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REDUNDANCY: BOUNDED OR GENERATIVE ORDER ?

CO-EVOLUTIONARY CHANGE MANAGER SKILLS AND

ORGANIZATIONAL WELL-BEING

(*to be published in World Scientific, 2011)

DARIO SIMONCINI

Faculty of Managerial Science – G. D’Annunzio University

Pescara – Italy – dariosimoncini@gmail.com

MARINELLA DE SIMONE

Complexity Institute – Chiavari (GE) – Italy –

marinelladesimone@gmail.com

The dominance of a reductionist approach in studies of managerial science has confined attention of

researchers to the coarse aspects of the organization and its regularity. The method of analysis and

solution of the problem has been to cancel interference generating unpredictability. The manager has

been considered a major player in decision-making models based on the relationship between

computational ‘facts’. The separation between the complexity of events and management skills has

become increasingly wide. It is urgent to rethink theories and managerial skills that may consider

human actions as carriers of meanings, the organizations as emergent relationships based on ‘values’

and organizational change as a permanent process of development and evolution of personal know-

how. Our contribution to the role of redundancy is part of the mainstream studies of organizational

change best practices. Our view is that change creativity is a property of ‘relational activity’ and that

it is necessary that management is able to acquire those ‘subtle skills’, both in studies and in

practice, to be a ‘co-generator of organizational values and well-being’.

Redundancy = fat in the meat of description (Heinz von Foerster)

Wisdom only exists in abundance (Raimon Panikkar)

1 Introduction

Managerial sciences still do not offer recipes for organizational change to meet the need

to make the best decision in complex environments, especially when referring to the well-

being in human relations. We need creativity and novelty in uncertain environments with

short-term goals. It is not sufficient to reduce complexity by simplifying reality or

eliminating interferences, nor to make the organizations capable of producing artificial

novelty. The first aim of this paper is to supply a proposal for ‘change managers’: to

acquire ‘subtle skills’ to co-evolve by exploring the possibilities offered by the generative

principle of ‘order of redundancy’. The second aim is to contribute to the debate on the

assumptions of values of ‘change management’ and their consistency, according to the

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needs arising from the community: living in less competitive contexts oriented to

improve the well-being of organizational relations.

There is a need for harmony which requires response without hesitation, changing the

level of attention in science. How? By shifting the focus of research from individuals-

actors that fit their context to persons-agents that co-create their landscapes [8]. Our

proposal is to acquire and adopt subtle management practices to co-evolve through

organizational change to relational well-being. It is in this frame that we will provide two

perspectives on the role of the principle of order of redundancy: that proposed in

‘reductionist thinking’ by Shannon, Simon and Gell-Mann, and that offered by the

‘generative thinking’ of Gould, Kauffman and Varela.

2 Redundancy is unnecessary

Generally with the term ‘redundancy’ we mean the superfluous, a replication of the

existing, of the already done [55]. Redundancy should be avoided to conserve energy, to

avoid confusion and misunderstanding. The premise of the argument seems to be that

communication happens between two or more machines and not between two or more

people; what is relevant is the transmission efficiency of the 'informational object’. The

transmission is done with maximum effect (influence of the transmitter on the receiver)

with minimal effort (choosing an object to be provided in a space devoid of rules) and

without any interference. It is a widespread idea that the Master with his wisdom has the

task to transfer with a funnel the informational object into the head of the condescending

student. Knowledge is reified. The reductionist analysis of the concept of redundancy is

inside this frame, as the constraint on the free and efficient use of available resources.

These beliefs have become dominant not only in the interpretation of the dynamics of

artificial systems, transformed in ‘facts’ by man through commands and settings, but also

in the forms of redundancy in systems organization [45]. There existed a managerial

paradox: the incompatibility between the curiosity of the manager-player, driven to

occupy new territories, and his need to impose a regularity that defines the creative

horizons. A dichotomy between innovation and order, between redundancy and

imperfection, between facts and values, that can not be overcome without transforming

the interpretative model of change.

3 Shannon: irrelevant semantic and factual domain

According to Shannon, the purpose of communication is to identify all the processes

through which a thought can affect another. Research focuses on the most effective

techniques to ensure that a message - a set of symbols or signals - sent from a source

reaches the recipient with as much precision as possible. The technical problems of

communication theory are separated from semantic problems [39].

