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

When it finds itself in a zone of discomfort, an organism cannot remain calm and will somehow
react to the deteriorating situation. This reaction may be adequate (taking the organism back to the
zone of comfort) or not.
The ability to align to different situations presumes a variety of possible reactions, and the
existence of certain mechanisms of recognition of the situation and the choice of an adequate
response. The existence of such mechanisms, in its turn, presumes that the organism possesses a
number of images of possible situations, and the variety of these images needs to be in
correspondence with the variety of different possible reactions. For example, a frog does not
recognize any difference between very small moving objects; colour and form are not relevant
factors, because the frog has only one normal reaction (it normally assumes a small object is an
insect).
The variety can be measured by the number of possible states. Why not accept as a unit the
minimal variety corresponding to only two different states? This unit was called a bit. If diversity is
very big, it may be reasonable to apply a logarithmic scale, taking as a unit the logarithm to the
base 2. Then the variety of 2 possible states may be valued as 1 bit, for 4 states – 2 bits, for 8
states– 3 bits, and so on … for 256 states – 8 bits (or 1 byte). Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But
‘information’ does not appear on the stage yet.
Memory is the ability of an organism to keep in its structure (including substructures) the history of
its interaction with the external world. It is not a miraculous property. In fact, it is much more
difficult to assume that history does not leave any tracks than to assume that anything that
happens and affects an organism above the threshold of a certain sensibility would not leave a
mark on its structure.
As was mentioned in Chapter 1.2, without memory, each new reaction to the same situation would
be random, thus making adaptation through adequate change of behaviour impossible.
In the presence of memory, non-adequate reactions may be eliminated (if they were not previously
eliminated along with the organism). Only adequate reactions remain. Therefore, conditional
probability (probability that takes into account something that happened before) increases, thus
also increasing the chances for survival. Looks like something relevant to ‘training’, doesn’t it
Signals
A signal is any distinguished phenomenon that allows an organism to discern the situation and to
link it with the specific record in its memory. A signal from the outside world is an element or
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