barile s., di nauta p., saviano m., polese f., supercausality, consciousness and managerial...

SUPERCAUSALITY, CONSCIOUSNESS AND MANAGERIAL DECISIONS

Sergio Barile Sapienza University, Rome

Primiano Di Nauta Foggia University

Marialuisa Saviano Salerno University

2011, September 26-27

Forum for Business Education Research and Development

Francesco Polese Cassino University

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S. Barile, P. Di Nauta, M. Saviano, F. Polese

To survive…

•  Organizations aim to survive in their own context.

•  Relation between the will to survive, the ability to dynamically understand the context and the need to choose the appropriate strategy to adopt.

•  Management can be understood as the discipline that deals with this essential cycle.

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Key points: ¨  organizations (as well as individuals) as viable

systems aiming at surviving in their context ¨  key role of the governing subject in interpreting the

context, defining goals and involving all the relevant actors into the system’s plan

¨  governance decisions as outcomes of the action of two complementary and coessential drivers/forces, competitiveness (opposing resistance) and consonance (generating harmony).

S. Barile, F. Polese, M. Saviano, P. Di Nauta

Systems perspective

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Decision making without experience

•  The analyzed problem proves to be difficult to place in a regulated system (laws – rules – customs) reference field of the decision maker.

•  In lack of a system, the data regarding the problem appear to the decision maker as overabundant and not retraceable to a coherent scheme.

•  A heuristic decision making process proves to be strongly influenced by the decision maker’s forma mentis, and significantly affected by emotional factors deriving from the context.

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Complexity and managerial decisions

Complexity Managerial decisions

•  lack in general schemes

•  data and informa6on result not inherent

•  decision taken according to everyone’s strong beliefs

•  dis6nc6on between decision making and problem solving

•  more and more importance given to the impact of emo5onal factors on decisions

We need new methodological infrastructure and complexity theories that overcome the limits of the tradi6onal analy6cal-‐reduc6onist

approach .

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¨  Complexity does not characterize the system in itself, but emerges subjectively, charactering the interpretation of the context made by the decision maker.

¨  A phenomenon can generate chaos, complexity or simply complication. It depends on the interpretative capacity of the decision maker, not on the characteristics of the phenomenon (huge variety, variability, etc.).

¨  Complexity manifests itself when the interaction emerging from relations in a specific process does not respond to clear cut criteria of behavioral rules.

¨  Complexity forces decision makers to abandon the structural perspective and need to evaluate “objects”, both tangible or intangible, not enumerable on the basis of a known calculation criteria (Barile, 2009).

S. Barile, F. Polese, M. Saviano, P. Di Nauta

Complexity

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Decision making vs Problem solving

•  Problem solving: choices traceable back to recurrent problems, already made, and for which experimented solutions have been identified.

•  Decision making: choices related to hardly

detailed problems in which the application of any methodology, independently from the technical difficulty, becomes difficult or impossible.

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Assumptions

•  Distinction between problem solving and decision making.

•  Renunciation of a reference to Newton’s scheme of classic laws on natural phenomena.

•  Recovered value of the psychological element and, therefore, the subjectivity in the less rationalized choice processes.

•  Different individuals, with different perceptive capacities, can generate different models of the same problem, even if applying the same methodology.

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Supercausality and consciousness

•  The hypothesis that the future may, in some way, influence the present intrigues the minds of many thinkers.

•  If the future cannot affect the past, considering that the past can influence the future in determining processes of cause and effect, it would run up a paradox of non decision making logic.

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Relativity •  The hypothesis of retro casuality is the inspiring principle of Albert

Einstein, who after having revolutionized the concept of relativity substituting Galileo’s absolute time with the absolute velocity of light, derives from it the well-known equation:

•  Actually, the initial formulation of the scientist resulted to be even more articulate:

The solution to the second degree equation determines two solutions, a

negative and positive that, considering the vectorial aspect of the movement variable (the “p”), leads to hypothesize a possible movement

forward in time (positive solution), but also a movement back in time (negative solution)

E =mc2

E 2 =m2c4 + p2c2

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Some literature on the subject •  1925: Klein and Gordon introduced to science a formal acceptance

of the concept of final causes and teleological propensity.

•  1927: Bohr and Heisenberg developed the wave/particle dualism.

•  1986: Chris King supposed viable systems are costantly solicited by factors from the past (classic causality) and factor from the future (retrocausality). Subjective consciuos is composed of two aspects: •  Acts of will, intention and processes of choice that rise from free

will •  Perception of the signals deriving from the environment

•  1994: Penrose and Hameroff, in line with King, theorize that, inside the brain,

•  Alfieri: volli, sempre volli, fortissimamente volli.

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Management decisions in uncertain conditions

•  The ongoing is corroborated by past experience as well as from purposes pursued, and therefore, by the expected future. Not a certain future, but certainly an imagined one.