The founding premise of the Mathematical Theory of Communication is that information

is immune from the object of meaning, existing as such. Information is a measure of the

ability to communicate novelty and a measure of freedom to choose the more appropriate

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message via the formation of a sequence of symbols. The freer to choose my message,

the higher the probability that the message is ‘innovative’, with unexpected additional

information for the recipient. Only in this case the message becomes information,

otherwise it is redundancy. Information is an inverse function of the probability of

forming a message already known by the recipient: the more unlikely the message, the

more informative it is. The probability has an essential role in shaping the message: the

symbols are the result of probable choices, dependent on previous choices.

The system tends to order, renouncing the uncertainty of the unexpected and the

exploration of novelty. Two point attractors in a linear mathematical configuration are

compared on a scale of possible information that can measure a redundancy level from

zero to one. To ensure that the transmission of information takes place, an appropriate

share of redundancy is required. A necessary measure to ensure that the system is not

characterized by maximum uncertainty, in which case the novelty does not receive

meaning at its destination, and which together ensures the technical resilience of the

system in case of interference in its path.

Shannon’s information is based on decreased entropy by Clausius and on the second

cibernertics observer who becomes the player, one that for our properties has become the

‘manager’. Shannon’s entropy is the measure of uncertainty of information; the lower the

entropy level of the system the more uncertain the information [14]. Therefore, shifting

the reductionist thinking of Shannon to change skills, we can say that managers must

focus on increasing redundancy, implementing rules, together with increasing the

entropy, implementing stress. The manager does not want crisis because it makes the

future unpredictable but must lead the organization into confusion and randomness if he

wants novelty.

4 Simon: hierarchy and nearly-decomposable systems

Conversely, as for the linear relationship between innovation and order, between entropy

and redundancy, between creativity and stability, there is a duality between intuition and

logic. Logical reasoning is conducted in a step by step progression, with relations

between simple and not repeatable objects. For consistency, language tends to order and

is understood without explanation. Logical thinking is rational, free from redundancy and

justifies the state of things without giving any sense. However, if redundancy is ‘near-

meaning’ [1], the task of science is to give meaning to the states of things to help man

understand their existence [54]. Science offers the possibility of forming a context where

man works with his autobiographical story through the learning process by generating a

sense to incomplete information and also to redundant messages.

To overcome the dichotomy between intuition and logic without exiting from the

reductionist scheme, Simon uses the mechanics of creativity, revealing the contrast

between two ways of thinking as a false problem. What is seemingly ‘ineffable’ is merely

the result of the processing of information previously acquired by the decision maker,

unless it is simple improvisation that is bound to fail [42,43].

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The computational approach of Simon is based on a reductionist premise for which it is

possible without loss of information to cancel interference caused by weak links between

things, between people, between events; these bonds are not critical to explain the

process that produced the decision. The solution is obtained using regularities applied in a

heuristic manner. Combining and re-combining simple elements allows to test and

validate the use of regularities.

Simon describes a complex system as a hierarchy of simple systems that can be

decomposed. The functioning of the system depends on the operating rules of the simple

systems that determine it. For each decision-making process, there will be input and

output information mediated by an elaborate process. In this way it is possible to

eliminate interferences, and to compute the operating of the complex system by its

decomposition into multiple operational blocks [40]. The evolution of systems is

represented by a hierarchical form of the classic ‘top-down’ direction. The decomposition

implemented with the division into blocks eliminates organizational redundancy, and on

the basis of their recombination can compensate for environmental interference.

To distinguish creative thinking, Simon suggests some practices: the tolerance of the

slow and gradual generation of thinking, the constancy of commitment and the wise use

of the experience accumulated over time. Simon's creativity is a heuristic mechanical

skill: it all depends on our ability to pattern recognition that we have made, a strategy of

problem solving that reworks choices already made successfully in other conditions. The

more patterns we know, and the more we are able to plan them, the better we recognize

what pushes us to think one thing rather than another, to recognize a more advantageous

position with respect to another [41].

5 Gell-Mann: the de-coherence of the interference

Based on the application of probability in physics as an explanatory principle and not

only as an approximation of a phenomenon, Boltzmann defines his ‘principle of order’: in

the dynamics of events that affect the life of a system, the state that has more probability

of occurrence is one in which these events tend to offset their specific effects. When the

dynamics of the system leads to achieve this state, the system maintains its achieved

status basically stable, through non-significant fluctuations in the neighborhood of a point

of attraction.

