Organizational Physics is a way to understand and leverage systems principles to create more effective, efficient, and resilient human-based organizations. I usually write about entrepreneurial organizations. In this post, I am going to shift gears and create a mental map for how to think about what we can do as citizens to restore and improve the United States government.
My approach is to put the US government in its proper context using systems thinking, then show where it’s gone terrifyingly off the rails, and finally to highlight the highest leverage points we can focus on to restore and improve it. To be clear, I’m not writing from a political ideology, Republican or Democrat, but rather from a systems view.
Also, nothing in this article will help us navigate through the current political crisis. This article provides useful concepts to consider in a post-crisis period of rebuilding. God Bless America.
What is the Purpose of Government?
“Government” is a loaded term, holding different meanings for each of us. Ask a Communist and a Libertarian the meaning and purpose of “government” and you’ll get very different answers. From a systems perspective, however, the answer is clear: The purpose of government is to maintain high integration and low entropy for a critical mass of its stakeholders, now and over time. A good government accomplishes this objective efficiently. A bad government does not.
To clarify how I use these terms:
Integration measures how well a system is connected to its surrounding environment. High integration means there’s ample flow of energy, resources, and opportunities available to stakeholders. Low integration indicates a scarcity of these flows. In order to get a sense of the importance of integration, imagine a race car without gas. Despite its potential, it’s not going anywhere.
Integration with the surrounding environment is crucial because every action requires energy. A system cannot grow beyond the capacity of its environment because new energy must come from that environment. As the environment evolves, society and its government must adapt to these changes. Without adaptation, stakeholders suffer, integration diminishes, and that society and its government fail.
Entropy is a measure of disorder within the system. High entropy indicates rapid disintegration and chaos. In such a state, the system is vulnerable to both internal and external threats and is at risk of collapse. When internal entropy surpasses integration, the system will collapse much like a termite-infested building. Healthy, resilient systems sustain high integration and low entropy over time.
Stakeholders refers to the citizens or members within the government’s jurisdiction. Critical mass means having enough stakeholders who support the governance system to make it self-sustaining. Achieving an objective efficiently means doing so without wasting time, energy, or resources.
The phrase “critical mass of stakeholders” is key—not “all stakeholders,” because there is always a trade-off. A government aiming for equal outcomes for all, like the Soviet Union under Communism, risks failure due to enforced conformity, stifled innovation, and stagnation. Conversely, if not enough stakeholders benefit from the system, the dissatisfied will fight against it from within and it will also fail.
Efficiency is vital because governments rely on taxes from productive, income-generating activities. Squandering these resources or overspending leads to inflation and economic instability.
Now and over time is important because both short-range and long-range needs need to be met. It is the nature of short-range needs to tend to overpower long-range ones, resulting in poor policy choices that may “win a battle but lose the war.” A good government makes wise policy choices that deliver on both.
In summary, the purpose of government is to maintain high integration and low entropy for a critical mass of its stakeholders, now and over time. A good government accomplishes this efficiently. A bad government does not.
The Four Forces (PSIU) Applied to the Nation
Let’s compare our national government with this definition and see if it’s accomplishing its purpose. (Hint: it’s not.) To aid you, we can use a lens from Organizational Physics called PSIU, which illustrates that all complex adaptive systems must do four things simultaneously. They must shape and respond to the environment as a whole system including the parts and tasks that make up that system. The black words in each quadrant Producing, Stabilizing, Innovating, and Unifying, represent the four forces of every system. The red words Economy, Government, Society, and Innovation represent the primary ways that those forces should show up in a nation.
The Producing Quadrant: The Power of Individuals
The Producing quadrant represents the economic engine of a nation. An economy represents the value of the goods and services exchanged within it. A healthy economy is one where individuals pursue their own economic interests and in doing so, up-level the whole. A society where too many individuals rely on the state for their livelihoods is on the brink of failure. Why? Because all governments survive by taxing the productive labor of their people. If the state becomes the leading employer and provider for its citizens, or if it over-taxes a critical mass of productive citizens, it is on a fast road to stagnation and poverty.
To maintain a high-functioning economy and society, centralized investments in transportation and communications infrastructure are vital. You can think of these investments as “producing force enablers.” Why are they so essential? Well, imagine if you couldn’t send an email or make a phone call because of incompatible standards between private companies. Or imagine that you couldn’t travel easily to another city or state because the roads, rail, and airline infrastructure are disjointed and deteriorated. Or imagine if you couldn’t speak your mind in public because this was outlawed or censored by a totalitarian state. Life, health, and prosperity require freedom of thought, speech, and movement.
The Stabilizing Quadrant: The Root of Government
From a governance perspective, the Stabilizing quadrant in the upper left quadrant represents the fundamental reason for the existence of any form of government. In this quadrant, the government acts as both a legislative and enforcing body. This is where it creates and enforces its standards and laws using coercion or force if necessary. The money or currency of the realm is also a standard and a legal construct, and it is controlled here.
