Sabbatical Report: Making Organizations Like Brains

Bob Barber

September 19, 2005

 

I named my sabbatical research project “Making Organizations Like Brains” because I’ve long thought – or hoped – there was more than a rhetorical connection between the two concepts.  The diagram on the wall here are meant to sketch out in a more visual way some of the realms and themes that I worked on during my reading (the linked graphic requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view; use the “Zoom in Tool”   to examine portions of it more closely). I chose this “mental map” format because I think it shows how the ideas interconnect more readily than a linear PowerPoint presentation. The diagrams may or may not be self-explanatory, and I’d be more than happy to discuss them today or some other time with any of you.

 

What I hope to do in the few minutes of presentation time that I have is to share with you what got me going in this direction, what some of the more interesting ideas were that arose as I went along, and one or two of the tentative conclusions are that I’ve arrived at so far.

 

What started me in this direction was the following observation by organizational theorist Gareth Morgan in his 1986 book Images of Organization which I read during my PhD program a few years ago. In the context of noting that it was no longer new news that organizations needed to learn from their experience and that many have established executive-level strategic planning groups of one kind or another to serve as “brains”, Morgan observed:

.....[I]t is far less common to think about organizations as if they were the brains, and to see if we can create new forms of organization that disperse brain-like capacities throughout an enterprise, rather than just confine them to special units or parts. This is a challenge for the future…[1]

 

Now Morgan went on to suggest the model of the hologram as a way of applying brain-like design to the organization, a model in which, as with the brain, the whole is encoded in each of the parts, or, to put it another way, just as memory is distributed across the brain rather than located in one part and can be reconstituted from any of it parts, an organization will be better able to self-organize and respond to its environment if each part is a reflection of the whole and thus able function in direct connection with the local environment. An example might be that each academic department has its own instructional technology specialist. I’ve always thought this was a line of thinking and organizational design worth pursuing.

 

A few years later I happened upon another book that stimulated my thinking about brains and organizations. The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing by a medical doctor named Frank Vertosick delineates how, if intelligence is defined as

“The general ability to store past experiences and use that acquired knowledge to solve problems….”, then “Intelligence and the living process are one and the same: to live, organisms (or communities of organisms) must absorb information, store it, process it, and develop future strategies based on it.”

“Intelligent beings extract key features from past experiences, identify patterns among those features, and later recognize the same patterns in novel situations….The ability to see old patterns within new ones, even when the patterns differ significantly in other respects, is known as pattern recognition and is the cornerstone of biological reasoning….biological reasoning (is) the ability to learn old patterns and extrapolate them to new situations.”[2]

 

Vertosick shows how this applies to bacteria colonies (explaining for example how the staph virus learned to resist penicillin very quickly), the human immune system (showing how the body learns to fight off viruses it has never seen before), and the human brain (showing how the brain learns by strengthening the connections between individual neurons in response to experience).

 

Most interestingly to me, Vertosick shows that the underlying mechanism in all of these instances is that of network connectivity and the result in each case can be called emergent intelligence. A network, in the generic sense, is a collection of input/output nodes, each one having two (or more possible stable states), in which the output of each node represents the input of other nodes. According to Vertosick, nodes in a network can be mechanical relays, vacuum tubes, transistors, nerve cells, enzyme-catalyzed chemical reactions, bacteria, lymphocytes, and even human beings, but in each case, the information stored in the network is represented by the connections (or the channels through information flows) between nodes, and learning is represented by changes in those connections are caused by external experience.

 

Introducing the concept of learning by networks opens a whole line of discussion of its own, which is fascinating but far beyond what I can spend time on here. But reading Vertosick’s book made me start thinking, if emergent intelligence is a property that can be found in such a wide range of networks involving so many types of life, wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect that networks of people inside organizations, and maybe even networks of work units inside organizations, also exhibit emergent intelligence since they, or “we” are extensions of that very same life?

 

Early in my recent research, I came across the following observation by sociologists and organizational theorists Karl Weick and Frances Westley:

[L]earning is embedded in relationships or relating. By this we mean that learning is not an inherent property of an individual or of an organization, but rather resides in the quality and the nature of the relationship between levels of consciousness within the individual, between individuals, and between the organization and the environment, This learning at the individual level (intrapersonal) and at the organizational level (interpersonal or interorganizational) evolves through a continual process of mutual adjustment.[3]

 

Here, I think, is a strong suggestion that models of organization which emphasize the relationships among people as the locus of knowledge will help us apply the knowledge about brain structure and functioning to organizational learning and functioning.

 

So now, some months later, I’ve spent time exploring a number of literatures, including: organization science theory, organization design, organizational learning, complexity and complex adaptive systems, organizational communications, communication network, power and gender in organizations, connectionist modeling, and potentially relevant modeling software. And actually, slowly, I have come to recognize that the core topic of my study is evolutionary processes: that is to say, the evolution of an organization is not unlike the evolution of a person’s brain. Each evolves through a combination of variation (in things like outlook and strategies), interaction (communication), and selection (methods for identifying successful strategies and copying or recombining them), in some respects whether there is intentionality or not.

 

Of these, especially in an organizational context, I’ve come to think the most important for successful growth and evolution is variation; within that, a particularly critical form of variation is variation in mental models – how people look at things. Interestingly, gurus like Peter Senge argue that organizations need people to have the same mental model in order to solve complex problems, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that the opposite is true. One critical and often underutilized source of variation in organization is the viewpoints of women and non-white cultural and racial groups.

 

Also critical are communications not only within units but across boundaries and levels. In particular, communications are not just a method for learning but also a method of introducing variation into work groups and units. This is why systems like email and Banner are so much more than just technologies.

 

Before ending, I’d like to share one more concept that has come to my attention about how the brain works. Philosopher Daniel Dennett has suggested that because the brain experiences a constantly changing environment, there is never such a thing as a “final draft” of experience or perception, but only “multiple drafts” that are registered in a continuous stream, millisecond apart. If you perceive organizations as being not static objects external to the people in them, but rather as social constructed meanings, I think this is a useful way of describing them as well. There is never a “final draft” of organizational experience, only “multiple drafts” reflecting (and subsequently influencing) the constantly changing and evolving perception, experience, and action of those in them.

 

What this all boils down to, I think, is that there are complex evolutionary processes at work in an organization whether its leadership or members recognize them or not. Like the processes a brain uses to absorb and respond to external experience, these processes cut across levels and boundaries, and the connections which they create and are created by them, can be reinforced or not. Leaders can tap into the collective knowledge and experience of organization members by helping build an environment that encourages variation in thinking; that promotes communication and interaction; and that seeks to ensure successful ideas and strategies are identified and copied or recombined on the basis of fitness rather than through the arbitrary exercise of power.