Entropy watch

I am, to quote Bill Hicks, not a physics major. Humanities have always appealed more to me. However I find myself fascinated by some parts of natural science, including the second law of thermodynamics.

It states that “The entropy of an isolated system not at equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value.” or, if I understand it correctly, that energy tends to flow from being concentrated in one place to spreading out evenly. The fact that there are forces slowing this process down is what makes life possible. At this point I was going to sort of segue into the whole idea of heat death – where all energy is gradually dissipated until the universe just stops – which in turn would have lead us to entropy and the gradual falling apart of all systems. My devious plan was to apply this to office work, namely everyday life in the multinational for which I work. Imagine my dismay when I go on to find that corporate entropy is already a recognised term and that business consultants are making millions telling corporations that this is something they should watch out for.

Obviously I’m not quite as original and innovative as I would have liked to think.

However this does not invalidate my point. Large organisations exhibit this tendency to entropy. I know, I know – to natural science entropy concerns energy, nothing else, but I’m applying my artistic license here, ok? Surely companies can be viewed as systems, subject to internal and external forces (this is of course where all my scientist friends scream as one, since the key to entropy is "an isolated system", but I pay them no heed) the. Besides sociologists use the term entropy to describe the gradual falling apart of systems, so from a humanities perspective I’m in the clear.

Anyway, things slowly fall apart, with management applying reorganisations or whatever buzzword treatment may be flavour of the month with the desperate urgency of a little Dutch boy running out of fingers by a leaking dyke, all to no avail.

For example: in my 18 months with this large hardware company – let’s call it Big Blue – I’ve seen one major reorganisation and at least 20 process changes, none of which has increased efficiency one iota. In fact some of the new processes have been such disasters that they require incessant tweaking, but we keep trying to adjust to this constant change for the worse.

This is what really baffles me; the ease with which we seem to accept the forced application of half-baked ideas, spawned by someone with absolutely no insight into our current way of working, ideas that inevitably change our situation unfavourably. So far, and I admit my perspective is limited, no change or new process has been for the better.

Adaptability has been a survival trait for us as a species, but I’m beginning to suspect that this isn’t always the case. Take my team leader for example, fresh out of surgery but with stern doctors’ orders to take it easy and avoid stress. Her job in our dept is basically to slow down our entropy as much as possible, which would have been a stressful job even against the natural background radiation of bureaucracy, but since they hired my half wit/half German colleague it looks as if it is going to bury her.

So in fact her working to prevent the sociological kind of entropy seems to be speeding her towards the chemical/physical entropy I started out with, and if that’s not a lesson I don’t know what is…