The role of ‘resilience’ of redundancy increases the probability that at the macroscopic

level the interference effects that arise from the interweaving of microscopic elements are

cancelled. Redundancy, an inverse function of entropy decrease, is the compensation tool

that ensures at the same time the possibility of moving towards a state of order and of

avoiding uncertainty spreads. Combinations become more useful to converge in a domain

of attraction, valid for floating measures. For molecular dynamics, the macroscopic state

is a sort of ‘space attractor’ which is the maximum probability achieved by the dynamics

of microscopic states. This state is realized in a situation that generates the most

molecular confusion, simultaneously with a perfect symmetry between the elements of

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the system. Symmetry is the arrangement among the components of a system in a way

that its properties tend to be invariant, without being very sensitive to changes in the

conditions achieved at the level of macroscopic state.

The physicist Gell-Mann defines the effective complexity as an explanatory model based

on the hierarchy of systems that learn to adapt to novelty [15]. What distinguishes these

systems from earlier ones is their ability to learn, based on the recognition of what

happens at random, and what happens with regularity dictated by recursion. The

relationship between systems is adaptive and represents the actual complexity, whose

measure is defined in relation to the number of regularities that characterize the system as

a gradual process of adaptation. The identification of the regularities permits to absorb in

the system accidental events that are ‘frozen’ because they are essential.

However, the physical presence of ‘alternative histories’ [16] forces the studies on

quantum physics to use the principle of order of Botzman, and to seek essential

regularities through the ‘condensation’ of possible schemes. The condensation is on the

search for the shortest message describing the system, and its de-coherence; this is

important to eliminate the interference in the determination of the ‘facts’. Quantum

physics is thus confined to ‘facts’ and their quest for a ‘coarse description’ useful to

assign probabilities to identify an event among other possible events. Otherwise, a ‘subtle

description’ would lead physicists to accept the idea that not everything is measurable

and therefore not everything is probabilistically determined.

To explain the real world it is necessary to compare different operational schemes in a

kind of ‘Darwinian selection’. The uncertainty principle states that the real is certain only

if one makes a choice; to observe means choosing a path over another and to interpret it

as existing in a range of possibilities. To resolve this uncertainty principle of quantum

mechanics, we co-create one of the possible realities. In this way, it is impossible to say

that there is a possibility to predict what will happen, and to define the fundamental laws

except those concerning the elementary particles which determine the course of all

events.

6 Coarse skills and reductionist change management

According to the reductionist principles of computational theories, managerial sciences

have established their own developments on the binomial "planning, coordination and

control" [21]. The dominance of the hierarchical and institutional approach that has

studied the organizations as construction and deconstruction of operational and

management sub-systems, led to a theory of planned change [7.44], even in the presence

of politics of contingency absorption [21]. The idea/practice of change management as a

process of ‘problem solving’ remains the most common: define the problem, identify the

change needed and find the techniques and tools to achieve the change as quickly and as

cheaply as possible. The change is intentional, deliberate and controlled by management

to adapt the organization to environmental constraints or opportunities.

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But, paradoxically, change [3.33] has in itself elements of uncertainty, so that it is

different from a process whose phases can be planned and monitored, especially if

decided in turbulent environments and evolutionary scenarios of crisis. Part of the theory

has devoted extensive studies in the social management of change, but without placing

under observation the assumptions of the dominant interpretative model [4].

The dominance of a reductionist approach in studies of managerial science has confined

the attention of researchers to the coarse aspects of planning and change management

[31].

The fundamental characteristic of the method of analysis and solution of organizational

change has been to cancel the interferences which originate unpredictability; the manager

was considered an organizational actor in decision-making models based on the

computational relationship between facts. The separation between complexity and

management skills has become increasingly wide [12]. The power of management has

focused on the domain of information data and their analysis and preparation towards the

pursuit of economic performance, and financial assets. In the mechanistic organization,

the individual manager has become increasingly part of a mechanism that went beyond

his meanings and his values. The manager is not relevant as a person, but only for

performing operational functions within the organizational schemata [22,10].

