Mongo is everywhere I look

A sério, eu gosto é disto de confundir economia com biologia.
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Há tanto a aprender com o paralelismo!!!
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Uma árvore cladística para o desenvolvimento, para a evolução das línguas na Papua-Nova Guiné

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Uma árvore cladística para relações entre espécies de insectos:

"A Cladística é um método utilizado para tentar achar as relações de parentesco entre os organismos. Actualmente, é aceite como o melhor método disponível para a análise filogenética por produzir explicações e hipóteses possíveis de serem testadas.
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A idéia básica por trás da Cladística é que membros de um determinado grupo de organismos dividem uma história evolucionária comum, e são mais "aparentados" entre si do que com membros de outros grupos. "
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"What assumptions do cladists make?

There are three basic assumptions in cladistics:

1. Any group of organisms are related by descent from a common ancestor.
2. There is a bifurcating pattern of cladogenesis.
3. Change in characteristics occurs in lineages over time.

The first assumption is a general assumption made for all evolutionary biology. It essentially means that life arose on earth only once, and therefore all organisms are related in some way or other. Because of this, we can take any collection of organisms and determine a meaningful pattern of relationships, provided we have the right kind of information. Again, the assumption states that all the diversity of life on earth has been produced through the reproduction of existing organisms.

The second assumption is perhaps the most controversial; that is, that new kinds of organisms may arise when existing species or populations divide into exactly two groups. There are many biologists who hold that multiple new lineages can arise from a single originating population at the same time, or near enough in time to be indistinguishable from such an event. While this model could conceivably occur, it is not currently known how often this has actually happened. The other objection raised against this assumption is the possibility of interbreeding between distinct groups. This, however, is a general problem of reconstructing evolutionary history, and although it cannot currently be handled well by cladistic methods, no other system has yet been devised which accounts for it.

The final assumption, that characteristics of organisms change over time, is the most important assumption in cladistics. It is only when characteristics change that we are able to recognize different lineages or groups. The convention is to call the "original" state of the characteristic plesiomorphic and the "changed" state apomorphic. The terms "primitive" and "derived" have also been used for these states, but they are often avoided by cladists, since those terms have been much abused in the past."
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Há um texto que ilustra como a dimensão de algumas peças do space-shuttle, porque tem de ser transportado num veículo que circula em estradas, foi ditada por uma decisão inicial dos engenheiros romanas que construíam as estradas que ligavam o império. Não sei se o conteúdo é verídico mas a sucessão de exemplos é plausível.
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Já entraram numa linha de montagem na Autoeuropa? E já viram como se constrói um Ferrari?
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Já viram como um artesão constrói uma boneca? E já viram uma linha de montagem de bonecas na China?
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Já viram com um agricultor cultiva oliveiras para ter azeite em casa? E já viram como uma empresa cultiva oliveiras para ter azeite para exportar?
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Algures, por exemplo no caso da indústria automóvel, de um primeiro atelier saiu aquilo a que hoje chamamos o primeiro automóvel. A partir daí... uma explosão câmbrica de modelos e de opções de comercialização e a evolução dos factores abióticos trouxeram-nos até aqui. E como decorreu a evolução dos métodos de trabalho? O GM way, o Toyota way, o VW way, o Ferrari way, o Bentley way...
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Peter Allen, Mark Strathern e James Baldwin em "The Evolutionary Complexity of Social Economic Systems: The Inevitability of Uncertainty and Surprise" listam 16 tipos de produção automóvel:
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"we can [consider] manufacturing organisations in the automobile sector.
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The organisational forms that have been identified are:

• Ancient craft system,
• Standardised craft system,
• Modern craft system,
• Neocraft system,
• Flexible manufacturing,
• Toyota production,
• Lean producers,
• Agile producers,
• Just in time,
• Intensive mass producers,
• European mass producers,
• Modern mass producers,
• Pseudo lean producers,
• Fordist mass producers,
• Large scale producers,
• Skilled large scale producers."

Cada um destes métodos foi sendo construído sobre um método anterior para dar resposta à evolução do mercado.