A government that lacks the perceived legitimate right to create and enforce its own standards and laws is not truly a government. In reality, no government on earth operates without relying on coercion or force to ensure compliance with its standards and laws. This is a hard truth that underscores the essential role of authority and enforcement in governance. This is also the reason why the US Constitution and Bill of Rights doesn’t lay out what a government can do, but what it cannot do. It’s an attempt to prevent an abuse of power by the State.
The Innovating Quadrant: New Advancements & Opportunities
The Innovating quadrant represents how new innovations are developed and take hold in a society. Ultimately, true innovation is what creates a prosperous and productive society. Innovation leads to technological advancements, process improvements, new products and features, and new knowledge and capabilities.
To expand the entire pie and defend against emerging and powerful capabilities from competing groups, a society must continue to innovate. Innovation is our most important resource. If you don’t believe me, try equipping your army with bows and arrows in a fight against automatic weapons and see how it goes.
A government that stifles innovation to protect the status quo is one that risks systemic harm. So is one that violates the precautionary principle and allows for the deployment of unsafe technologies. So is one that wastes long-range research and development resources on unproductive areas. Allowing for the right mix of market forces and competition, safety and security, while seeding the next era of innovations, is a key responsibility of government.
The Unifying Quadrant: Society’s Role
The Unifying quadrant in the lower left represents society. It’s important to distinguish between government and society; they are not the same thing! A healthy society reinforces the positive qualities of a unified whole. This includes social cohesion, shared history, shared language, shared sacrifice, community, connection, shared vision, and shared values.
When a society is healthy, more of its people benefit. Conversely, when a society is sick or corrupted, everyone suffers because no individual can ever be truly separated from the whole. A society that overly relies on rules and regulations from the Stabilizing quadrant in an attempt to reinforce desired social behaviors in the Unifying quadrant is a broken or deteriorating society. For example, are people kind and respectful to one another on the subway because it’s the right thing to do, or because they are afraid of being fined or arrested by the police if they are not? Or, is the free exchange of competing ideas and views encouraged or is it squashed through censorship, cancellation, and social conformity? Our collective morals and values matter a great deal because they shape our society for better or worse.
Visualizing Different Types of Government
The PSIU matrix above is a flat 2-dimensional image of a complex 4-dimensional system. Nevertheless, we can use it to gain some insight into what an ideal form of government should look like.
Let me give you two examples of what an ideal form of government would look like to a Libertarian and then to a Communist. As you glance at these images, see if you can’t tell why both pure forms of Libertarianism and Communism fail as political systems. They fail for the same reasons even though they have very different approaches to governance.
The Libertarian Ideal
The Libertarian ideal of government is characterized by minimal state intervention in both personal lives and economic activities. The government’s control and responsibilities would be limited to core functions necessary to maintain order and protect individual rights in the Stabilizing quadrant. It’s minimal centralization for maximal individual liberty.
The Communist Ideal
Compare the Libertarian ideal with the Communist ideal. In the Communist ideal, the State is characterized as the caregiver, guardian, and supplier of all means of production and livelihood. The State controls and coordinates nearly everything.
There’s a very good reason that neither an idealized Libertarian nor a Communist form of government has ever succeeded and thrived over time. Can you tell what it is?
That’s right. Neither system is adaptable and resilient to change. The Libertarian model can’t coordinate quickly enough to defend against internal or external threats because there isn’t enough centralization. The Communist model, on the other hand, has too much centralization and it can’t compete for, nor distribute, the right resources at the right time. Both systems fail under the pressure to evolve in changing conditions.
Managing Trade-Offs Effectively
I am using these two extremes, Libertarianism and Communism, to illustrate system dynamics for a reason. Everything is a trade-off. There is no ideal form of government! But we can consider Libertarianism to be one extreme polarity and Communism to be the opposite polarity. The best form of government will live somewhere between these two polarities and it is one that can successfully manage trade-offs, now and over time. Critically, whatever form it takes, a successful form of government can’t afford to be stagnant and stuck in its ways. It must evolve and adapt its capabilities to changing conditions.
How Would You Draw an Ideal Government?
I have a challenge for you. Now that you’ve seen an illustration of Libertarianism and Communism, draw your ideal form of government on the same PSIU matrix. But as you do, be mindful that everything is a trade-off. There are no solutions here, more of one force gets you less of another.
For example, if you were to keep your government confined only to the Stabilizing quadrant (which, as mentioned, is where government must reside at a minimum or it’s not even a government) there are still going to be trade-offs:
Unifying Trade-Offs: No government support or influence for the Unifying quadrant means no shared culture, no shared vision and values, no shared language. Too much government influence or censorship over the Unifying quadrant means cultural conformity and no freedom of the press and speech. And be warned because enemies of the State, or agents of the powerful, will attempt to infiltrate, capture, and corrupt cultural institutions in education and the arts to co-opt and control the nation’s future.