The ability of the manager is ‘coarse’ because it concerns the ability to handle relational

schemes as linear and with regular retroactivity. Managerial understanding is limited to

the formalities and the measurements of what is known in order to strengthen the stability

of the organizational system. It is an ‘incomplete’ skill [2] because most of the attention

and management skills remain only ‘latent’, generating a behavioral duality.

Management overcomes this duality by focusing its attention to the coarse phenomena:

formal relations and hierarchical power [ 49]. Management skills focus on analysis and

forecasting of the facts, regardless of the meanings that individuals attribute to them,

acquired from their own personal experience. The manager fears that value judgments

require the expression of an intention of doing, and along with it, to submit his own

choices to the scrutiny of the community. The choice of an organizational culture of

complexity and co-evolution is considered inefficient by management [32,34,35].

Reductionist change management must develop ‘organizational actions’ in a context

where redundancy is needed to enable the development of systems, and is used

exclusively with the objective of cancelling interference and regularizing formal

relations. The management choice to propose for redundancy a coarse and reductive

vision, creates a situation of immobility and a relational crisis of the organization. This

approach does not allow morphogenetic mutation of the system [13] and raises at the

same time the instability resulting from the separation of variables needed to implement

effective managerial control.

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7 Redundancy is necessary

The complexity of imperfection and incompleteness [6], rejected by coarse change

management, tells us that we are at all times in history and that history is composed of

human relationships that take place in subtle ways in nature and with nature [17 ].

Gould, Kauffman and Varela contributed to the formation of generative thinking, and

taught us that it is precisely uncertainty, imperfection and disorder that make it difficult

but fascinating to cope with reality. Each of us contributes to reality with his own

interpretation [51]. Nevertheless, reality is made of order, stability, and consistency. In

fact, many studies have shown that redundancy is a necessary condition for the operation

of complex systems [36,38,52] and that it is the source of radical emergence of

innovations.

This interpretive framework has already authoritatively refuted the belief that

communication can be a linear system [53] and that there can be a meaningless

information, which exists uniquely in itself. We jointly refute the belief that redundancy

inherently contains the idea of waste and damage. The idea is to place the concept of

redundancy in a complex paradigm that considers communication systems not ‘immune’

from meanings and values, nor from an embodied ethics [9], and redundancy not a

constraint but a plenty of variety and diversity of existence. The manager recognizes the

platforms that give life to the context and explores what are the variables to be handled

with skill to encourage the emergence of novelty. The process of reducing entropy and

increasing order can harbour novelty. The system can be transformed if redundancy is

abundant and there are skills that foster the emergence of new forms of relationships that

increase the organizational well-being.

Systems change constantly, are transformed seamlessly into a space of possibilities

thanks to the dynamics of the systemic variables that are positioned in the ‘middle space’

[23.30]. The middle space concerns the levels belonging to the mesoscopic domain. Here,

the contamination among the variables of the system can not be explained through the

general laws of the microscopic level and the effects of which, sometimes radically

unpredictable, can not be cancelled with the law of probabilistic composition. It is in this

‘middle space’ that change management can check the completeness that generates the

unexpected and the interference which operates with order. Hence order is evident

because of the invariants, while a domain of attraction emerges which is different and

capable of relational coherence.

To acquire complex skills means to acquire subtle skills, a new way of thinking and

seeing the world and the community organization that emerge from collective behaviors

and human relationships. The practice of complex managerial skills can allow the

emergence of new forms of work and organization.

8 Gould: exaptation and up/downward hierarchy

Intuitive thinking can proceed through leaps, discontinuities, punctuation; even though

the specific steps of thought can be represented by balance, its development is not

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necessarily revealed as progressive and rigorous. The thinker allows thought to evolve

freely but senses that steps take place, discoveries are made, adjustments are performed.

It is the body that develops knowledge, skills, embodied abilities. Like an imperfect

selection, competition and collaboration do not appear to be dichotomous motions any

more, but dynamics that alternately or jointly cooperate in an evolutionary model,

extracting the abundance of possibilities offered by redundancy to generate the

unexpected [19].

The redundancy of varieties can be expressed through a proliferation of similar mutations

and whose evolutionary role may be very different because of their possible use in new

and varied functions tacitly held but not acted out. The novelty may manifest itself as a

diversity from the original project or as a difference in the patterns [18].