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Em que é que cada um destes métodos difere dos outros?

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Em que é que cada um destes métodos coincide com os outros?

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"These are identified on the basis of their constituent “characteristics.” In the case of the automobile sector the basic characteristics that have been observed are the different practices, routines and techniques that have emerged in the sector over time. The 16 different organisational forms listed above therefore differ from each other by being composed of different “bundles” of characteristics – defining therefore different “species” of organisation. This provides us with a clear definition of the “identity” of a particular company, in terms of constituent practices that make it up. Obviously, each of the 53 practices shown in Figure

has its own advantages that will add to the performance of the whole. However, in bringing in the ideas of “complexity” we are also concerned with the pair-wise interactions between each pair of practices, in order to examine the role of “internal coherence” on the organisational performance. In this “complex systems” approach, a new practice can only invade an organisation if it is not in conflict with the practices that already exist there. (Moi ici: Quando os factores abióticos, o entorno, o mercado, a economia, mudam bruscamente, os "outsiders" - consultores, políticos, amigos bem intencionados, participantes nos fora radiofónicos - aparecem com soluções milagrosas para inverter a situação e ajudar as empresas a fazer face à nova paisagem competitiva. Só que não há soluções milagrosas, não há enxertos que resultem sem ter em conta a história prévia de uma organização). In other words, we are looking at “organisations” not in terms of simply additive features and practices, but as mutually interactive “complexes” of constituent factors.

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The analysis of the evolution of the different organisational forms is shown in Figure

which tells us which practices need to be added or taken away in order to derive the 16 different organisational forms.
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The idea behind the original work was that by understanding the “characteristic practices” that constitute the most effective organisations, it would be possible to provide precise advice on strategic changes that might allow a current “mass producer” to become a “lean and agile” one. However, it seems to us that the elimination of some practices and wholesale addition of many others is probably an impossible task, and that the only way to achieve it would be to replace an old factory working with the old rules with a brand new one working with the new ones. (Moi ici: Grande discussão tive em 2004 com um dinamarquês, por causa deste tema. Quando uma empresa monopolista de facto, habituada a todas as mordomias que um monopólio confere, vê chegar um, depois dois concorrentes... e há alguém lá dentro que pensa no futuro e quer mudar... vai gastar tanta energia, sem garantias de sucesso... se calhar era mais barato, rápido e eficaz, fechar para abrir logo a seguir com gente nova. Tudo por causa de uma frase retirada do livro "Re-imagine" de Tom Peters "much easier to kill an organization than change it substantially". No fundo é o problema de toda a inovação disruptiva.) In fact the view we want to examine here is about the organisation as a complex system of interacting practices, and of successful organisational forms as reflecting the underlying synergy and coherence of its constituent practices."
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Mongo is everywhere I look.

E por que é que existem espécies e não uma gama infinita de variedades em simultâneo em cada paisagem competitiva?
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Continua.

How complexity leads to simplicity

Adapting to change

"The final implementation imperative - adapting to change - is the most important. Nothing in your business is set in stone. Change is inevitable. The only question is whether you will be prepared. The interactive process allows you to focus your entire organization on the strategic uncertainties that will one day - sooner or later - invalidate your current strategy."
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Trecho retirado de "Seven Strategy Questions" de Robert Simons.

Uma espiral virtuosa de criação de novas estratégias e nichos

Quando aqui reflicto e escrevo sobre como se pode ser optimista face a um futuro onde "Mongo rules", ou seja, onde as PMEs triunfam, onde as mega-empresas não têm hipótese de competir a não ser nos negócios de escala, ou seja do preço mais baixo, é sobre o comportamento de "complex adaptive systems" saudáveis que escrevo.
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Este trecho de Holland e Miller "Artificial Agents in Economic Theory" descreve bem o que procuro transmitir:
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"Many economic systems can be classified as complex adaptive systems. Such a system is complex in a special sense:

• (i) It consists of a network of interacting agents (processes, elements); 
• (ii) it exhibits a dynamic, aggregate behavior that emerges from the individual activities of the agents; and 
• (iii) its aggregate behavior can be described without a detailed knowledge of the behavior of the individual agents. 