•  Government action wants to make possible within a certain temporal arch what at the moment is impossible or however not implemented. So, it moves practice of the real and search of the possible, the latter understood as tension «to create worlds», to outline new opportunities and original conditions, in respect of a delicate equilibrium between good sense, which sets to collect results concretely achievable, and the inspiration to broaden the horizon of the possible…. The capacity to dream, the capacity that is to build prospective representations even very distant from the reality of a certain moment, sets itself, in fact, as the principal sustainment to enterpreneurialship. (Golinelli, 2000-2011)

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The government action

•  Management emphasis is not expressed in the strategy implementation phase, as sustained in many manuals, but it finds its peak of commitment in the individuation of the purpose upstream.

•  The government of organization should not be considered an applied science, but rather a procedure with a strong artistic prerogative, that is, and activity unpredictable and not easily intelligible from the outside in its outcomes.

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The government action

•  This does not mean that the managerial action has to be non scientific, but at least we should distinguish two activities:

•  Detection of purpose (of the dream) •  Program implementation

•  Management literature is rich in the second one. Any manual of project management pretty well summarizes technical methods and tools.

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The contribution of (vSa)

•  Government substanties in the adoption of decisions and actions made to allow for the system to pursue its purpose.

•  Government action results to be moved by two fundamental drivers:

•  Competitiveness •  Consonance

16 Competitiveness and Consonance

Compe66veness “a#tude of the firm in ‘staying on the market’ by searching dis8nc8ve elements compared to compe8tors and progressing over 8me”; it finds expressions in different aspects (costs, prices, sales, delivery 8mes, quality …)

Consonance concerns the implementa8on/preserva8on of condi8ons of harmony, agreement, endorsement, dialogue, with the context of reference; it expresses the need to match values, culture and needs of the en88es that live in the specific context.


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•  It is a component established by the decision maker who places a suitable attention priority in virtue of the goal to reach and of the organizational hypothesis that he/she wishes to implement.

Relevance

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Resonance

The essen8al capability of the governing body is to create the condi8ons the two different forces can interact “virtuously”, thus developing what we call “resonance”, which is necessary and sufficient to create and implement a successful strategy.

So, it becomes of par8cular importance, from a managerial perspec8ve, the ability to sense/read the effec8ve and future trends and dynamics (that involve both supra-‐systems and for sub-‐systems), but also the ability to assess their current and prospec8ve consonance, which is essen8al for the emergence of "resonant" processes.

To be in phase

The movie shows that there is a law in nature (it is not important for our purposes to understand more now about how this law acts) that allows the emergence of order from disorder.

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A general description of the law of phase relationship: from chaos to order

•  There are some conditions (more precisely, the conditioning factors) that allow chaotic structures, characterized by increasing entropy (Fig. 1), to bring out configurations with order [syntropy] (Fig. 2).

•  We call these conditions (these factors) factors of resonance, and define the emerging configuration as phase relationship.

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Distinction between concepts

•  It is often argued that the term Syntropy is equivalent to Neg-Entropy. Next slide shows how Neg-Entropy, on the basis of a time dimension, is intended as an inverse function of the Entropy. Syntropy, differently, is to be understood as complementary Entropy at different times.

•  Essentially, Neg-Entropy tends to restore the lost order, Syntropy tends to find a new order.

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Neg-Entropy vs Entropy

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About the factors of Resonance

•  The factors of Resonance are generally presented as a sound, basically a wavelenght, a vibration showed in the video.

•  A vibration which induces, in a homogeneous set of particles (consonant particles), a dynamic that change from a chaotic state of indifference to a condition of organized participation.

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About the phase relationship

•  The phase relationship is a state of “impaired life” in which individual components, with an area of broad existential possibilities, choose to “live” a specific condition, a subset of their potential life, that enhances the harmony with all that “feel” of belonging.

•  When you are in a phase relationship with others, you vibrate all together.

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Examples of phase relationship (1)

•  The phase relationship does not exist just for components such as fragments of iron in our movie.

•  There are also significant phase relationships for humans: Have you ever wondered why, for example, in 1930, in Panisperna Street in Rome, people like Fermi, Majorana, Amaldi, Corbino, Segre, and many others were all together there?

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Examples of phase relationship (2)

•  Why in a certain historical moment (1790) so many people joined the French Revolution?

•  Why the Neapolitans, in the last elections, have chosen, so unexpected, De Magistris as the Mayor of Naples?

Simply because also we humans are significantly affected by the general law of attraction towards what might be called a phase relationship!

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Resonance factor for humans

•  The resonance factor for humans, triggering the vibration, is usually of emotional kind.

•  In support of this statement there is a wide literature in several disciplines, from psychology to neuroscience, but I think that it is sufficient to remember expressions like “love vibrating” or “hate vibrating” to recognize that emotions are those that cause us to vibrate.

