on Antifragility, Variety and Mental Models.
We need internal mental models to observe reality, and by this our internal mental models define and limit how we see the reality. The variety of the reality exceeds by far the variety accommodated by our personal internal mental model, and thus exceeds the variety in our personal reality. The variety of the reality increases (exponentially) by the new knowledge gained by our study and exploration of the reality.
Creating new connections between existing things and affording new functions to something existing, can only realise when it is part of your internal mental model, and has an impact on the (shared) reality. The variety of the reality increases by the connections we create in the construction and the new functions we afford to it.
The more we know and build, the more the variety in our combined reality exceeds the variety in our personal internal mental models. We use patterns as divergence, convergence and requisite variety to deal with the difference of variety between realities. Science is our constant search for simplification of reality in a model that can be used in communication and construction of reality.
Since reality has an infinite variety, and there are always differences between one internal mental model and another, it is situational to define words, concepts and actions to deal with reality at any given moment. The challenge is to make sense so that we can act in a reality that is increasing in variety faster than we individually can deal with. Absorbing the ever-increasing variety is not sustainable, since this will always be incomplete.
Resilience is the ability to recover from (un)expected events. This can be events from within or from the outside. Recovery is achieved by either absorption resulting in the same variety within, or by reconfiguration of the function and construction, changing the variety within to better fit the changed outside reality. Optimized for reconfiguration is called antifragile. The process of reconfiguration is done via making sense and acting. Action is limited by your internal mental model.
The focus of this research will not cover the mental model itself, and it will not try to add a simplification of reality to absorb some of the variety of our reality. The focus of this research will be on the process of absorbing new mental models into the existing set of internal mental models and the effect on reality. The goal is to research how to optimise learning for reconfiguration of the value proposition.
This text is part of my PhD research: “How Can Organisational Learning Be Leveraged to Enable Antifragility of an Organisation?” documented on Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/edzob/complex_adaptive_systems-knowledge_base/-/wikis/home
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