[FRIAM] ** this Wednesday** Lecture May 31 12:30p - Carlos Gershenson: A General Methodology for Designing Self-Organizing Systems

[Bill Eldridge]

Phil wrote:
>
> Bill
>
>     Phil wrote:
>>
>>         There's a good amount of growth these days based on trying to
>>         improve efficiency,
>>         workflow, best practices, processes, etc. Part of the quality
>>         movement is about gains
>>         made in eliminating waste and eliminating reviews, and
>>         instead having quality as an
>>         up-front and intrinsic effort.
>>         [PH] That's good and bad.   Refinement is wonderful in itself
>>         in lots of ways, but it's inherently a diminishing return
>>         endeavor, like polishing.   You do the easy gains first and
>>         then successively smaller gains take increasing work.
>>
>     Wow, that's a pretty low expectation for efficiency and quality.
>     In some ways it sounds like
>     the complaints about Total Quality Management from the Six Sigma
>     crowd -
>     that the former focused on the easy gains in a localized area
>     (technical only, say),
>     while ignoring the organizational needs as a whole. So you might
>     have a spruced
>     up assembly line that runs really well but the organization needs
>     a better sales force.
>     Combine this with an approach that gets IT focused on business
>     processes with
>     enterprise systems, improved supply chain, better mobile access to
>     sales support in
>     the field, better customer ability to configure and order...
>     [PH] Well our scenarios are different.   You seem to be describing
>     a constant resource being used to enable growth produced
>     by creating emergent levels of reorganization.   I was assuming
>     that the difference between growth (positive exponent increase) 
>     and refinement (negative exponent increase) was clear and you seem
>     to be using good English in a way that makes it unclear which
>     we're talking about.   My description was meant for the later.
>
I think the growth and refinement are very closely coupled in many 
processes.
China's spewing out steel. Will it grow till it stops? or refine, target 
new markets, find new
uses, cut costs, leverage the technology and factories onto something else?
I'd bet the latter. Most innovation is incremental, not disruptive, but 
both types
are useful - 2 products can look almost identical, but one flies off the 
shelf and
one stays.  I can't be sure that refinement means negative exponent increase
unless you're defining the two tautologically - that refinements are 
negative exponent
increases. Otherwise, a refinement can possibly lead to exponential 
growth with
little to no extra effort.

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