BEATRICE AND SYDNEY ROME System Development Corporation
Santa Monica, California
The authors have devoted the past few years to studying information handling in very large organizations. We do this by growing large organi-zations in our computer-based laboratory and performing experiments upon them. These laboratory organizations are combinations of live and artificial personnel. Today we shall focus on the information handling facets of our experimental method. We shall present some of our initial findings, or, more rigorously, initial interpretations of initial findings.
THE COMMUNICA TION PROCESS IN LARGE ORGANIZA TIONS
THE SCOPE OF THE COMMUNICATION PROCESS
First a word about the communication process as we view it. All of you will agree that information handling is more than issuing memo-randa, disseminating documents, making telephone calls, filing papers. It is more than abstracting, indexing, digesting, card punching, photocopy-ing, or shuffling electronic pulses through computers. All these modes of processing information are merely instrumentalities that serve a higher function. They serve as media to convey and develop meaning and intent between person and person, persons and groups, and groups and groups, in large organizations.
Communication, then, goes beyond mere data processing. It includes all formal and informal conversations. It is a succession of encounters and a continual stream of dialogue among multitudes of organisms. When these organisms communicate with one another, they buffet, challenge, sustain, cajole one another. They address to one another their hopes, anticipations, plans, schemes, knowledge, misinformation. They submit
*This paper is an enlargement of two talks presented at the Conference by the authors.
Development of the theoretical aspects of the research described in this paper is being sup-ported in part by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Information Sciences Direc-torate) of the Office of Aerospace Research, under contract No. AF 49(638)-1188.
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or seek to dominate; they conceal and reveal, laugh and joke, impress and depress one another, persuade and threaten each other-in sum, they express, covertly or overtly, entire worlds of hopes, fears, tendencies, motives, attitudes, intentions.
THE SOCIALIZING FUNCTION OF THE COMMUNICATION PROCESS
Consequently, we can understand the communication process as that process through which individuals enter into social, value-laden rela-tions with one another. This process fuses separate, often conflicting and antagonistic, individuals into the solidary groupings which in turn make up large organizations. Through communication, large organizations be-come real social beings. Communication assimilates the resources of a large organization into its organic social existence. By means of com-munication the organization, once born, continues to recreate itself and to sustain its own social existence. Through communication the organiza-tion acts, accomplishes its objectives, realizes its values, and exerts its power. And once a large organization comes into existence and continues to be, it provides, through its communication process, the internal social environments in which its members have status and roles, realize tactics, develop strategies, and cope with the larger environments in which the entire organization lives, moves and has its being.
When information handling is viewed in the present way as carrying out the life processes of large organizations, every document and every symbolic expression within it can have many levels of revealed and con-cealed meaning. We are not speaking of ambiguity. We are speaking of the fact that any significant piece of information is potentially a many-layered communication having values and consequences that impinge dif-ferently on different departments, levels and subsystems within large organizations. We are also speaking of the fact that every symbolic ex-pression hides while it reveals. As the noted French sociologist, Georges Gurvitch, puts it: "Social symbols ... characteristically reveal while veil-ing and veil while revealveil-ing, and while inspirveil-ing participation also re-strain it."* And, we add, all this multifaceted impingement of
informa-*The Spectrum of Social Time (La multiplicite des temps sociaux), Dordrecht-Holland, The Netherlands, 1964, p. 2. On page 49 Gurvitch elaborates this thought as follows:
Social symbols are signs which only partially express the contents toward which they are oriented. They serve as mediators between these contents and the collective and individual agents who formulate them and to whom they are addressed. This mediation consists of encouraging the participation of agents in the symbolized contents and these contents in the agents. Whether the symbols are mainly intellectual, emotional, or voluntary, whether they are tied to the mystic or the rational, one of their essential characteristics is that they reveal while veiling and veil while revealing, and even while they encourage participation, they check it. From this viewpoint, all the symbols, including the sexual symbols, constitute a way of overcoming and dealing with obstacles and impediments to expression and to participation. The symbols vary because of 'many
LEVIATHAN; LARGE ORGANIZATIONS 163 tion grows and unfolds in time, calling for constant reevaluation and reinterpretation by all participants at all levels of an organization.
