Every organization is challenged by cultural entropy. Competition, globalization, technology, regulation, macroeconomic ambiguity, internal politics, leadership, and employee transitions necessitate that each organization actively scan the environment and tend to the entropy that is occurring within the organization.
Entropy is “a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system. The second law of thermodynamics finds that entropy always increases with time”.
Picture a 0-10 scale, with 0 equaling absolute randomness and 10 equaling perfect predictability. Where does your organization score? Does it vary by functional area? What about customers? What are the rates of customer retention and acquisition?
In the workplace, culture entropy is determined by whether energy expended is transferred through systems, processes, and people in support of a productive and functional system.
Please share your thinking about how this law of thermodynamics applies to your organization’s ecosystem.
If you are intrigued about completing a culture assessment that includes external and internal factors reach out to KBD Consulting.
All my Best,
Kevin B. Dull, JD, MBA, MSML
