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DEVELOPING A MAP OF PURPOSEFUL BEHAVIOR
Lane Tracy
Department of Management Systems
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701
Abstract
Living systems, including organizations, exhibit purposeful behavior aimed at maintaining steady states of negentropy. Models of motivation and decision making have been developed to help us understand such behavior. Yet the choice of acts is influenced by a variety of complex factors, making it difficult to draw a general map of purposeful pehavior. This paper attempts to identify those factors.
Keywords: Living systems theory, biomatrix theory, behavior, purpose, maintenance, actualization, propagation.
Introduction
Purposeful behavior aimed at maintaining steady states of negentropy is a hallmark of living systems. Every living systems acts in accordance with purposes and goals that are derived from its template and modified by learning [7]. Underlying these purposes and goals is a hierarchy of values that permits the system to establish priorities. These priorities come into play when needs of the system conflict; that is, when the system is unable to act to fulfill all of its requirements simultaneously.
Living systems models of motivation have been developed to represent the process of choosing behavioral acts and determining the force behind them [10, 12]. Purposes and goals of living systems are also central to biomatrix theory [4, 5]. Biomatrix theory views living systems as consisting of self-governing functional subsystems called teleons, of which some are purpose-directed (endoteleons) and some are goal-directed (exoteleons).
Tracy [11] has suggested that purposes and goals may be sorted into the following three broad system imperatives: Maintenance, Actualization, and Propagation (MAP). That is, purposeful behavior is directed at (1) maintenance of steady states, (2) growth and elaboration of the system, and (3) reproduction and dissemination of system properties. All three imperatives require both internal (purpose-directed or endoteleonic) and external (goal-directed or exoteleonic) behavior.
There is constant tension among the three imperatives, which often point toward divergent kinds of behavior. In any business firm, for instance, there is likely to be competition for funds to maintain the capital equipment and replace inventory, to build or acquire additional .
productive capacity, and to develop and market new proprietary ideas. Some of these competing demands on funds may prove to be complementary, but others will be in conflict. In order to resolve conflict, the system must make choices based upon a hierarchy of values reflecting priorities amongst the MAP imperatives as well as among specific needs in each category.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a guide to sorting out purposeful behavior of living systems. Factors influencing the hierarchy of values are suggested. The role of genes and memes is explored with respect to each of the imperatives. The paper attempts to add a new level of detail to both living systems theory and biomatrix theory, as well as provide a link between then.
Purposeful Behavior
The behavior of a living system is governed by its template and its decider subsystem. "The template, genetic input or charter, of a system is the original information input that is the program for its later structure and process" [7: 34]. The original input may later be modified by learning.
Some behavior, often called instinctive or innate, is governed directly by the template. The template or environmental stress creates a strain that can be alleviated by specific, programmed behavior. The physical growth of a young organism, as well as certain reflexive acts, are governed in this manner.
Other behavior, including most human behavior, is either generated or moderated by the decider subsystem, "the executive subsystem which receives information inputs from all other subsystems and transmits to them information outputs that control the entire system" [7: 67]. Between input and output the decider subsystem engages in a process of analysis, synthesis, and choice in accordance with the system's hierarchy of values.
Living systems are generally beset by a multiplicity of strains generated by the template and the environment. These strains are too many and too varied to permit a general response directed at all of them. Thus, they generate conflict. Conflict was defined by Miller [7] as a special strain arising within a system when it receives commands to carry out two or more incompatible acts. In order to resolve conflict the system must exercise choice based on such parameters as the relative urgency of reducing each specific strain (i.e., the system's hierarchy of values) and efficient use of the system's resources.
Only very high priority strains may instigate a direct, instinctive reaction. For instance, when you see an object flying at your head, the ducking reflex may override any other behavioral instructions that you are currently carrying out. The need to protect your head from damage has a very high priority in your hierarchy of values. Even this priority can be altered, however, if you are a football player trying to catch a pass.
Other strains, even those generated by the template, must receive a measured response. Thus, sexual behavior has its source in the template but may be postponed, sublimated, perverted, or expressed in the socially-approved fashion of the times. The original purpose of the behavior is mixed in the decider subsystem with a variety of other purposes and goals. A single act may thereby work to relieve a variety of strains. Choosing acts that can fulfill a multiplicity of needs meets the criterion of efficiency in governance.