Order of selection and disorder of imperfection act simultaneously to ensure the

invariants of life, even to support the process of natural selection there is a hand of

chance. The diversity generated through the exploitation of the existing remains available

to the evolutionary leap of the system; the abundance of diversity, its redundancy, is the

wealth of punctuated and gradual transformation.

Randomness helps us to describe all those changes, that are made without matching any

specific orientation. When we talk about random phenomena, we are not discussing

chaotic or incomprehensible events, but unpredictable events, not necessarily impossible

or anomalous. Randomness may be held as a real agent of change, and transformation of

evolutionary scenarios.

From the connection between the historical origin of incompleteness and current actions

emerges the novelty as tacit knowledge made accessible to improve the fitness landscape.

Gould suggests to reserve the concept of adaptation to functions shaped by selection, the

concept of pre-adaptation to availability that have not produced effects, and, finally, calls

‘exaptation’ those characters that have evolved for other purposes but have then been co-

opted and ‘discovered’ as generators of effects [20].

Gould proposed the idea of 'differential success’ as a model of multiple creativity that

does not identify with natural selection; selection is only one possibility, although

perhaps the most significant. Differential success is manifested by that novelty which

describes a new plan, a new evolution project which has emerged through the

combination of regularity and randomness, redundancy and imperfection. There is no

scale of redundancy but a space of possibilities where varieties mix to explore the

possibility of new differences. Chance and necessity blend favored by the work of the

player, and the emergence of new systemic properties triggers a morphogenetic

transformation of systems.

9 Kauffman: the creativity of nature

Kauffman calls ‘adaptiveness’ the perennial search for the regularity that characterizes

human beings to satisfy the desire to give causes and meanings to everything [26].

Paradoxically, best practices do not consider either chance or value.

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By denying the scientific validity of experiential phenomenology of the person [50],

knowledge has been interpreted as a sum of informations on the object of knowledge, the

significance of which increases in proportion with its thoroughness and detail regarding

the object itself. This approach to knowledge means that reality exists outside us, that is

observable, that it can be analyzed in its relations between objects of knowledge, the

‘givenness’ of objects reinforces the isolation of parts for which the observer has defined

and described functions. In this way, tacit knowledge of man [37] and nature cannot be

creative, capable of promoting relational well-being [26]; there is a higher authority

governing life. Science claims that the functional role of the parts can explain the

givenness of units of epistemological higher order.

Supporting the agency [27] for each item that has consciousness, Kauffman affirms the

generative power of nature, reassembling the profound tear between human and natural

sciences. Science itself is limited in its creativity more than it ever admitted; classical

science is not the only path that leads to knowledge and understanding. The mere facts of

reductionism rob us of meaning and leave us empty of values. Today it is necessary to

think of a science of life that is based on radical emergence.

This implies the existence of sites suitable for the generation of actions characterized by

values and exploration. Creation is innovation: no more a mechanical novelty of Simon,

nor the interference-free quantum field assumed in Gell-Mann. The landscape is a co-

construction based on a relational model where every action changes the neighbor’s

landscape in close relation to the degree of connectivity and quality of choices made

earlier [24].

Kauffman proposes to turn our gaze upward, to change the direction of the arrow, to give

meaning to the vision of man, to fill action with meaning and thus with value. Actions are

‘intentions’ and ‘acts’ and they represent ‘values in motion’ [25]. Values give meaning to

language. They represent the science and its effects on reality transforming the landscape.

The landscape is therefore filled with ideas, novelty and purposes.

10 Varela: the creative circle of co-definition of reality

By identifying as physiological its own border with the environment, the living organism

can perceive what puts it ‘in connection with’ whatever determines the cognitive act: a

change in the structure of its body. Perception is the means that puts us in relation,

simulating the other within ourselves [28,29]. According to Varela, the body gives rise to

sensory-motor patterns, capable of recursive self-organization and self-generation. These

recursive circles appear paradoxical as long as one tries to separate the single parts to

define them individually. In these circles creativity is generated by the co-definition of

meaning, in a reciprocal relationship without beginning or end [51]. This generates new

cognitive domains by defining self-contained units, called identities, which are the

foundation of the whole living system. These independent units are interwoven with each

other, generating domains gradually vaster, called multi-level hierarchical systems.

