haken
The regulation of behaviour of an organism may be executed both by the organism itself and by
the director. The director supplements mechanisms of self-regulation, but does not fully substitute
for them. He or she may try to do so, but it may only exhaust a lot of energy and heat up the
atmosphere.
In any case, any director by the fact he or she exists, reduces the level of self-organization
and spontaneous adaptability of an organism. All medicines are harmful to the health, but some of
them may save a life.
To be least harmful to an organization, the ideal director should intervene in the processes
of self-regulation only when they prove to be inefficient and the situation gets worse. A director’s
decision is needed when an organization has no answer to a deteriorating situation and cannot
afford the risk of a random search. A director’s decision is useful if it ensures a better response
than would happen otherwise. The usefulness should be great enough to compensate for the
inevitable harmfulness of the intervention.
What a manager should control in order to control changes
The process of change depends on many variables. Ultimately, the direction of change at any point
depends on the resulting action of all external and internal forces, both controlled and erratic ones.
Picture 7. Controllable (green) and not controllable (red) factors
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