Role of IT - information technolgy - in next-gen companies

Judging from Toyota and "lean" processes, what is the appropriate role of information technology ("computers and networks") in the next-generation company?

If we assume that what we're building is, essentially, a massively-parallel connnectionist computing engine (consciousness) out of people and technology, we get the suggestion that the key roles are:
transparent communication at successively larger scales
coherence-building at successively larger scales, and
transparent interactions - ("phase-lock loops") across the components of the system.

Yes, computers will still be required for tracking the trillions of details needed to run a large company today, but that is, in Peter Senge's words "detail complexity." There's a huge amount of it, but it is, relatively, simplistic in nature aside from the amount of it. Enterprise computing knows how to do that, at least in theory.

What we are looking for in the next-gen company is the thing that ties it all together, that supports the feedback loops that maintain coherence and build integrity, the same way the circulating thoughts in the brain slowly emerge an "image" out of billions of "nerve impulses" from the retina.

This is "Technology-mediated collaboration" and more, so I'll call it "technology-mediated coherence." It is what allows "aperture synthesis" in large radio telescope arrays to act as if they are a single huge individual and the gaps "don't exist."

This is pretty much what the Institute of Medicine was recommending when it urged a focus on "microsystems" recently (see prior posts on "microsystems"). The point is that a small team (5-25 people) is capable of being "self-managing" if they can simply be given the power to do so by having access to information about what their own outcomes are. This information does not need to be packaged and interpreted at successively higher levels of management and then repackaged and distributed back to them a month later as "feedback." In fact, that doesn't help much. What really helps is speed. What helps is if they can see, today at 2 PM, how they have been doing collectively, up through, say noon. They can learn to make sense of the details, and don't need "management" to try to do that for them.

In fact, given the fractal density of reality, and the successive over-simplifications required to get data into a "management report", it is a certainty that we have something far worse than the game "telephone". What will come back down the line from upper management will bear little resemblance to what went up, breeding distrust and anger on both sides.

So the role of next-gen IT is to grab hold of the 'WEB 2" technology, that allows bidirectional websites to be both read and written by people, and that includes weblogs, wikis, and "social software" that encourages interaction and cooperation, including, gasp, "gossip."

This is the stuff that, in the right climate and context, can be converted into "social capital" and converging understanding by each employee as to what everyone else is doing and why.

Where there can be dashboards, they should best be very close, in both space and time, to the decision-making actors. Lag times are incredibly dangerous, and are the source of instability in feedback systems. (Imagine trying to drive a car with a high-resolution TV screen instead of a windshield, with a fantastically clear picture of what was outside the car 15 minutes ago. )

A relevant quote from Liker's "The Toyota Way" is this (page 94) where he is talking about the problems with large batches and the delays that go with such batches:

"...there are probably weeks of work in process between operations and it
can take weeks or even months from the time a defect is caused until the time it
is discovered. By then the trail of cause and effect is cold, making it nearly
impossible to track down and identify why the defect occurred.

The hugely complex computation of making sense of such data is what human brains and visual systems are built for, and tuned for, and that machines costing a billion dollars cannot replace yet. Just give people a VIEW into what is happening as a result of what they are doing, and they will, by a miracle of connectionist distributed neural-networks, figure out what's affecting what faster than a room full of analysts with supercomputers - in most cases.

That's the role that computation needs to look at - is close-to-real-time feedback in a highly visual form to the workers of the outcome of the work currently being done. (This is a step-up from Lean manufacturing visual signal system which is a signal to management that something is amiss.)

The "swarm" is capable, like any good sports team, of making sense of "the play" long before the pundits have had a chance to replay the video 8 times and "analyze" it. Yes, there is a role for longer-term, more distant view that adds value.

But what there is NOT is a way to replace real-time feedback and visibility with ANY kind of delayed information summary. All the bases must be covered, and long-term impacts and global impacts will not be instantly visible to local workers -- but they have to be able to see what their own hands are doing or they'll be operating blind. "Dashboards" with 1-month delays on them cannot cover that gap. Too much of the information is stale by the time it arrives. Both are needed. Local feedback for local news, and successively more digested, more global feedback for successively larger and more slowly varying views.

Speculation on cross-scale resonance

This is wildly speculative, but it seems possible to me that there is some kind of resonance possible across the natural "levels" of the hierarchy of Life.

Now, cross-scale phenomena are always weird - for example, how a snowflake, on a scale of a centimeter, maintains coherent growth based on some initial seed at a molecular level. It doesn't seem intuitive that that kind of thing should work, yet snowflakes are symmetric at large scale.

But, if there are indeed levels of life that have some physical intrinsic basis, as the spiral I sketched a few days ago, and if basic control structures are symmetric across scale, then there maybe some kind of feedback or resonance that crosses scales, or octaves, as harmonics do in music, or as Moire patterns seem to do. (A Moire pattern is formed when you look through, say, a screen door and a second screen door, and you appear to see a huge but fuzzy screen shaped pattern as sort of an interference pattern. ) It's your call as to whether that pattern is "really" there or not.

