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