An agent in such a system is adaptive if it satisfies an additional pair of criteria: the actions of the agent in its environment can be assigned a value (performance, utility, payoff, fitness, or the like); and the agent behaves so as to increase this value over time. A complex adaptive system, then, is a complex system containing adaptive agents, networked so that the environment of each adaptive agent includes other agents in the system.

(Moi ici: Segue-se agora a essência da coisa) Complex adaptive systems usually operate far from a global optimum or attractor. (Moi ici: A presença de atractores, de factores que ultrapassam a aleatoriedade, significa, no meu entendimento, que o sistema está "doente" como na Espanha que se concentrou no imobiliário, ou no Portugal que se focou nos bens não transaccionáveis) Such systems exhibit many levels of aggregation, organization, and interaction, each level having its own time scale characteristic behavior. Any given level can usually be described in terms of local niches that can be exploited by particular adaptations. The niches are various, so it is rare that any given agent can exploit all of them, as rare as finding a universal competitor in a tropical forest. (Moi ici: Nichos, nichos, diversidade, mais diversidade, fim das mega-empresas presentes com sucesso em todas as partes de um negócio) Moreover, niches are continually created by new adaptations. It is because of this ongoing evolution of the niches, and the perpetual novelty that results, that the system operates far from any global attractor. (Moi ici: Quem apela ao proteccionismo está mais à procura de defender o passado do que a construir o futuro. Há sempre mais alternativas, há sempre novas possibilidades) Improvements are always possible and, indeed, occur regularly.
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The everexpanding range of technologies and products in an economy, or the everimproving strategies in a game like chess, provide familiar examples. Adaptive systems may settle down temporarily at a local optimum, where performance is good in a comparative sense, but they are usually uninteresting if they remain at that optimum for an extended period."

São estes textos que me fazem reflectir...

