Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Organozational Information Retention

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about social organization. I'm trying to do that stereotypical post-collegiate project. That's right, I'm going to attempt to write a book. Don't know if I'll succeed, but I think it will be a fun process nonetheless.

However, I'm not exactly a fiction type of guy. I'm pretty sure all my characters would be just like me and the plot would be too complicated to understand. So, something other than personal fame and glory is prompting me to do this writing. That thing, my friends, is impatience. There's a specific book I've been waiting to come out, but nobody has written it yet.

No worries, then I'll do it. I know the old saying about ideas who's time has come.

Regardless, social organization plays a major role in the book. I've teamed up with an amazing guy who loves this sort of stuff, but I'm having trouble communicating my thoughts. You see, I'm sort of stuck behind years of biological training, so most things I know about organizing are related to very technical biological processes. I'm really glad I have someone to start this journey with.

Anyway, I have been reading up on DNA as information storage. At the same time, I have been having concerns about turn-over in an organization I'm in. Turn-over, where people graduate and move on to other things, takes the experiences these individuals have and removes them from the group. I like to think of people as retaining organizational memory, they remember ways to do things more efficiently and hold social connections with others inside and outside the group. When these experienced people leave, the group loses an immense amount of information.

Of course, it's necessary that people move on, but how does one retain the good changes in retained information?

... That's when it hit me. Changes in retained information are the same things as mutations. In a way, people act as the informational storage for social organizing. They retain the social capital and the knowledge it takes to run a group. In order to keep this new information, it has to be passed in some way. If it is not passed on before these individuals leave, then you get a sort of organismal death. The group, almost literally, has to start over from scratch, being exposed to the same environmental factors that it had to go through before.


Even bacteria think information transference is sexy


By golly, well that means that empowerment is a fundamental life function of an organization. Without it, you're just starting over every time someone leaves. The only trouble is how to institute mechanisms in an organization to transfer this information. A type of breeding of ideas, each transmission changes it in some way, but the ones that work well are retained.

I have lots of suggestion on how to do that, but it will have to wait for another blog...

or perhaps a later book?
I can only hope.

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