Resonant frequencies are always intriguing, as energy tends to concentrate itself there for complex reasons. And, there are places where stuff collects for reasons that are not apparent, the most fascinating to me being the Lagrange Points, These are points that are a result of the gravity between the sun, earth, and moon, that are locally "downhill" and any stray junk floating in space will tend to congregate and stay there. So, right out in the middle of nowhere there are 5 places where stray things tend to go, even though there is no planet or moon or anything there, at least to start with.

So, here's my mixed metaphor thought -- what if some kind of interactive resonance across scales made control loops at every scale slightly "downhill" from the surrounding territory, so that if some system at some level gets "close" to having a closed control loop, this resonance will act like an "attractor" and bring the parts into better alignment with no further outside effort.

If that were true, even though highly organized things in general are unstable and tend to decay or degenerate, maybe the base class of control loops, at any scale, succeed in being entrained by this resonance, or any harmonic of the resonance, and synch up to it, the way radiation in a ruby crystal synchs up perfectly to make a laser beam.

Entrainment is another weird and wonderful thing of Nature. If you look at the Wikipedia entry on entrainment, you see that the concept spans many different fields of science, from physics to brainwaves to geology. Basically, if two things in harmonic or cyclic motion are "close" to the same frequency, they both tend to move towards being exactly on the same frequency. Two people walking will tend to end up walking in step. Women's monthly cycles tend to synchronize with each other if they live together. The mechanism is subtle and not obvious, but the effects are quite real and common.

One web site puts it this way.

Entrainment is defined as the tendency for two oscillating bodies to lock into phase so that they vibrate in harmony. It is also defined as a synchronization of two or more rhythmic cycles. The principle of entrainment is universal, appearing in chemistry, pharmacology, biology, medicine, psychology, sociology, astronomy, architecture and more. The classic example shows individual pulsing heart muscle cells. When they are brought close together, they begin pulsing in synchrony.

So, my thought has run out of steam without coming up with any experimental test, but I like the idea that somehow control loops at different scales can reach across scale and tend to help each other find common or compatible harmonic frequencies that work just a tiny bit better than you would expect. The playing field is just a little bit tilted, hardly enough to notice in any given case, but over 5 billion years the effect is strong.

Another example of a "weak" force acting over a long time to have a visible effect is the undisputed fact that the moon revolves around the Earth, and rotates as it moves, in exactly the right ratio so that the same "face" always is pointed towards the Earth. It wasn't always like that, and it didn't start like that. But, over time, there was a very weak "coupling" between the Earth and the Moon, such that there was a very mild downhill direction defined pushing the moons rotational speed towards being entrained by such synchrony. With nothing to push back, over a billion years, this very weak effect dominated and now the moon rotates the way it does.

Rupert Sheldrake, I think, has writtena bout "morphic fields" and some theory that life effectively pushes on and reshapes other life or proto-life nearby. I don't think I buy where he goes with that, but the idea of entrainment synchronizing living things is an intesting one to keep an eye on.

All of this speculating is partly because of the rather remarkable observation that, in a world of decay, dominated by laws of thermodynamics and moving ever "downhill", LIFE continues a remarkably defiant journey of moving UPhill and becoming ever more complex and larger in scale of operation. Something, some principle, is probably staring us in the face there, to explain why entropy keeps losing this battle and Life keeps winning. On a local scale, our dishes tend to get dirty, as do our desks, and our filing doesn't do itself. On a global scale, however, things do seem to be getting more and more organized. This tension between local and global behavior needs attention, and I'm not sure that "survival of the fittest" explains it entirely well. I have no doubt in evolution, I just have doubts that we've understood all there is to understand about it yet.

This thing of Phase and phase-coupling is subtle, but my intuition keeps bringing me back to it as if there's something important there I'm missing. The idea of "phase locked loops" is also fascinating, but this whole subject is just to subtle for most people to care about. There are three ways of modulating a carrier wave in radio, for example - amplitude modulation (AM), frequency modulation (FM), and phase modulation (PM). Most cars have AM/FM radios. AM goes a long way, but is subject to static from lightning storms. FM goes a short way, but is high fidelity. I'm not sure what PM is good and bad at, but I need to figure that out.

I came across this article if you just want a mouthful to add to your class homework paper: Wandering breathers and self-trapping in weakly-coupled nonlinear chains. It's not relevant in any way to this post.

Still, I'd love to understand what principle helps cells, or people, or nations, that appear to be moving downhill towards chaos, surprise everyone and emerge stronger and healthier as if it was the most natural thing. There are a lot of sick people and companies and countries that could use more assistance, and if we could figure out how to amplify that effect, at least it should help.

If there is an effect, of course. Which isn't yet proven.

Any ideas welcome. Please comment!