# Modeling Stress and Outcomes By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2023-08-14 Where should one begin if one wishes to build a simulation of a human organization? Let's start with the person as they appear to be the primary element of organizational systems. How does one go about building a model of a person? One may ignore the biological aspects and only focus on human psychology. What psychology theories should serve as the foundation of the people in the model? Must one model a person's childhood? Does the person grow and develop within the model? Indeed, younger people have different distributions of behavior than older people. But, as soon as one starts to capture this dynamic, biological considerations dominate. Primarily, aging has at least a correlation to psychological development. Furthermore, there is evidence that psychological stress causes physical stress. This biological stress has real consequences on psychological behaviors and attitudes. Anyone working within any organization knows that stress, or lack thereof, is a critical component of workplace dynamics. Deadlines, adhering to tribal norms, and organizational survival are delicate interplays of stress. So, one is back to modeling people's biological and psychological factors. This can be overwhelming and delusional as we barely know how all these systems work. One may have to abstract away this problem and only model stress levels within individuals within an organizational context. Here stress serves as a proxy for all things biological and psychological. Thus, organizations become bi-directional stress machines. They can either increase or decrease stress on various time horizons with positive and negative feedback loops. Then, one can posit that some individuals deal with stress better than others based on rates of depression, heart attacks, and related stress-induced health conditions. By throwing different mixtures of people into different organizational stress machines, one could hypothesize our society's current and future state. Two essential things will likely result from such a study. First, helping people deal with stress is the most important and immediate thing we can do for society. Second, organizational systems that diffuse stress have better long-term outcomes than those that induce stress. Stress will always exist; it's the nature of the universe and the human condition. But we've always been able to create structures that reduce it by working together. We are stuck on a plateau just above chaos and fear. It's time to resume the climb to a higher plateau of existence. #### Related Items [[Models]] [[Systems Thinking]] [[Organizational Analytics]] [[Progress]] [[Society]] [[Fear]] [[Stress]]