Ecossistemas, transitoriedade e a morte do regime

Ontem numa caminhada ao final da tarde li:

"The service ecosystems perspective emphasizes that value is cocreated within multi-actor exchange systems in which shared and enduring institutional arrangements—interrelated rules, roles, norms, and beliefs—guide resource integration and service exchange. In addition to providing a systemic and institutional understanding of value cocreation, this perspective also offers important insights into how actors can intentionally influence long-term change within the complex service ecosystems they are a part of.
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The service ecosystems perspective not only provides a more systemic and holistic understanding of value cocreation but also offers important insights into how actors are able to influence value cocreation within the service ecosystems they are a part of. Like natural ecosystems, service ecosystems exhibit the quality of emergence and are, therefore, beyond the full control of any individual actor. However, actors are able to intentionally influence, at least partially, how service ecosystems evolve.
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What emerges from this theorization process is the conceptualization of service ecosystem design, defined as the intentional shaping of institutional arrangements and their physical enactments by actor collectives through reflexivity and reformation to facilitate the emergence of desired value cocreation forms.
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Ecosystems do not have an equilibrium steady state but rather adapt to instabilities by enacting forms that are uncertain and unpredictable. Furthermore, in recognizing the cocreated and phenomenological nature of value, it is not enough to focus on a single actor category (e.g., the user or the customer), but rather, there is a need to zoom out to understand the configurations of a multitude of interconnected actors who might all perceive the outcomes differently. In this way, actors may be purposeful in the forms of value cocreation they wish to influence, but they can never truly control or predict the outcomes of service ecosystem design. The first proposition of service ecosystem design summarizes the argument related to this insight."

Há muitos anos que trabalho o conceito de ecossistema. Julgo que a primeira vez que escrevi sobre esse tema aqui foi em 2007, "Subir na escala de valor".
Outras referências podem ser encontradas em:

• Agosto de 2016
• Março de 2017
• Janeiro de 2019

Em 2005 escrevemos no nosso livro sobre o Balanced Scorecard:

E agora, juntar tudo isto ao que vou lendo em "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin:

"The economy is not a machine that experts can fine-tune for maximum efficiency. It is far more productive to think of it as a complex, dynamic system, like a vast garden, within which we can all thrive if we tend it properly.
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A more powerful and useful metaphor for the US economy than a complicated manmade machine is a natural system, like a rainforest.
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In a natural system, the outcome is the product of the dynamic interactions between and among the parts rather than a simple addition of the outputs of the parts. That is, one can’t just add up the parts and produce the whole. In fact, it is often hard to identify what the parts actually are. A family is a system. It is not possible to add up the individual features of a family and predict its functioning, because the interactions make it too hard to understand in advance how they will play out. The body is a system. One can’t really divorce the functioning of the liver from that of the kidneys or the heart or even the brain, though modern approaches to medi cine often attempt to do just that.
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If the economy is a system like a family or the human body rather than a machine, that suggests that an approach based on managing the parts separately and simply adding their outputs will very likely result in a major dysfunction at some point.
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The economy, then, can best be viewed as a rapidly evolving and potentially unstable natural social system, in which intelligent players transact for their personal gain according to rules and processes that they design to facilitate those transactions—through laws, regulations, and the application of technologies. This creates the possibility that adaptive behavior turns into gaming, as individuals transact in the system in ways that suit their own immediate ends but subvert the system as a whole. And as we’ll see in the pages that follow, the smart people always figure out how to game the system and any attempts we make to change the rules in order to prevent the small number of smart players from walking off with all the rewards are doomed to end in failure."

Muitas vezes ao longo dos anos, ao ouvir certos políticos não podia deixar de sentir um misto de perplexidade e incompreensão. Como é que esses políticos se podiam arrogar a capacidade de terem desenhado a forma ideal de governar este país. Como podiam proibir os vindouros de alterar as regras? Como podiam pensar que tinham desenhado o melhor sistema possível?

Roger Martin deu-me a resposta: trata-se de gente que vê a sociedade, a economia como uma gigantesca máquina.

As pessoas, a tecnologia, o contexto, tudo muda. O que é verdade hoje, amanhã é mentira. (Nunca esqueço que a ala mais à esquerda da política portuguesa matou o rei D. Carlos porque não defendia as colónias...)

Voltando ainda mais uma vez a Roger Martin:

"Pursuit of all resilience and no efficiency is as problematic as pursuit of efficiency with no resilience. The only difference is in the nature of the death.
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Nonresilient systems tend to die explosively. [Moi ici: Como classificam um sistema que foi talhado na pedra como a última coca-cola do deserto? Estão a ver como acabam esses regimes cheios de direitos adquiridos? Não é uma questão de se, mas de quando]
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In contrast, inefficient systems tend to fade away slowly, as systems with superior fitness replace them. There is no way to guarantee the resilience of a system that doesn’t pay attention to efficiency. It may appear to be resilient, but it will eventually be overwhelmed by a more efficient adversary."

Trechos iniciais retirados de "Service Ecosystem Design: Propositions, Process Model, and Future Research Agenda"