Claude Shannon started on his mathematical physics of communication during WWII. His theory is a law of nature having all the properties common to natural laws. For one, defiance is impossible.
The laws of communication provide another route to Plan B. Shannon stipulated the purpose of communication as to getting the party receiving the communication to act as the communicator intended. Just getting the message delivered to the receiver error-free is not sufficient. The whole point of Plan B is to deliver organizational prosperity.
It is fair to conclude that when Plan B is functional that communication theory was honored in the process. Fiction doesn’t work.
Shannon believed that mathematical concepts could be used to bring structure and understanding to almost
anything. We enlist Shannon to help separate truth from fiction and success from failure to communicate. Lies don’t work in communication theory and so when implementation is failing you know where to search for the error/lie. By invoking Shannon, you can find most errors in the strategy without having to implement.
The essence of Shannon’s contributions was his style of work – his ability to take a problem and
apply mathematical theory to revolutionize the way in which the field was viewed. The impact of his
work was brought about by societal influences. Shannon himself talks about this in a talk that he gave in
1953:
The first one that I might speak of is the concept of simplification. Suppose that you are given a problem to solve, I don’t care what kind of problem in a machine to design, or a physical theory to develop, or a mathematical theorem to prove or something of at kind. A very powerful approach to this is to attempt to eliminate everything from the problem except the essentials; that is, cut it down to size.
Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another; and if you can being this problem down into the main issues, you can see more clearly what you’re trying to do and perhaps find a solution. Now in so doing you may have stripped away the problem you’re after. You may have simplified it to a point that it doesn’t even resemble the problem that you started with; but very often if you can solve this simple problem, you can add refinements to the solution of this until get back to the solution of the one you started with.
We use a procedure called “Penetrations” coupled with FMEA to ferret out errors that is both effective and organizationally neutral – for us. Strange, we are the obvious perpetrators of the inevitable riot but we never get blamed for it. Anybody can run the Penetrations exercise. It is pure implementation-speak where delusion-speak gets massacred.
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