Crisis in Human-Organization and Sustainable Response and Recovery

Human-organization crisis is a typical pathology of old, large, especially, not business social-services, government research, public administration, as well as, regional or international organizations.
All of them are characterized by many the same properties, and their symptoms are well seen from the systemic socio-cognitive perspective.

In general, a crisis of organization causes its own "natural" and frequently "not conscious" response, but the proper recognition and management of the crisis require its external and internal identification, as well as, a complex and "delicate" recovery strategy.

The work employs the top conceptualizations, axioms and methodology of the TOGA (Top-down Object-based Goal-oriented Approach) meta-theory, it means, its top ontology and epistemology. Definitions of basic concepts and modeling frameworks are essential for this research.

The metaphor of the health care of human body is useful for the initial top-down identification of the problem.

The basic, most easy observable crisis symptom is an inefficacy of organization internal and external decision-making (d-m). In such cases, the declared intentions of decision-makers are not congruent with the measured/observed results of the performed actions.

The second aspect is a lack of congruency between, for instance, "old" organization structures and the possibilities of competencies and responsibility networks in the organization.

At present, the critical factor of crisis identification is the generic framework of the ontology of intelligent organization (a meta-ontology), not yet sufficiently precisely defined and investigated. It includes such basic concepts as: organization fundation-goal, functional structure, role, competence networks, decision-making and ... ethics (1, 2 ).
Next, going "in deep", necessary "top" definitions and their reciprocal relations are introduced in the TOGA theory as the properties of a formal abstract intelligent organization composed of abstract intelligent agents (entities).

The identification/diagnostis of a concrete organization in crisis, requires a construction of organization-dependent ontologies on sufficiently detailed (generalization) levels.

An organization ontology has to take under consideration the specific context (constrains), objectives and the type of organization resources .

An utility of the application of socio-cognitive engineering methods (TOGA) to the diagnosis of organization pathologies and vulnerabilities are briefly illustrated in the ppt presentation (SCEF-2003 Workshop) , and in the Gadomski's paper related to the socio-cognitive vulnerability identification , CNIP Conference (2006):

The main factors useful for the organizational crisis taxonomies and crisis modeling, are the following:

   - primary cause criteria ( various types of human
      managerial errors) in human-human, human-computer
      human-organization interactions;
   - not-business organization pathologies related to the

   - managerial pathologies (they are caused by human/
      cognitive factors );
   - conflicts of interests; hidden implicit preferences of d-m'ers;
   - inertia of managerial strategies & power distribution;
   - lost of organization intelligence and self-consciousness

All of them can be described in the terms of the management of information, preferences, knowledge (IPK) and the distribution of organizational information acquisition and executive power.

In the crisis modeling we may distinguish two types of crisis essential for the sustainable responses of human organizations and for the choice of a minimal-stress recovery strategy, see the CNIP2006, the presentation on Organization Vulnerability Modeling.

Socio-cognitive organization pathologies leading to organization crises are weakly recognizable for external observers but they are usually well visible by the organization employees. For the reason of the managerial inertia they are neglected by the organization authorities and their revealing is usually connected with individual personal risk, but usually, informal information and opinions circulating between the organization employers relate to the well cognitively recognizable symptoms of SCP.

The most serious organization pathology is possible to conceptualize (A.M.Gadomski, 2005) as the triangle composed of reciprocally interacting :

ignorance, arrogance, power (IAP).

From the computational modeling and simulation perspective, using IPK meta-model, we may assume the following short explanations:

- ignorance is considered as the lack of formally requested knowledge,

- arrogance is based on the arbitrarily accepted own preferences system (see also Wikipedia) where the subject opinions are considered better than any other - it can be conscious or not conscious.

- power relates to the access to information and to the possibility of and autonomy in the realization of own decisions.

* The IAP syndrome, if related to the high-level managers, unable internal initiatives, neutralizes externally activated processes of the organization improvement and resilience. At the end, it usually leads to different forms of socio-cognitive and socio-economical crises.

* The IAP pathology depends on the individual assessment by managers, risk and benefits in their decision making . It especially emerges when managerial personal benefits are possible, and the risk of decisions, not profitable (wrong) for the organization, may be neglected during its routine functioning.