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Complexity and phase relationship

•  Complexity, in the Viable Systems Approach (vSa), is interpreted as the inability to find solutions to an emerging problem, using schemes (methods, techniques and tools) previously intended as valid.

•  These complexity conditions do not manifest an absolute, objective difficulty, but a specific state of difficulty, that subjectively refers to the decision maker in the specific decision making context.

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Elements of complexity in (vSa)

•  When the decision maker faces a never experienced problem, this is not in its information variety (categories and schemas owned), he/her considers the problem complex.

•  The solution of such complex problems requires that the decision maker is able to find new interpretation schemes (in this way he/she is in... a new phase relationship).

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•  In moments of complexity, the search for a new solution (a new phase relationship) through abductive processes, it implies the reject of rational approaches to recover emotional ones.

•  All processes that emphasize the relevance of emotional rather than rational aspects are considered, in complex environments, appropriate to the search for new patterns of solution, i.e. new phase relationships.

Searching for a new phase relationship

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•  The Italian company-oriented doctrine has been committed in the elaboration of a paradigm that can include those aspect, maybe neglected for too long cause of layouts deriving from the Anglo-Saxon world.

•  If the present work outlines “the dream” of a new management approach capable of considering overly neglected factors, then it is simply necessary to find the conditions of consonance in the context of scholars, and the future can come true.

Considerations

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References AA.VV. (2011), Contributions to theoretical and practical advances in management. A Viable Systems Approach (VSA), ASVSA Associazione per la ricerca sui Sistemi Vitali, International Printing,

Avellino.

BARILE, S. (2000), Contributi sul pensiero sistemico in economia d’impresa, Arnia.

BARILE, S. (2009), Management sistemico vitale, Giappichelli, Torino,.

BARILE, S. (2011), “A viable system conceived as a universal decision maker”, in AA.VV., Contributions to theoretical and practical advances in management. A Viable Systems Approach (VSA), International Printing Editore, Avellino.

BARILE, S. , POLESE, F. (2010), “Linking Viable Systems Approach and Many-to-Many Network Approach to Service-Dominant Logic and Service Science”, in International Journal of Quality and Service Science, vol.2, n.1.

BARILE, S., POLESE, F., (2011) “The Viable Systems Approach and its potential contribution to marlketing theory”, in AA.VV., Contributions to theoretical and practical advances in management. A Viable Systems Approach (VSA), International Printing Editore, Avellino.

BARILE, S., SAVIANO, M. (2011), “Foundations of systems thinking: the structure-system paradigm”, in AA.VV., Contributions to theoretical and practical advances in management. A Viable Systems Approach (VSA), International Printing Editore, Avellino.

BARILE, S., SAVIANO, M., (2010) “A New Perspective of Systems Complexity in Service Science”, in coll. with BARILE S., in Impresa, Ambiente, Management, vol.3, n.3.

BEER, S. (1972), Brain of the Firm, The Penguin Press, London.

DI CORPO, U., VANNINI A., (2011), Supercausality and complexity. Changing the rules in the study of causality. (Syntropy) [Kindle Edition], Amazon Digital Service.

GOLINELLI, G.M. (2005, 20001), L’approccio sistemico al governo dell’impresa. L’impresa sistema vitale, Vol. I, Cedam, Padova.

GOLINELLI, G.M., (2010) Viable Systems Approach. Governing Business dynamics, Cedam, Kluwer, 2010.

GOLINELLI, G.M. (2011), L’Approccio Sistemico Vitale (ASV) al governo dell’impresa. Verso la scientificazione dell’azione di governo, Cedam, Padova.

NG, I., BADINELLI, R., POLESE, F., DI NAUTA, P., LÖBLER, H. AND HALLIDAY, S. (2012), "S-D Logic Research Directions and Opportunities: The Perspective of Systems, Complexity and Engineering", Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, forthcoming.

RULLANI, E., (1989), "La teoria dell’impresa", in Rispoli M (ed.), 1989, L’impresa industriale. Economia, tecnologia, management, Il Mulino, Bologna.

SAVIANO, M., Di NAUTA, P., (2011) “Project Management as a compass in complex decison making . A Viable Sstems Approach, in Proceedings 1st International Workshop on Project and Knowledge Management Trends-PKMT2011, Co-located with the 12th International Conference on Product Focused Software Development and Process Improvement, PROFES 2011, Torre Canne (Br), 21 June 2011.

VON BERTALANFFY, L. (1950), “The theory of open systems in physics and biology”, Science, vol. III.

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About ASVSA

ASVSA, Associazione per la ricerca sui Sistemi Vitali Association for research on Viable Systems

Join us! www.asvsa.com [email protected]

THANKS FOR YOUR ATTENTION

Sergio Barile Sapienza University, Rome

Primiano Di Nauta Foggia University

Marialuisa Saviano Salerno University

2011, September 26-27

Forum for Business Education Research and Development

Francesco Polese Cassino University

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