Businesses behave like living organisms, therefore they tend to balance dynamically. In this article I highlight this important condition, since at the end of the day change management should be focused on maintaining the current balance of the organization or bringing it to a new one. The concept of feedback plays an essential role in this regard, which is why I explain it briefly.
The tendency or ability of living organisms to maintain internal balance is called homeostasis.
Since organizations behave like living organisms, they obviously have this essential condition. This is why they constantly change in order to stay balanced and stable, which is essential for their survival.
Hence, a necessary condition for balance in living organisms is change, even if it seems paradoxical. This apparently paradoxical perception occurs because, normally, when we think in equilibrium we imagine the static equilibrium of a balance (mechanistic thought), while the equilibrium of living organisms is dynamic.
A good example to understand this is the art of balancing or tightrope walking. If you look carefully at a tightrope walker, you will find that in order to keep your balance on the tightrope, you necessarily have to keep moving constantly, regardless of whether it is more or less noticeable; if he ever becomes still, he immediately loses his balance with the danger this can bring to his life.
In the East, hundreds of years ago, Taoism knew how to wonderfully express the dynamic balance in the symbol that identifies the Tao. This symbol represents the balance between yin-yang complements, for example light and darkness, joy and sadness, day and night, etc. It is important to note that the white area is separated from the black area by a curved line and not by a straight line, which means that the balance between accessories is dynamic and not static.
To understand the company as a complex living organism, it can be said that the different areas are equivalent to the organs that compose it and people can be seen as the cells that make up these "organs". Obviously in this case, the tendency of the organism (company) to maintain equilibrium dynamically is also maintained, so that the organs (areas) and cells (employees) fulfill their function with this ultimate goal.
Given the characteristic of homeostasis, in order for change to lead to the expected result, any change process that is undertaken must aim to change the way in which the usual process of change leads to stability, or to change the usual balance for a new one more useful for the intended purpose.
Dynamic equilibrium turns the concept of feedback into a fundamental aspect, because it is through this that the system stabilizes or destabilizes. Negative feedback helps maintain your usual balance, and positive feedback is what allows you to jump to new levels of balance.
This means that any feedback that points to stabilization is negative, while that that encourages imbalance is positive. Here it is important to note that in this positive and negative case they have nothing to do with value judgments related to good or bad. Kurt Lewin's analysis of the force field can basically be explained as a game of forces between positive and negative feedbacks, with limiting forces being equivalent to negative feedbacks and favoring forces being equivalent to positive feedbacks.
The stock market is a good example to see the play of forces between negative and positive feedback. Normally, the stock markets maintain a balance where some days rise and others fall, which makes some have gains and others losses, usually moderate, respectively.
The disturbance generated by a sell or buy order is quickly controlled by a contrary response, this action working as negative feedback, which does not happen when the markets are bull market or bear market. For example, the market enters a runaway uptrend when demand grows in such a way that supply is insufficient to serve as negative feedback. This kicks off a positive feedback loop driven by record gains in these periods.
If market conditions cause supply to react by providing negative feedback before an uncontrollable point is reached, a new equilibrium is reached at a different level from the initial level with a "soft landing", where the market stabilizes again. But if not, and the positive feedback from increased demand continues or grows, allowing the bubble to inflate to burst, the trend is most likely to reverse completely. When this happens and the market plummets (bear market) there is a high probability of returning to the usual equilibrium level, and in many cases, falling into a new one below the initial one.