São estes textos que me fazem reflectir, que me questionam, que me obrigam a ser mais cuidadoso e humilde no que faço.
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São estes textos que me confortam na minha solidão, à medida que me afasto do mainstrean e me apaixono pela  desorganização aparente que resolve os problemas do dia-a-dia de muitas pequenas empresas que lidam com sucesso com clientes a operar em modo caótico... só de pensar na sua certificação... arrepia-me.
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"What people usually mean when they talk about the long term, big picture for a whole organisation is a clear view of the purpose of that organisation and the direction in which ‘it’ is intended to ‘move’, ‘going forward into the future’, so that its ‘resources’, ‘capabilities’ and ‘competences’ are ‘optimally’ ‘aligned’ to the sources of competitive advantage in its environment as ‘the way’ to achieve ‘successful’ performance." (Moi ici: Eu não resumiria melhor o propósito do meu livro e no entanto...)
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"It is also widely believed that there is a set of ‘tools and techniques’ which can be ‘applied’ to an organisation to yield ‘success’ and that there is ‘evidence’ that these tools and techniques actually do the job required of them." (Moi ici: O problema quando se salta para o mundo das ferramentas assepticamente, sem olhar à particularidade de cada organização)
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"there is no body of scientifically respectable evidence that the prescribed tools and techniques do actually produce success" (Moi ici: É impossível garantir que a aplicação de uma ferramenta só por si faz milagres ou contribui para o sucesso... é o mesmo que assegurar que uma caneta usada por um humano só escreverá poesia, ou só contribuirá para o bem da humanidade)
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"For me, nothing could be more practical than a concern with how we are thinking and I can think of little more important for organisational improvement than having leaders and managers who can and do actually reflect upon what they are doing and why they are doing it." (Moi ici: Não há acasos... aquilo que vamos sendo e os resultados que vamos produzindo são a consequência do que fazemos, de como interagimos, de como actuamos. Se não gostamos das consequências... temos de mudar a nossa forma de actuar, pensar e trabalhar)
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"If the complex responsive processes perspective leads to a ‘tool or technique’ it is to the most powerful ‘tool or technique’ available to managers, indeed to any human being, and that is the self-conscious capacity to take a reflective, reflexive attitude towards what they are doing. In other words, the most powerful ‘tool’ any of us has is our ability to think about how we are thinking – if only we would use it more and not obscure it with a ready reliance on fashionable tools and techniques which often claim to be scientific even though there is no supporting evidence" (Moi ici: Ás vezes parece que o recurso a ferramentas é uma desculpa para não fazer esta reflexão, para não fazer um acto de contrição, para evitar o esforço da auto-catarse. )
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"An inquiry into thinking about management needs to be placed in the context of what people in organisations actually do, rather than with the main pre-occupation of the management literature with what managers are supposed to do but mostly do not seem to be actually doing. In other words, we are concerned with ways of thinking about management located in the context of thinking more widely about what people actually think, feel and do in organisations." (Moi ici: Realmente, quer aplicar o que é suposto fazer-se é, muitas vezes, criminoso, por que vai contra o ADN de uma organização... mesmo quando esse não é o problema, ou o desafio da organização)
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"the perspective of complex responsive processes, then the focus of attention shifts from the long term, big picture, and strategic macro level to the details of the micro interactions taking place in the present between living human beings. Instead of abstracting from and covering over the micro processes of organisational dynamics, such organisational dynamics become the route to understanding how organisations are being both sustained and changed at the same time and what part the activities of leading, managing and strategising play in this paradox of stability (continuity) and instability (change). " (Moi ici: O que tento é combinar as duas posturas: o médio longo prazo com a actualidade. O médio longo prazo como orientação para a definição do destino, e a actualidade para explicar o desempenho actual. Um problema reside numa eventual crença arrogante na nossa capacidade de prever o futuro... troca-nos as voltas. Por outro lado ao tirarmos "fotos" da realidade actual que conspira para que tenhamos o desempenho actual, aterramos em coisas concretas, coisas palpáveis, coisas sobre as quais podemos, ou julgamos que podemos, actuar, coisas sobre as quais as pessoas conseguem situar-se e relacionar-se. Como costumo escrever num acetato: "Coisas que podemos mudar já para a semana!")
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"It becomes understood that both continuity and change in all organisations are emerging in the many, many local communicative, political and ideologically-based choices of all members of all the interdependent organisations including the disproportionately influential choices of leaders and powerful coalitions of managers. What happens to an organisation is not simply the consequence of choices made by powerful people in that organisation. Instead, what happens to any one organisation is the consequence of the interplay between the many choices and actions of all involved across many connected, interdependent organisations. Instead of thinking of organisations as the realisation of a macro design chosen by the most powerful members of that organisation, we come to understand organisations as perpetually constructed macro or global patterns emerging in many, many local interactions. Continuity and change arise in local interactions, not simply in macro plans. Strategies are thus no longer understood simply as the choices of the most powerful but as emergent patterns of action arising in the interplay of choices made by many different groups of people." (Moi ici: Ora aqui está algo que não pára de me surpreender... o poder e a importância da comunicação interna, da comunhão de interpretações, do alinhamento voluntário dos agentes, das pessoas. Pressentem o poder da transparência? Pressentem a importância da clareza? Vislumbram o que acontece quando não há jogo limpo?)
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"Notions such as best practice, benchmarking and an evidence base for prescriptions for success all become highly problematic, indeed, often quite meaningless. Thinking in the second way calls for more reflective, reflexive modes of acting creatively in unique contingent situations for which there are no generally applicable prescriptions. The consequence of making the shift from the first to the second modes of thinking is a move from asking what organisations should be like and how they should be managed to asking what they are actually like and how they are actually being managed. It is only on the basis of fresh insight into what we are actually doing, rather than some rational fantasy of what we should be doing, that we might find ourselves acting more appropriately in specific contingent situations." (Moi ici: Não é um desafio fácil, apela à facilitação em vez da consultoria. O que poderia ser uma solução, apesar de fantasia racional, nunca o será, ou dificilmente o será, se for transmitida e não descoberta, se for comunicada e não co-construída pelos agentes. A solução comunicada apela ao racional e não joga no emocional. A solução comunicada é sempre genérica, não desce ao pormenor que facilita a implementação.)
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Trechos de Ralph Stacey e retirados de "The Demand for Management Tools and Techniques"

Biology of Business: Complex Adaptive Systems

Biology of Business: Complex Adaptive Systems

Dá que pensar... a sério

É impressionante...