In short: A large organization is a union of people, relating in myriad ways, grouping and regrouping ceaselessly, and constantly making and remaking its evolv.ing history. Through its communication process, the organization creates and regenerates its ongoing power and sustains itself. At the same time, the communication process reveals and expresses the social vitality of the organization.
Thus, paradoxically, communication is the creative force that gives birth to and preserves the organization, and, in turn, it is the organization that gives birth to and sustains the communication. Communication expresses the organization and the organization is the expression of its which the members of the organization talk with one another.
(b) Information feedback. The information feedback that reports on system and subsystem performances.
(c) Formal authority. The structure of formal authority and its inter-relation with the feedback system.
(d) Charter. The process through which the organization expresses and enforces its values, image, and mission-an active process that constantly renews, recreates and reaffirms the "organizational charter."
*
(e) Extraformal interaction: The extraformal process of person-to-person interaction in an organization.
factors: particularly because of the character of the subject-broadcasters and the subject-receivers, because of the variable importance of the symbols and that [which]
is symbolized; because of the various degrees of their crystallization and flexibility, etc.
This is why the symbols constantly risk being overwhelmed, of being slower than that which they would symbolize. Only rarely are they adjusted for their task, so much so that at each turn we are tempted to speak of their "fatigue," if not of"their "defeat."
*E. Wight Bakke, "Concept of the Social Organization," in Mason Haire (ed.), Modern Organization Theory (New York, 1959), chap. 2, pp. 37-39. Cf Kenneth E. Boulding, Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (Ann Arbor, 1956). Bakke describes what he means by the term, organizational charter, as follows:
In many relationships of participants and outsiders to a social organization, it is essential that those involved have an adequate image of the uniqueness and wholeness of the organization. It is essential that the organization as a whole mean something definite, that the name of the organization call to mind unique, identifying features.
This image and its content we label the Organizational Charter . ...
Clearly, the communication process in a large organization is a com-plex, fluidly developing, all-pervasive medium. Clearly, too, a medium of this magnitude cannot be completely observed in any actual organization that exists in the real world. Noone information scientist, or group, or army of scientists, can fully survey and evaluate the full information flow in large organizations. Therefore, information scientists have used a.
variety of means for conducting such study. Good as these means are, they have all lacked one vital element in order to be truly scientific-the ability to conduct experiments and thereby to test hypotheses in a lab~ra
tory environment.
We have developed a unique and, we believe, a fairly comprehensive and fruitful method for performing such experiments. This method, which we call the Leviathan, is itself a complex instrument. We shall now describe some of the information-handling features of the Leviathan method. You will observe, as we proceed, how the five basic taxonomic elements of the communication process are incorporated in our method.
It is the conception held by participants in the organization of what the name of the organization stands for, together with their basic and shared values, which tend to justify and legitimize such identifying features. Efforts to maintain the integrity of the organization will be governed by what is necessary to actualize and perpetuate this image of unique wholeness. It is basically a set of ideas shared by the participants which mayor may not be embodied in written documents ....
Although it is the image of the unique wholeness of the organization, it is not by any means a summation of its parts. It is created by selecting, highlighting, and combining those elements which represent the unique whole character of the organization and to which uniqueness and wholeness all features of the organization and its operations tend to be oriented ....
The Organization Charter contains at least the following identifying features of the organization:
1. The name of the organization.
2. The function of the organization in relation to its environment and its participants.
3. The major goal or goals toward the realization of which the organization, through its system of activities, is expected by participants to employ its resources (including themselves).
4. The major policies related to the fulfilling of this function and the achievement of these major goals to which agents of the organization are committed.
5. The major characteristics of the reciprocal rights and obligations of the organi-zation and its participants with respect to each other.
6. The major characteristics of the reciprocal rights and obligations with respect to each other of the organization, and people and organizations in the environment.
