Life sustainment

Picking up from the outline of parallel patterns of biological and social life, let's focus on the sustainment phase of the lifecycle.

Sustainment of the living system, any living system, requires the following abilities:

• The ability of the system to self-regulate.  We see this in the internal forces that cause an organism to breathe on a regular basis, to respond to hunger and thirst in the pursuit of nourishment, the ability to slough off excess heat, or seek heat sources to stave off excessive cold.
• The ability of the system to manage variety.  The problem with variety is unexpected threats.  An animal needs to be prepared to fend off attackers, whether predators or rivals.  But an unexpected toxin may be a form of variety that the animal is totally unprepared to address.  This becomes extremely complicated in the case of business, where threats can come from unexpected sources, and sources that actually have intentions to dislodge the business from valuable revenue sources.
• The ability of the system to self-regenerate.  Can the system heal itself?  Can it recover from injury (or disaster)?
• The ability of the system to maintain relationships among elements.  In the case of the biological system, this is fairly obvious.  Trees and persons have inherited the longstanding ability to keep their limbs from randomly falling off.  Limbs that fall off clearly indicate unhealthy conditions.  For businesses this presents special problems, when the needed relationships are with autonomous individuals and organizations.  We will address this as a key health maintenance concern.
• The ability of the system to grow.  Maybe we should say "grow within limits".  In the case of animals and plants, nature has supplied the ability to grow to a certain size, and then imposes limits to growth (no 300 pound mouse).  In the case of organizations, we can see that there are major changes as they grow up to and beyond certain thresholds.  But as a business leader, one of the main desires and responsibilities is, specifically, to attain specific growth objectives.  It's enough to note for the moment that there are abilities, barriers, and methods to the achievement of various levels of growth.
• The ability of the system to metabolize.  Here we're talking about whole input, processing, and output systems, which we'll get into in greater detail as we think about supply chains and supply webs, as well as operational processes in the business world
• The ability of the system to adapt.  Again, as with growth, there are limits to adaptivity in the plant and animal kingdoms.  Genetic adaptation occurs on a generational basis, so is fairly slow at a species level, and limited at the individual level to what is programmed into the individual by genetics.  Except for humans, who have an almost infinite ability to adapt to situations, both psychologically, and through technology.  For organizations, adaptability is even more unlimited, potentially.  But the actions of leaders of organizations can go a long way to limiting or enabling the organization to adapt to changing circumstances.  For much more on this topic, take a look at Stephan Haeckel's work on the adaptive enterprise.
• The ability of the system to respond to stimuli.  The ability to respond to external events depends on many factors.  The ability to perceive situations, both opportunities and threats, the ability to process the implications of such perceptions, and the ability to form intent and take actions are all important to the responsiveness of the organization as well as the organism.
• The ability of the system to learn.  This ability is quite variable among organisms, and even more so among the organizations human beings.  This is one of the greatest sources of excellent health, or lousy health (quite frankly).
• The ability of the system to form a purpose.  Both biological and social life have the ability to pursue goals.  In Russell Ackoff's formulation the difference is that biological life forms purposes within the individual, whereas social organizations have individual purpose, as well as group purpose.  We will see that the lack of common purpose among individuals and the group can be one of the greatest sources of ill-health in business.
• The ability of the system to decide.  Based on information from the environment, individuals and groups both decide on courses of action.  In the business world, the concept of "buy-in" to the decisions that affect the business as a whole can effect the organization's health for better and for worse.
• The ability of the system to communicate.  The communication capability is one of the most interesting points of difference between the individual and the organization.  Communication, especially among humans, provides much of the power to shape their situations.  Likewise communication within a business, and outwardly from a business provides many critical success factors.  For this reason, our considerations of business health will revolve around this ability, which is ever more important in a networked, global, business environment.
• The ability of the system to produce.  The ability to produce is most important for businesses.  Yes, individual organisms, including people, do produce according to their abilities, but the power of the organizations (including businesses) is the collective ability to produce results that far exceed the ability of individual persons.
• The ability of the system to reproduce.  Do individuals reproduce?  Yes, and in nature, the reproductive methods have a great deal of interesting variety, from bacteria that reproduce by simply dividing, to various forms of sexual reproduction.  For the organization, there are even more mechanisms, including various forms of division and combination.

Problems with any of these sustainment mechanisms will inevitably lead to ill-health for the organization.  So feel free to link over to the discussion of healthy factors for businesses.

Or pick up on a deeper discussion of the characteristics of businesses (and other organizations) as living systems. (To be written)

Or return to the introduction.