In biomatrix theory (BT) governance is largely dispersed to the level of the teleon. Each teleon has its own purpose or goal, cructure, flow of resources, and governance. For instance, an . ism's oxygen teleon, whose purpose is to supply oxygen to the on governs the amount of oxygen that flows to the tissues. The covernance process requires feedback from the cells but may be carried eae without reference to the decider subsystem of the organism as a whole.
This view appears to supplement living systems theory (LST), rather than contradict it, Subsystems and living components in LST have their own decider subsystems and are at leastly partly self governing. An organ such as the heart, for instance, governs its own rate of pulsation based on feedback from various parts of the system. People, who are the primary components of a group, direct most of their own behavior, deferring only occasionally to group decisions or norms.
The chief distinction in BT is that teleons are defined in terms of a specific purpose or goal that they serve, rather than by more general classifications of process and structure found in LST. Teleons process matter, energy, and information as necessary to carry out their purpose or goal. Thus, teleons tend to cut across the critical subsystems of LST, combining processes from several subsystems into one purposeful bundle.
Under both theories the behavior of a given system is seen as being influenced by its own purposes and goals as well as by the purposes and goals of higher-level and lower-level systems with which it interacts. LST focusses particularly on the purposes and goals of a system's suprasystem as a major source of influence. A suprasystem is the system at the next higher level of which the given system is a subsystem or component [7]. For example, a person's behavior is strongly influenced by the purposes and goals of his or her family. Yet behavior can also be influenced by the weather or a stomach ache.
BT puts equal emphasis on a system's endoteleons, which are influenced by the needs of system components, and exoteleons, whose behavior is directed toward and influenced by the system's environment, including the suprasystem. Indeed, the system is called a doublet because it is composed of these two kinds of teleons. Endoteleons of a given system tend to have interrelated purposes and to gather into endopoles. For example, the oxygen teleon might be linked in an endopole with teleons that supply water and carbohydrates to the cells and remove heat and waste products. Likewise, exoteleons tend to group themselves into exopoles of interrelated goals.
The influence of the nonliving environment is not purposeful, but it is nevertheless strong. Its strength comes from the fact that living systems require both a steady supply of resources and maintenance of environmental conditions within certain parameters. Unaided by artifacts, a person cannot live long without food, water, and air, nor without a moderate climate and freedom from predators. Any departure from these conditions creates a strain that must be answered.
In a sense the ultimate power of each of these sources of influence lies in the system's own preferred steady states, as defined by the system's current template. The stresses put upon a system by its suprasystem, subsystems, and nonliving environment become strains within the system only in relation to those preferences. A strain may be either an insufficiency of a specific resource in comparison with its preferred state (i.e., a need) or an excess of that resource. The relationship of need and excess to preferred steady state is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. The resource need continuum.
(From [11], p. 62.)
Miller [7] defines a system's values as the totality of the strains within the system. The hierarchy of values represents the relative urgency of reducing each strain. In other words, some strains require more immediate attention than others. For a person, a lack of oxygen is generally more urgent than a lack of water. That is because the body has less storage capacity for oxygen than for water or, in proportion to what is stored, it uses up the supply of oxygen more quickly. Other physiological needs, such as for calcium or iodine, are much less urgent.
The values of a business firm show similar differences in urgency. The firm may need both cash and well-trained employees, but the lack of cash may kill the organization more quickly than the lack of employees. Thus, if management must choose between offering a raise to retain the employees or saving the money and having to replace them, it is likely to choose to keep the cash.
Urgency must be balanced against the degree of need or excess, however. A person who has a steady supply of oxygen but has not had a drink of water for several days might be under much greater strain from the lack of water than from any momentary lack of oxygen. Likewise, a firm that has a backlog of potentially profitable orders may find that the threat of losing its workers is a stronger force than the threat of foreclosure for lack of cash.
Determining the Order of Coping
The question posed to the decider subsystem might be put in this way: With which of the strains must the system cope first? Both normal urgency and degree of deviation from the preferred state must be weighed in the balance in making such a decision.
We must also be concerned with differential awareness of strains. Some variables are monitored closely, whereas others may deviate quite far from the preferred state before the deviation is noticed. For example, people are not as aware of a lack of calcium in their system as they are of a lack of oxygen. Business firms tend to be more aware of a jack of cash flow than of employee dissatisfaction.