7. The significance of the organization for the self-realization of people and organi-zations inside and outside the organization in question.
8. The value premises legitimizing the function, goals, policies, rights and obliga-tions, and significance for people inside and outside the organization.
9. The symbols used to clarify, focus attention upon, and reinforce the above, and to gain acceptance from people inside and outside the organization. These symbols are actually particular items of the several basic resources which serve as cues to bring to mind the content of the Organizational Charter and reinforce its hold upon the minds of both participants and outsiders.
LEVIATHAN; LARGE ORGANIZATIONS 165 COMMUNICA TING THROUGH THE
COMPUTER IN NATURAL ENGLISH:
THE LINGUISTIC MEDIUM COMPUTER-BASED LABORATORY
The Leviathan method, first of all, utilizes a large, computer-based laboratory (Fig. 1). An essential feature of this laboratory is its 24 sepa-rate stations at which individual subjects communicate independently and
Figure 1. View of Leviathan Laboratory. Subjects in 21 booths enact roles of Officers in large information-handling organization.
directly with the computer in real time (Fig. 2). Each station contains a set of pushbuttons and a display scope. The pushbutton unit was es-pecially designed for Leviathan experiments but has proved to have ex-tremely wide practical and theoretical application. By means of these pushbutton units and displays, subjects communicate with each other through the computer. An example of a complete message follows: "Re-quest approval to increase production rate to 999 at station A-I. Need maximum rate." (See Fig. 3.)
NATURAL LANGUAGE SETS
Note that the present message approximates natural English. It is one of a set of over three million well-formed sentences. This set of sentences
Figure 2. Subject in individual booth sending message over computer.
LEVIATHAN; LARGE ORGANIZATIONS 167
Figure 3. Example of completed message.
exists in the computer and is simultaneously and independently available to each individual subject. The entire set of sentences is a well-organized language. This language, moreover, can be varied from experiment to experiment without affecting the basic computer programs. In other words, the program system remains unchanged regardless of the variety of natural languages that can be imposed upon it. Anyone language, or
any version of a language, is supplied to the computer by the experi-menters through a relatively small deck of several hundred IBM cards.
And since new cards can be readily substituted, anyone language can be grown and modified as the needs of the subjects become manifest to them-selves or the experimenters.
COMPRESSED CODING
One great advantage of this language is its ease of mastery and use by the subjects. Another advantage is its extraordinarily compressed coding, for it is several times as efficient as any other existing means for communi-cating sentences over physical channels. The entire message shown above, for example, can be coded into and transmitted by less than two 48-bit words.
*
Furthermore, when our subjects compose these messages-which they can do faster than your eye can follow-they transmit at a rate which is equivalent to approximately three bits per second.t As a result of the extremely compressed coding, transmission of this language over physical channels can be very economical.AUTOMATIC RECORDING
From the experimenters' perspective, the language has still another advantage, in that it provides an automatic record and analysis by the computer of the entire interactive communication process among the subjects. The computer records who talks to whom, at what levels of authority and domains of responsibility in the organization, the occasions and times when communications take place, the exact content of what is said, and the patterns in which the utterances succeed one another. Sub-jects use this computer-based language to manage and control a large-scale organization operated by hundreds of artificial employees. The language is also used by the live subjects to issue orders to the artificial personnel and to communicate 10 them the decision rules according to which the organization operates.
t
U sing this language, the managers can also report information to one another over the computer. For example, a manager might compose the following message: "Reporting information on epoch 28. Value F is
*Except for special data such as "999" and "A-I."
t Actually the transmission takes place over parallel lines; the figure of approximately three bits per second is estimated for a single channel and optimal coding both of computer programs and hardware signals.
tThe language just described is a structured command or management language for directing, planning and operating a large organization in a laboratory. While its technical aspects have been perfected, its social elements are still being developed and refined. This is being accomplished by supplementing the computer-based language with handwritten messages and face-to-face debriefings. The latter are observed through one-way glass and recorded on sound tape, and subsequently transcribed.