Producing Trade-Offs: No government support or influence in the Producing quadrant means every individual and community for themselves. There are no government-sponsored unemployment benefits or a social safety net like Social Security or Medicare. There are also no standardized and consistent transportation networks (roads, shipping, rail, air, space), or communications networks (mail, phone, internet, cellular) that support the free flow of individuals, ideas, and commerce in the nation. But give too much support to the Producing quadrant and what would otherwise be motivated, healthy, and productive individuals become wards of the State. This leads to deep social malaise and, if compounded over a decade or two, that country’s formerly strong economic engine and can-do culture will be lost and may never be regained.
Innovating Trade-Offs: No government support or influence to the Innovating quadrant means no government-sponsored long-range research and development. This means no NASA, no DARPA, no internet, no GPS, and no cell phones, to use just a few examples. But give too much funding and support to the status quo in this quadrant and you end up with collusion within what is now a “big” pharma-technology-agriculture-media-military-industrial complex that we are all suffering from now. This mega-system encapsulates and enriches the powerful few, versus supporting the health, liberty, autonomy, and agency of the many.
Stabilizing Trade-Offs: Even if you were to follow the Libertarian ideal and try to keep the government solely confined to the Stabilizing quadrant, there would still be trade-offs. For example, if you allow the Stabilizing quadrant to become too large and bureaucratic, the system will get so heavy and unresponsive that it will implode on itself. Or, if you allow the Stabilizing quadrant to fall prey to regulatory capture and become corrupted, those industry insiders who control that agency will co-opt it for their own special interests. There’s a reason we don’t want the pharmaceutical industry dictating health policy in the same way we don’t want Monsanto dictating agricultural policy. Yet we allow this.
I haven’t even mentioned the biggest trade-off in the Stabilizing quadrant. It is how the government prints money to pay for itself and its services. Printing money allows the government to meet its short-term debt obligations but it also creates long-term inflation. Interest on the federal debt will soon exceed 50% of all tax dollars. This is an unsustainable debt-death spiral for any nation.
It’s trade-offs all the way down.
So how would you draw an ideal USA government in the PSIU matrix? Where should government intervention begin and end?
What the USA Needs Now
In Organizational Physics, there’s another map that we use to help any organization set its strategy and determine what it should do next. It’s called a lifecycle curve and I’ve simplified it to show where the USA government is now, approximately, in its lifecycle stage. No surprise that it’s fallen into the aging and deteriorating stage and that the governance and political system have very high entropy, which means that it’s very close to falling apart under its own inertia:
If this were an academic article, I would now have to provide some verifiable evidence to support my claim that the USA is indeed in this stage. I’m not going to do it. Anyone should be able to tell that things are neither good nor sustainable. But if you do need more data, then do a scan yourself. You’ll find that every important measure of societal health and resiliency, including inflation-adjusted economic performance, healthcare quality, social trust and choesion, environmental quality (humans are not the only stakeholders!), and overall well-being, have been trending negative for many decades. This is how societies fall apart, slowly and then all at once.
So what do we do about it? Look at the lifecycle map above again. There’s a basic rule of thumb to follow when an organization has fallen over into the aging side of the lifecycle curve. Don’t prop it up. Tear it down. Restructure it. Redesign it for a new era and restore its purpose. Why? The Stabilizing force has become so overgrown and/or corrupted that it lacks the integrity, energy, agility, and resiliency to restore itself. Sadly, that’s where the American political system is now.
In order for the United States to remain a viable and innovative nation, it must have an effective and efficient national government that fulfills its purpose. We are all affected by this current problem/opportunity. In order to influence changes, where should we citizens focus our attention? We know exactly where to focus based on the maps we’ve looked at.
The Stabilizing quadrant where the government manages its standards and laws has become overgrown and corrupted. Inflation and unpayable debt levels are caused by excessive government spending; many Federal agencies seem to be engulfed in regulatory capture resulting in oligarchy, surveillance, deception, and corruption; and the Federal government has very little trust and transparency with those it was designed to serve: We the People.
Sequence matters. Rather than trying to address the other quadrants simultaneously, the Stabilizing quadrant must be reset and realigned first because this is the root of government. When it fails to do this quadrant well, the government acts like a cancer on all the other quadrants. We, our families, businesses, and communities cannot thrive in such a broken system.
If the government is to maintain high integration and low entropy for a critical mass of its stakeholders, now and in the future, then it is imperative that political leaders understand and wisely manage the trade-offs I have mentioned, rebuild trust in government through integrity and transparency, and have the courage and conviction to reorient how the government manages the Stabilizing quadrant. At a minimum, this includes rebalancing government expenditures and monitoring and preventing regulatory capture.
If we don’t restructure the Stabilizing quadrant first and foremost, then all other government initiatives including attempting to control and steward AI, secure the border, rebuild social confidence, ensure fair and transparent elections, and restore the ecosystem don’t have much of a chance.
If we do manage to reset the Stabilizing quadrant with transparency and integrity, there is hope that our nation can adapt and remain resilient in the coming years.
It’s not just a question of politics. It’s system dynamics.
Thanks for reading. I hope you’ll find these concepts helpful as we navigate the challenges ahead.