how to make your organisation dumber

adding the term “adversarial context” to the lexicon

Apologies for the non-arrival of yesterday’s post! I got caught between a couple of deadlines and also went down a slight rabbit hole with trying to tweak my Google NotebookLM environment. (In case anyone’s interested, the notebook in question is one that I’ve uploaded all the important European banking statutes to, so I can use the Gemini AI as a natural language search, to tell me which Article I ought to be looking at, and which past regulatory guidance is relevant to the document I’m reading. It is actually very good, particularly when I get queries for quick response. But, it’s got one weird quirk – it tends to get the actual content right, but it is incredibly inaccurate with page numbers of citations. I am coming to the conclusion that this might be related to the “strawberry problem”; the model uses tokens which are usually somewhat longer than individual words and characters, so it can’t reliably give you the right paragraph number for the same reason it finds it hard to tell you how many r’s there are in the word “strawberry”).

But in any case; while writing a script for a presentation, I realised that I’m increasingly using the phrase “adversarial context”, to describe a cybernetic phenomenon that seems to be quite important. Basically, Stafford Beer places huge importance on what he calls “translation and transduction”. This is the practice of dedicating resources to places where information has to be transmitted across organisational (or intra-organisational) boundaries. It’s part of the central problem of management cybernetics – making sure that information arrives where it can play a part in decisions, in time to be useful and in a form where it can be accepted as input by the decision maker.

In the general case, organisational boundaries are information-reducing filters. But increasingly, I’m thinking that Beer should have paid more attention to the case where effort is expended on doing the opposite of “translation and transduction”. Because I think this is actually quite common.

A lot of the time, organisations and people have opposing interests, but are meant to communicate information. When this happens, there’s an incentive to be strategic; to present the information which serves your interests the most, and suppress things which portray your case in a bad light.

It gets worse, because the existence of those incentives creates what you might think of as a “market for lemons” type problem. Everyone thinks that everyone else is doing this, so a) you’d be a fool not to, and b) you have to discount most of what those other bastards are saying. The adversarial or strategic context makes it difficult or impossible to communicate.

Potentially this might be quite hopeful, because it means that if you can restructure things to reduce the number of adversarial contexts, your organisation could get a lot smarter without any of the individual people in it getting any less dumb.It also suggests to me that structure and context might matter a lot more when it comes to determining the decision-making ability of organisations, than the talent of the individuals.