Homeostasis
Like a body maintaining 37°C, organizational culture requires constant active work - energy expenditure, negative feedback loops, and calibrated responses to deviation.
Homeostasis is not passive equilibrium. It's dynamic equilibrium - constant active adjustment to maintain stability despite changing external conditions.
Now we get to one of the most important concepts in biology, one that most business books completely ignore: **homeostasis**.
Your body temperature right now is approximately 37°C (98.6°F). It varies by maybe half a degree throughout the day. Miss by 2°C in either direction and you're seriously ill. Miss by 4°C and you're dead. Your body works constantly - burning energy, adjusting blood flow, triggering sweating or shivering - to keep temperature stable.
The same goes for blood pH. It must stay at 7.35-7.45. A shift of 0.1 in either direction is dangerous. A shift of 0.4 is fatal. Your blood contains buffering systems that resist pH changes, your lungs adjust how much CO2 you exhale (which affects pH), your kidneys adjust what they excrete. All of this happens automatically, constantly, using significant energy.
Homeostasis is not passive equilibrium. It's *dynamic* equilibrium - constant active adjustment to maintain stability despite changing external conditions.
Here's the mechanism: homeostasis works through negative feedback loops.
**Step 1: Sensor** - Detect current state (thermoreceptors measure temperature, chemoreceptors measure pH, stretch receptors measure blood pressure)
**Step 2: Control Center** - Compare current state to set point (hypothalamus for temperature, medulla for breathing, various organs for various parameters)
**Step 3: Effector** - Take action to correct deviations (muscles shiver to generate heat, sweat glands release moisture to cool, kidneys adjust urine composition)
**Step 4: Feedback** - The system senses the result of the correction and adjusts further
This is a thermostat, except biological thermostats are more sophisticated, more redundant, and more context-aware than the one controlling your office temperature.
Critically, homeostasis requires energy. Your body at rest still burns calories maintaining these systems. A dead body cools to room temperature because homeostasis has stopped. The stability you experience isn't the absence of work - it's the product of constant invisible work.
Business Application of Homeostasis
Culture doesn't maintain itself. Like a body maintaining 37°C, organizational culture requires constant active work - energy expenditure, negative feedback loops, and calibrated responses to deviation. Companies that understand this (Netflix) build explicit homeostatic mechanisms. Companies that don't write down values and wonder why culture drifts.