If the question is which strain to act on first, we must also consider the lead time required to manage each variable. Some lacks and excesses can be relieved almost immediately; others may require considerable planning and preparation. For instance, a business firm can respond to a lack of computer capacity rather quickly by purchasing more machines, but coping with a lack of new products may require months or years of development work.
There is a tendency to respond first to the strains that can be relieved immediately, at the expense of those that require time and effort. A firm may thus find itself constantly "fighting brush fires," because it never takes the time to relieve the strains that cause the brush fires.
Interdependence of Choices
Yet another factor that the decider subsystem must consider is whether strains, and the acts required to relieve them, are interdependent. For instance, does one act preclude another? In order to address a new strain, must the system abandon some of its current behavior, which was also purposefully chosen to relieve a strain? If we sell some of our machinery to obtain needed cash, will it still be possible to make a profit?
A related question is whether failure to relieve one strain might make others irrelevant. When you shoot yourself in the foot, if you can’t stop the bleeding, stopping the pain may not matter. If management loses control of the business for lack of cash, the happiness of the employees won't count for much. Some strains have a logical order to them.
Another consideration is whether two or more strains can be dealt with simultaneously. For instance, a person could coincidentally fulfill needs for both water and carbohydrates by drinking fruit juice, while also breathing, working, and listening for instructions. The repertoire of acts from which the decider subsystem may choose is large, complexly interrelated, and often not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, many internal processes continue relatively unabated under the direction of subsystems and living components while the system performs its chosen acts. In an organization the many individuals, groups, and departments may carry out their normal processes with only minor adjustments to accommodate the edicts of top management.
Finally, we must consider whether the system is able to cope at all. It may lack the capability to relieve a particular sort of strain, or it may be overwhelmed by the collective weight of multiple strains. In people a nervous breakdown or heart attack may be the result of such a situation. A business firm may be forced into bankruptcy or merger because it cannot cope with financial pressures.
Balance Requirements
Some strains are linked in such a way that all must be addressed at least partially in order to maintain a balance among them. If a person is both hungry and thirsty, but both needs cannot be completely fulfilled, it is probably better to treat each one partially than to fulfill one at the expense of the other. An organism must maintain a balance of electrolytes, for instance. A firm requires both machines and employees to operate them; it cannot completely sacrifice one for the other.
The logic of balance seems to underlie the BT concept of endopoles and exopoles. A system or doublet must pursue both internal purposes and external goals. Indeed, it is often necessary to act upon the environment through tapping exoteleons in order to obtain the resources required by endoteleons. A business firm may sell goods or services in the marketplace in order to obtain cash and other kinds of information that are necessary for its own internal development, for instance.
Balance is also required in pursuing the three imperatives, yet there are clearly times when one imperative predominates. Certain need theorists would have us believe, for instance, that physiological or maintenance needs must be satisfied before a person will act upon actualization needs [1, 6]. That is demonstrably so in some cases. Yet in other cases it can be shown, for instance, that children ignore safety precautions in their all-out pursuit of new experiences, and that new business firms often emphasize growth over maintenance of the existing system. Likewise, it would seem that a system must be healthy before it can procreate, yet there are many instances in nature when the dying act of an organism is to give birth or spread its seeds.
Groups, organizations, and societies are quite capable of choosing to submerge their own identities through some form of merger in order to propagate their values within a larger system. Indeed, sociobiologists such as Dawkins [3] and Barash [2] emphasize the preeminence of propagation or replication from the point of view of the genetic template. A revolutionary group might similarly believe that spreading its doctrines is worth endangering the lives of its members. Thus, no simple hierarchy among the MAP imperatives can be assumed. Each of the imperatives is important and usually a balance must be maintained among them.
Another sort of balance is required by the need to maintain efficiency within the system. Other things being equal, the more efficient a system is in the use of its resources, the more likely it is to prosper. It generally does not make sense to expend more resources to relieve a strain than that strain is worth, unless the expended resources are excess. Methods of conflict management illustrate this principle. The preferred methods are generally those, such as authority or expertise, that require little outlay of resources. Power from threats or promises is employed only when the resources required to carry out the threat or promise are regarded as expendable.
Expending critical resources to relieve a strain may simply trade one strain for another. In general, a living system seeks to avoid generating strains within itself, unless they are required for actualization or propagation. Thus, if possible, behavior is chosen that reduces the net strain on the system.
