Mind · Strategy
ShapeControl
Keeping an organisation, model or trajectory close to a desired form or target, with information serving that form
Definition
Mechanism
A desired shape is defined up front: a target, plan, blueprint, policy, objective or standard. Information from the environment is then used only to detect and correct deviation from that shape, as a self-righting agent corrects for a rocking deck. Information that would push the agent away from the shape is filtered out as noise. Value sits in the shape itself; information is valued only in its service. Shape control is one of three ingredients of organisation growth, next to adding mass and growing information, and it trades off against both.
Preconditions
- A desired shape or target can be stated explicitly
Invariants
- Information is valued only insofar as it restores or maintains the target shape
- The target shape is fixed before the information that corrects deviation from it arrives
- Control of shape weakens as mass is added faster or as information is pursued for its own value
Risks
Failure modes
Treating every risk as a problem of better shape control and missing the value of changing shape
Discarding as noise information that would be valuable to a different shape
Overcommitting to an initial shape whose small error grows as more is invested in it
Relationships
Root pattern: builds on nothing in this library.
Used by
References
The gap between how humans model and manage risk and how organisms manage it: decision over organisation, prediction over creation, control of shape over change of shape
What a single-model system filters out as noise can be signal belonging to another, overlapping model
Granular, local or short-term responsiveness only pays if the local optimum differs from the global average
The payoff from changing shape to exploit reliable short-term information, which exists even when the long-range forecast is entirely correct
A fixed error rate in a frozen model grows into a larger absolute error the more is invested in that model
Society
Work whose shape is not fully controlled centrally and is not dominated by a single objective
Society
Every organisational structure makes some tasks 'losers' with high laterality and weak communication; reorganising only moves the problem
Society
Predict resources over the long range, and leave the shape of the work free to follow short-range information
Correcting as you go still fails when the same model that produced the shape is the one checking it
Exponential growth curves are better read as loss of shape in the thing being scaled than as a shape to aim for
Risk in organisation growth is the balance of three trading-off ingredients: control of shape, addition of mass and growth of information
Choose between holding shape (adding inertia) and moving with the information (removing inertia) by weighing switching cost, information reliability and local variation
Reference