Self-Reflective Capability Is Necessary for Self-Governance (Premise 2)

No More Feedback — Chapter 10

This chapter is an excerpt from No More Feedback: Cultivate Consciousness at Work, the first in a series of books on toxic practices in the workplace. Read the introduction and previous chapter here on Medium, and find links to purchase the full book here.

The ability to be self-correcting or self-governing depends on the capability to be self-reflecting: 1) to see one’s own processes as they play out, 2) to interpret them in terms of what is needed to return to homeostasis (balance and harmony internally and with one’s environment), and 3) to create heterostasis (evolution and change of strata or class).

Returning to cybernetics theory, we find that an internal mechanical governor seeks the information that is appropriate for optimizing the whole of the system and interprets it to determine what is needed for optimization, ignoring all other information. It turns out that human beings have a similar drive to maintain wholeness and not to be diverted into sub-optimization in favor of a part.

Forcing information into a human or machine system, overriding its autonomy, it will cause either oscillation (wavering or vacillating without any ability to choose or proceed independently) or a state of…