Organizational Capability: A concept codified now with that name

News Flash: I am still alive and still working on RPM, working to draft Chapter 8 of the book outline.

 

Six years ago I added the new term Behavior Pattern BP to the lexicon of research in the Resource-Patterns Model of Life RPM. Now once again I have realized that a recurring pattern in my thoughts needs a name. It will be Organizational Capability, OC for short.

Need for this term arises as I write about how organizations become more effective. An organization becomes more effective by gaining knowledge of a new BP which is beneficial to the members of the organization, as such the organization gaines this capability.

Here are some examples of OCs:

• At the small and simple extreme, suppose a pair of critters on the tabletop has on one occasion met and negotiated an exchange of water and sugar from which both benefitted. We overseers now expect that these two, if they meet again under similar circumstances of need, will prefer to interact with each other again rather than risk negotiating trade with a stranger. This predictability about the behavior of these two allows us overseers to consider the two as one organization. The organization has learned one BP. So it has one OC.
• An additional OC for this pair of critters might be for the two to coordinate their movement together, thereby hoping to reach a RP which the two, by virtue of being adjoined, could exploit to their mutual benefit. See Chapter 7, section 1.3.1.
• More generally, members of an existing organization may discover success in new cooperative BPs, BPs not already among the capabilities of their organization. Such discoveries probably become new OCs.
• Following a leader is an OC, a natural step in the increasing organization of a group. This occurs where a leader has won the respect of many otherwise independent members.
• Self awareness is an OC, very complex and thus possibly composed of numerous component OCs. The OC of self awareness has grown when the organization has a center or mind which “knows” that it can, but does not have to, choose a BP for the organization to undertake. Contrast this center of knowledge with the knowledge in the first example above where two critters have traded successfully. There was no center of knowledge in that example since the knowledge enabling the one learned BP existed in the memories of the two separate critters. That first primitive organization was not self-aware.
• Ability to reproduce is an OC which lies at the high end of our consideration of increasingly more complex organizations. When an organization has attained this sophisticated level of internal management (of organization that is — to use the word again with a different meaning) then we modelers may regard it as a new Living Thing LT on a new and higher level. (See Life in Levels.) So we modelers can congratulate ourselves on having completed the model of one generation of life, and we can puzzle ourselves again with the questions of how these new higher-level LTs might coordinate their activities for mutual benefit, finding RPs accessible to this new and higher level.

A need for this newly-defined term has arisen for me in drafting Chapter 8. I have wanted to write about the growing number of these things. It is simpler to say “organizational capability” or “OC” than to say “knowledge of a Behavior Pattern which is beneficial to the members of the organization”.

One of my beliefs driving this RPM project is that governments, and other organizations as well, tend to grow with time. This growth consists of adding new OCs. Typically, such an addition occurs when a new problem comes into focus in the minds of members of an organization. It is natural for those members to decide that the easy way to solve this new problem is for their already-formed organizational headquarters to take on this one more responsibility. So the already-existing headquarters of the organization is given a new OC, hopefully solving the problem for some observers, while possibly creating issues for other observers.

That’s Better. But confusion still remains.
I suppose I will make good use of this new term in my future writing about RPM. But I must tell that I ran into contradictions while I was trying to settle on a definition for this new term. I discovered consequences of my tentative wordings which I had not considered. And some confusion remains for me, even with the wording I have chosen. Of course I hope that fellow explorers will find the new term to be useful: to be true enough that is to some real pattern which they encounter that their use of the term makes it easier for them to express their thoughts.

Actually, lingering confusion on the margins of a paradigm is a result which can follow from RPM. Lingering confusion on the margins is also to be expected following Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.