Replying to LO26108 --
>"I have just stumbled over "the natural outcome is to reduce the
>organization's complexity". I would have expected "the natural outcome is
>to reduce the complexity of the organization's environment". ...."
Winfried:
If you mean reduce the complexity of the "environment" inside the
organization, I agree. When possible, I prefer to reserve the term
environment for the organization's external environment. Of course, it
gets a little muddy when talking about the "enacted environment". That
is, how the organization's internal culture, systems, processes, etc.
select, filter and shape those facets of the organization's external
environment that reach management's radar screen. According to Karl Weick
(cited in Miller's paper):
"Organizations create and constitute the environment to which they react;
the environment is put there by the actors within the organization and by
no one else. This reasserts the argument that the environment is a
phenomenon tied to processes of attention, and that unless something is
attended to, it doesn't exist."
I just add that processes and information systems, as well people, produce
the enacted environment. As the organizations become simpler, so does the
environment they can enact. This, in part, is what limits their capacity
to adapt to environmental change.
I think Danny Miller can summarize his work better than I can. The
following is the conclusion of his paper, "The Architecture of
Simplicity", from the Academy of Management Review, 1993, Vol 18, No. 1,
116-138.
"The central tenet of the simplicity theory presented here is that over
time most successful organizations become simpler, not more complex. The
strategies of such companies, for example, turn into specialized recipes.
Cultures narrow to mirror the views and practices of a single group, and
routines and systems become more focused. All of these trends interact to
produce tight configurations - but, ultimately, these configurations
become distended, exaggerated, and lacking in richness and subtlety.
"Eventually, such companies will behave less like organisms and more like
machines, so that surprise and randomness, the source of much knowledge,
are lost. Activities become more thematic, more specialized, and more
uniform. Before long, there is no more "noise" left in the system: no
court jesters, no devil's advocates, no iconoclasts with any say, no
countervailing models of the world. This conformity, of course, decreases
flexibility, engenders myopia, and blocks learning and adaptation.
"Paradoxically, however, if the 'machine' is beautifully tuned and aligned
with its environment, it can beat everything in sight. And these stellar
successes are impossible to forget; they tempt and tantalize managers to
go just a little bit further.", Danny Miller
Doug Merchant
--"Doug Merchant" <dougm@eclipse.net>
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