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Li recentemente Linchpin de Seth Godin, ouvi recentemente Tribes do mesmo autor, ando a ler The Power of Pull de Hagel e outros.

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Todos estes autores escrevem sobre pessoas e a economia do futuro, todos eles escrevem, ainda que indirectamente, sobre o fim das empresas como as concebemos ainda hoje, todos eles escrevem sobre novas relações entre criadores, produtores e compradores e, sobretudo, sobre as novas relações que existirão entre quem vai constituir as entidades futuras, as task-forces, de criadores e produtores.

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Há momentos o cirandar pela net levou-me a esta citação:

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"This, I believe, is what separates the new networked thinking from industrial era doctrine. Peter Drucker said "In the knowledge economy all staff are volunteers, but our managers are trained to manage conscripts". Dan Pink pointed out that 'management' is an invented technology from the 1850s, and that "management leads to compliance, but only self-direction leads to engagement". "

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E páro... e recordo o que li ontem em "Complexity and Management":

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"A complex adaptive system consists of a large number of agents, each of which behaves according to its own principles of local interaction. No individual agent, or group of agents, determines the patterns of behavior that the system as a whole displays, or how those patterns evolve, and neither does anything outside of the system. Here self-organization means agents interacting locally according to their own principles, or “intentions,” in the absence of an overall blueprint for the system.
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Kauffman’s ... shows how the dynamics of a self-organizing network consisting of a number (N) of entities is determined by the number (K) and strength (P) of the connections between these entities.
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Kauffman is developing a notion of formative causality in which numbers and strengths of connection between entities in a system cause the patterns of behavior of that system. The patterns of behavior are not, initially anyway, caused by chance and competitive selection, on the one hand, or by an agent’s choice, on the other. No agent within the system is choosing the pattern of behavior across the system and neither is Kauffman, the simulator. Instead, that pattern emerges in the interaction between the agents, neither by chance nor by choice, but through the capacity to produce coherence that is intrinsic to interaction itself.
If this notion of causality were to apply to human organizations, its implications would be profound because it would mean that organizational change, strategic direction, is caused neither by chance nor by the choices of managers, but by the nature of interaction, relationship or cooperation between people in that organization. If one thinks along these lines, it immediately leads one to ask what managers are doing when they think they are choosing and planning their organization’s future. The notion that managers can choose what happens to their organization as a whole is so deeply ingrained that it leads to a typical response. The response is to argue that if managers cannot choose a creative outcome because it is radically unpredictable, then at least they can choose those numbers and strengths of connections, those qualities of relationship that produce the dynamics at the edge of chaos where creative change is possible. However, this misses the whole point because no agent within the system is choosing the numbers and strengths of connections for other agents in the system, or for themselves either; even if they were, this is not enough to determine the dynamic"

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Um admirável mundo novo pleno de oportunidades

Quando eu era um jovem engenheiro químico a trabalhar numa empresa da industria química, num tempo em que ainda havia dinossauros à face da Terra, uma das minhas referências era a revista Chemical Engineering Progress do American Institute of Chemical Enginners.
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Um dos documentos que guardo desse tempo é um “tutorial” com 10 “reprints” sobre o tema Estatística. O décimo artigo é um do qual me lembro muitas vezes, chama-se “Experimental design”. Nele pode ler-se:
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“The classical approach to experimentation is to study one variable at a time: varying its level over a certain range, while holding all other variables constant, and observing the effect of the response variables.”
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“This approach is not very good, however. For one thing, it is inefficient, requiring a separate set of observations for each variable and using each observation just once. It is also incapable of detecting interactions: variables acting together may have a greater or smaller effect than individual variables acting alone.”

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O que o autor (Robert E. Miller) pretendia chamar a atenção, pode ser descrito nesta sequência de figuras.

