What We Can Learn about Business Modeling from Homeostasis

Business modeling methods most often model an organization’s value provision to its customers followed by the necessary activities and structure to deliver this value. These activities and structure are seen as infinitely malleable; they can be specified and engineered at will. This is hardly in line with what even laymen can observe of organizations, that they are not easy to change and that their behavior often is not directly centered on providing value to customers. Homeostasis is an almost century old model that was developed in the field of physiology to explain how living beings survive by maintaining the constancy of their internal states. Homeostasis helps to explain both the inability of organizations to provide maximum value to their customers and their reluctance to change. From this point of view, resistance to change is not something to fight or to ignore but an essential force behind organizational behavior that can either enable or defeat new business models.