‘Subtle competences’ regard the understanding of the dynamics of multi-level systems.

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Each level is irreducible over the other, resulting in a new stand-alone unit,

organizationally closed; each emerging level has its own specific properties and becomes

part of the unit it has co-generated. The system produces its own coherent world,

according to a recursive process that wraps around itself, never passing through the same

points, just like a fractal or a strange attractor [48].

The cognitive process involves continuous transformations of the system in perception,

emotion, and behavior without being able ever to return to previous states. In terms of

knowledge, the novelty emerges from diversities that already exist in the plan; a new

meaning for the person is generated only when a diversity encounters another diversity

[8]. Order and imperfection are at the same time a necessity for the existence of

knowledge and an opportunity for the generation of new knowledge [48].

To understand how the creativity of knowledge emerges and persists over time we need

to change the level of observation: from the personal, subjective, to the network of

relations in which the person is inserted and which determines the environment [29]. To

talk about generating new knowledge, both aspects are needed: the subject, with the help

of its identity and responsibilities for action, and the network of relationships, which

allows interaction between multiple identities. The two sub-modes of observation can not

exist one without the other, since they are in a relationship of mutual interrelation.

The use of redundancy creates consistency through a change in the scale of observation

of phenomena; what is considered rule and order for one level of observation, may

represent imperfection and disorder on another level of observation. Generative skill is

linked to the ability of subtle action in a space domain made of multiple interacting

hierarchical levels.

11 Subtle skills and co-evolutionary change management

Management can learn to give a general sense to the variety and abundance of

redundancy. Redundancy and imperfection can share the same space in the domain of

attraction of the system defined by its invariants. It is not a learning organization, as this

would reify human relations [8]. People have the power to change beliefs and behaviours,

so that the organization can change and co-evolve with the environment. Creativity is a

property of embodied action in ‘relationship with’; it is necessary for the change

manager to acquire the skills that transform him from coarse manager to subtle explorer

of the wide possibilities offered by redundancy and incompleteness, in order to co-

generate values to evolve the organizational system. The skills are subtle ethical

responsibilities because they work on diversity, to improve the welfare of the community

[9].

This process of ‘generative cooptation’ of the diversity widens the space of novelty. It is

not a combination or recombination of elements but the mixing, the contamination and

the synergy between multiple behaviors to signal management new paths to follow

without departing from the selected viability [47].

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Generative learning competence is embodied in a continuous search for meaning through

a circuit that acts both inside and outside the body together with the context. In this

encounter emerges and is expressed the sense of the context in which each participant

embeds his action.

The subtle skills of the manager concern both introspection and extrospection abilities.

Subtle introspection enables him to understand and describe his embodied actions and

identifying the meaning that emerges in a given context. He enhances his wisdom, his

charismatic skills in team leadership, but also gives strength and power to the coherence

of his acting. The subtle extrospection allows him to understand and describe the

intentions that are developing in the context and thus enables him to preside over the

dynamics of events emerging from the community.

In order to catalyze emergence and novelty, change management can facilitate the

transformation of the environment through a ‘trigger’: it is a management ability to

engage new relationships form between the formal and informal organizational levels,

catalyzing emergencies and making them become the focus of the organization. Co-

evolutionary change management is a management of patterns that contaminates the

organizational areas, propagates ways and ideas, stimulates the exploration of diversity

and imperfection, facilitates freedom of interpretation: it is a ‘value change management’

[11].

12 Concluding remarks

The beauty and power of redundancy represent the permanent challenge of complexity to

the creative abilities of the change manager; redundancy constitutes the space of

possibilities that we are not able to perceive in a subtle way. It is urgent to rethink the

theories and managerial skills, considering human action as rich in meanings,

organizations as an emergence from relationships and change as a permanent process of

development of personal knowledge. Our contribution on the role of redundancy as a

‘resource of order and coherence’ and on the need to give meaning to management action

is part of the mainstream studies on best practices of organizational change.

Inspired by the classical view based on the mathematical theory of information, we

developed a new point of view on redundancy, no longer as a constraint on order and

efficiency, but as a resource for order and coherence, rich n opportunities for emerging

variety and novelty, diversity and difference. In our opinion this change of view is

possible if change management assumes subtle skills and abilities to facilitate co-

evolutionary organizational well-being.

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