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of the whole are already embodied in the parts. The development of more holographic, brainlike forms of organization thus rests in the realization of a potential that already exists. III. Facilitating Self-Organization: Principles of Holographic Design Get the whole into the parts. Create connectivity and redundancy. Create simultaneous specialization and generalization. Create a capacity to self-organize. These are things that have to be done to create holographic organization. Our task now is to examine the means. Much can be learned from the way the brain is organized, and much can be learned from cybernetic principles. Four interacting principles (see chart) The principle of redundant function shows a means of building wholes into parts by creating redundancy, connectivity, and simultaneous specialization and generalization. The principle of requisite variety helps to provide practical guidelines for the design of part-whole relations by showing exactly how much of the whole needs to be built into a given part. And the principles of learning to learn and minimum critical specification show how we can enhance capacities for self-organization. Any system with an ability to self-organize must have an element of redundancy: a form of excess capacity which, appropriately designed and used, creates room for maneuver. Without such redundancy, a system has no real capacity to reflect on and question how it is operating, and hence to change its mode of functioning in constructive ways. In other words, it has no capacity for intelligence in the sense of being able to adjust action to take account of changes in the nature of relationships within which the action is set. Australian systems theorist Fred Emery has suggested that there are two methods for designing redundancy into a system. The first involves redundancy of parts, where each part is precisely designed to perform a specific function, special parts being added to the system for the purpose of control and to back up or replace operating parts whenever they fail. This design principle is mechanistic and the result is typically a hierarchical structure where one part is responsible for controlling another. If we look around the organizational world it is easy to see evidence of this kind of redundancy: the supervisor who spends his or her time ensuring that others are working; the maintenance team that “stands by” waiting for problems to arise; the employee idly passing time because there’s no work to do; employee X passing a request to colleague Y “because that’s his job not mine”; the quality controller searching for defects which, under a different system, could much more easily be rectified by those who produced them. Under this design principle the capacity for redesign and change of the system rests with the parts assigned this function; for example, production engineers, planning teams, and systems designers. Such systems are organized and can be reorganized, but they have little capacity to self-organize. The second design method incorporates a redundancy of functions. Instead of spare parts being added to a system, extra functions are added to each of the operating parts, so that each part is able to engage in a range of functions rather than just perform a single specialized activity. An example of this design principle is found in organizations employing autonomous work groups, where members acquire multiple skills so that they are able to perform each other’s jobs and substitute for each other as the need arises. At any one time, each member possesses skills that are redundant in the sense that they are not being used for the job at hand. However, this organizational design possesses flexibility and a capacity for reorganization within each and every part of the system. Systems based on redundant functions are holographic in that capacities relevant for the functioning of the whole are built into the parts. This creates a completely new relationship between part and whole. In a design based on redundant parts, e.g. an assembly line where production worker, supervisors, efficiency experts, and quality controllers have fixed roles to perform, the whole is the sum of predesigned parts. In the holographic design, on the other hand, the parts reflect the nature of the whole, since they take their specific shape at any one time in relation to the contingencies and problems arising in the total situation. When a problem arises on an assembly-line it is typically viewed as “someone else’s problem,” since those operating the line often do not know, care about, or have the authority to deal with the problems posed. Remedial action has to be initiated and controlled from elsewhere. A degree of passivity and neglect is thus built into the system. This contrasts with systems based on redundant functions, where the nature of one’s job is set by the changing pattern of demands with which one is dealing. Needless to say, the two design principles create qualitatively different relationships between people and their work. Under a system of redundant parts involvement is partial and instrumental, and under the principle of redundant function more holistic and all-absorbing. In implementing this kind of organizational design one inevitably runs into the question, how much redundancy should be built into any given part? While the holographic principle suggests that we should try and build everything into everything else, in many human systems this is an impossible ideal. For example, in many modern organizations the range of knowledge and skills required is such that it is impossible for everybody to become skilled in everything. So what do we do? It is here that the idea of requisite variety becomes important. This is the principle, originally formulated by the English cybernetician W. Ross Ashby, that suggests that the internal diversity of any self-regulating system must match the variety and complexity of its