Replying to LO26124 --
Just a reflection on this posting LO26124 from my complexity background.
Doug writes:
> 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.
Organisation adapt to their environment. Full stop. The environment
changes constantly, and hence organisations operating in then environment
adapt to this environment. That can happen the hard way (what most
management processes try to achieve with controlling actions or the easy
way: allowing for self-organising processes to happen. Since the
environment in which organisations operate become MORE COMPLEX, rather
than simpler (because of the sheer amount of interactions -with positive
and negative feedback loops that are happening!) organisations (as in:
their processes, etc.) will become MORE COMPLEX and hence less
controllable (by definition).
> 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
Don't know this stuff, but it sounds rather obscure to me. If there is
anything we are learning from looking at organisations through the eyes of
modern science -and by finding out that INDEED they behave as Living
Systems, the machine metaphor becomes less and less tenable. Not more. I
know of very little adaptable (sic!) systems that are well oiled. I would
agree that machines can be perfectly tunes to a certain fixed action, not
to be adaptable (=changeble in a structural coupling with its
environment).
Frank Smits
--"Frank Smits" <frank.smits@lineone.net>
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