Organizational Entropy

Entropy explains why our natural order trends with time towards disorder. Entropy explains why thermodynamic cycles have limits, heat flows in a single direction, and why temperature and time have meaning. Entropy is a powerful concept and one of the three laws of thermodynamics, (paraphrased):

• You can't win (conservation of energy)

• You can't break even (entropy)

• You can't quit the game (thermodynamics provides the rule book)

Recent organizational models apply thermodynamic principles to organizations and processes. Entropy helps to explain the apparent confusion and disorder among some large organizations as they do so. Entropy can help us understand operating environments. We might view a "situation normal all fouled up" (SNAFU) as an individual fault a person messing up the job but an entropy model suggests it is the nature of the system. Things will malfunction without continuous addition of energy and intelligence to the process (Fig. 10-1).

Figure 10-1: The Fort Saint Vrain power plant in Platteville, CO., was operated as a conventional nuclear plant until its sporadic operations and high cost caused its shutdown and decomissioning. Today, it's operated as a combined-cycle gas generator.

This explains accepted aspects of operations that have never been theoretically considered before. Operations demand intelligence and energy. Every conscientious worker in an operating environment knows this.