Developing a Map
To help us in the task of sorting out purposeful behavior, what we need first is an understanding of the "minimum daily requirements" of various living systems. We are much further along in preparing such a list for organisms than for organizations or societies. For business firms we do have models of cash flow and capital requirements. Inventory reorder models and queueing theory can tell us something about minimum matter-energy requirements. But we need more sophisticated models that can handle questions of balance, urgency, lead time, and interrelatedness among variables.
Given that organizations vary widely with respect to such variables as size, level of technology, degree of automation, mix of production and service, geographical dispersion, and competitive position, it may not be possible to construct a list of minimum requirements for organizations in general, as we do for human individuals. We should at least be able to list the relevant variables, however. Then managers could fill in the requirements for their specific enterprise on the basis of experience and/or experiment.
To some, extent that is what managers do when they establish a budget for the firm. But budgets use money as a proxy variable for many requirements that should be measured in other ways. At each level of application a budget total must be translated into decisions as to amount, quality, timing, and other aspects of specific variables such as employee training, acquisition of capital assets, purchasing of supplies, travel, and employee compensation.
An understanding of the needs of the firm and of what it must do to fulfill them may exist collectively among the many echelons of its decider subsystem. In most firms, however, there is no centralized, upper-echelon understanding of these requirements. Thus, when competing demands or recommendations come from the various subdivisions of the firm, they are often reconciled on the basis of power or compromise, without a clear understanding of the interrelatedness of the variables or the likely effects of these decisions on the health of the firm.
To identify the critical variables of the organization, managers must ask each of the individuals, groups, and departments what are the key variables that they monitor in order to keep their particular processes going. Interdependencies within this aggregate set of variables must then be identified. Some interdepencies are fairly obvious. Monetary variables, for instance, will all be interlinked. There will also be dependencies based on flows of materials, partlyfinished work, and information.
Modern computer technology and communication networks improve our ability to gather the necessary information. Living systems theory then offers a way to begin to map the complex, interrelated requirements of the organization. Swanson and Miller [9] have shown how accounting data can be aggregated through a procedure called concrete process analysis (CPA) to measure the financial processes of each of an organization's critical subsystems. Swanson [8] has extended this analysis to the level of the society. From such analyses we can judge the balance of resource distribution across the system. With some experimentation we may also discover the minimum financial requirements of each subsystem.
Biomatrix theory might also be employed to develop a better understanding of organizational requirements. The first step would be identification of the bundles (poles) of essential teleons of the organization. We would also need to know about the interdependencies among the teleons in each pole. Methods to measure each of the specific goals and purposes of these teleons would then be selected and measurements taken. Experience and experimentation would allow managers to determine minimum requirements for each teleon and an appropriate balance of resource distribution.
Summary and Conclusions
The foregoing discussion indicates that the choice of purposeful behavior is based on a very complex set of factors. The factors that were identified include:
(1) the normal urgency of a strain on each critical variable,
(2) its current urgency based on the degree of deviation of the variable from its preferred state,
(3) differential awareness of the state of each variable,
(4) different lead times required to cope with different strains,
(5) interdependencies among variables that may require coping in a certain order or may allow simultaneous fulfillment of multiple variables,
(6) the capability of the system to cope with each variable,
(7) considerations of system efficiency, including avoidance of generating new strains, and
(8) the importance of maintaining balance among the MAP imperatives and between purposes and goals, or between endoteleons and exoteleons within the doublet.
Many of these complexities have been resolved with respect to the physiological and social behavior of human individuals, though there is certainly work left to be done. For social systems, however, we lack the sort of general taxonomy that would allow us to draw a universal map of behavior. We must work from the specific toward the general. The pest we can do at this point is to identify the variables and the factors that affect the behavioral choices of the system, measure those variables through techniques such as CPA, and begin to draw maps of the decision making in our own systems, In terms of achieving a better balance of behavior, the exercise should be well worth the effort.
The basic conclusion arising from this discussion is that tension and balance are central to life. The decider subsystem must balance the claims of the three imperatives, purposes and goals, a wide variety of ever-changing needs, urgency and degree of deviation, subsystems and suprasystems. Any precise sort of homeostasis is unlikely; the system's values move hither and thither as various influences assume momentary prominence. Therein lies the strength of living systems -- their ability to respond to the stresses that constantly impinge on them. They do this remarkably well on a trial and error basis. With proper understanding and planning they could do it even better.
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