LEVIATHAN; LARGE ORGANIZATIONS 169 being routed to line 3, to meet sender's demand." The message appears on the display scope in this way:
COMPLETED MESSAGE REPORTING
INFO ON EPOCH 2 8
VALUE F
ROUTED TO LINE 3
,TO
MEET SNDR DMND
Simultaneously with displaying the message, the computer prints hard copy. The hard copy is delivered by courier to the sender of the message and to those to whom copies have been addressed. Any who wish can use the hard copy for their permanent records.
USE OF LANGUAGE TO REQUEST FEEDBACK
Finally, during a laboratory experiment, this same language enables the live managers to request various kinds of feedback information (which we call "indite"). This information is generated by the robots in the com-puter. An example of a request for feedback information is the following:
COMPLETED MESSAGE REQUEST FOR
INFO ON EPOCH 4 2
SEND
STATION OUTAGE INDITE TO
CO BL GM
This completed message contains a request made by an officer to the robots for information on operations that took place during the 42nd epoch or simulated day of laboratory operations. He is requesting that the information be sent to his commanding officer (CO), his branch leader (BL) and his fellow group head (GM). He is asking the robots to send these officers feedback information (indite) concerning station failures or outages.
The computer programs for the natural language that we have been describing are called the General Operator-Computer Interaction (GOCI)
Program System.* By means of this system of programs, the first pre-requisite of a taxonomy of the communication process is realized: GOCI and the natural language superimposed on it represent the linguistic or symbolic medium through which the members of an organization talk with one another.t
THE LEVIATHAN INDITE SYSTEM:
COMPUTER-GENERA TED INFORMATION FEEDBACK HIERARCHICALLY ORGANIZED
The information feedback that can be requested by means of the com-puter language is itself a major feature of our Leviathan method. It satisfies the second taxonomic prerequisite of the communication process - a feedback mechanism that reports on system and subsystem perform-ance. An integrated system of computer programs, known as the Indite programs,
t
provides us with an extensive repertory of different kinds of feedback information. During the past two years of laboratory opera-tions, we have given our subjects-on line and in real time-more than 20 different types of feedback. Each of these types is supplied in different forms to different subjects, according to their particular roles in a given experiment. We, the experimenters, specify which combinations are to be given to the subjects, depending on the design of the experiment. Almost all of the 20 types of feedback are aggregated to suit the various organiza-tionallevels of authority and responsibility.§ Each officer at each com-mand level receives those abstracts of the total information store that are relevant to the particular offices which fall within his span of control.EXPERIMENTALLY CONTROLLED
In a typical Leviathan experiment, the subjects simulated 21 distinct offices in a six-level hierarchy (Fig. 4). Each office had its own unique combination of authority level, functional specialty (or combination of specialties), and territorial domain. And each office received a distinct selection of appropriate feedback. More than 200 different reports were supplied to the subjects in a simulated day of operation, covered in 25 to 30 minutes of laboratory time. Thus our program system enables us to
*The Gael programs were realized by Mildred Almquist.
tThe handwritten messages and face-to-face debriefings complete the linguistic or sym-bolic medium in Leviathan experiments.
tThe Indite programs were realized by Robert E. Krouss.
§Ten of these different types are illustrated in Figs. 7-9 and 11-19. Figures 9 and 11 and 16-18 respectively show how two major types of feedback are aggregated at various levels of command.
LEVIATHAN; LARGE ORGANIZATIONS 171
Figure 4. Six-level hierarchy in typical Leviathan experiment.
control the kinds and amounts of information that we supply our subjects.
We also control by its means the rates, timing and patterns of information flow.
Clearly, as with large organizations in real life, our feedback system has been deliberately designed to prohibit any single officer in a command pyramid to form accurate, comprehensive and complete pictures of
Clearly, as with large organizations in real life, our feedback system has been deliberately designed to prohibit any single officer in a command pyramid to form accurate, comprehensive and complete pictures of