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Uma empresa quer optimizar o seu reactor no sentido maximizar o rendimento que consegue tirar de uma reacção química. As variáveis que pode manipular são o tempo de reacção (ou tempo de residência) e a pressão a que decorre a reacção. Seguindo o método que aprendemos na escola de variar uma variável de cada vez, mantendo as outras constantes temos:
À pressão testada o rendimento máximo conseguido é de 64%.
Agora, fixando o tempo de residência no valor que deu o máximo de rendimento, o ponto A, variamos a pressão em busca do máximo rendimento:
Assim, deste modo podemos concluir, de uma forma científica, que o rendimento máximo que se pode obter para esta reacção química anda em volta dos 78%
Este método só funciona para sistemas com respostas lineares. Em sistemas não lineares… nós passamos completamente ao lado se usarmos este método:

Lembrei-me desta lição ao escutar esta apresentação de John Holland sobre CAS (Complex Adaptive Systems)

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ao minuto 8:20, Holland descreve os CAS como “badly non-linear”.
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Depois, ao minuto 13:50 aparece um acetato simplesmente delicioso!
“A complex adaptive system, cas, is an evolving, perpectually novel set of interacting agents where

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• There is no universal competitor or optimum
• There is great diversity, as in a tropical forest, with many niches occupied by different kinds of agents
• Innovation is a regular feature – equilibrium is rare and temporary
• Anticipations change the course of the system.

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E para onde é que nós caminhamos?
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Deste postal “Resumo” recordo a figura:
Caminhamos para um mundo com mais incerteza, mais instabilidade, mais volatilidade, mais variedade, … uma autêntica floresta tropical… (ver no vídeo, ao minuto 9:50, o que Holland diz sobre a variedade de uma floresta tropical)
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E voltar a recordar as proposições do acetato de Holland:

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• There is no universal competitor or optimum
• There is great diversity, as in a tropical forest, with many niches occupied by different kinds of agents
• Innovation is a regular feature – equilibrium is rare and temporary
• Anticipations change the course of the system.
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Em sintonia com o postal “Efficiency and utility: an evolutionary perspective”, em sintonia com a promoção do foco, da atenção, do sonho na eficácia, na criação de valor, na diversidade, na diferença…
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Admirável mundo novo pleno de oportunidades com o fim da ditadura da eficiência que tudo tenta uniformizar.

O animal adaptativo

Já não me recordo como foi, mas por causa do meu costume de pesquisar as fontes bibliográficas cheguei a um livro interessante “The social atom – Why the rich get richer, cheaters get caught, and your neighbor usually looks like you” de Mark Buchanan.
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Uma vez que prego a descrença nos acasos e a crença na necessidade de mergulhar e procurar os padrões de comportamento que se escondem abaixo da superfície da realidade, foi com gosto que apreciei a designação do primeiro capítulo “Think Patterns, Not People”. Quem me conhece sabe o quanto comungo da máxima “A culpa é do sistema”
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“The central idea of this book is that the only way to understand a sudden explosion of ethnic nationalism, a peculiar link between women’s education and birth control, entrenched racial segregation, and a host of other important or just plain interesting social phenomena – in financial markets, in politics, in the world of fashion – is to think of patterns, not people.”
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O livro faz referência ao artigo “Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality (The El Farol Problem), por W. Brian Arthur.
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Alguns trechos do livro, tendo em conta o artigo, são:
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“… the way people make most decisions has little to do with logic, and a lot to do with using simple rules and learning by trial and error. In particular, people try to recognize patterns in the world and use them to predict what might come next.”
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“… people tend to hold a number of hypotheses in their heads at once, and to act on whichever seems to be making the most sense at the time.”
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Agora vem uma citação que parece retirada de Karl Weick: “One of the best ways to go about a task, anything from putting up some shelves to finding a job, is often to just get started, even if you have no clear idea of the best way to proceed. You try something, then you learn and adapt. “The world,” as Jacob Bronowski once put it, “can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.” Following this way of thinking, Arthur replaced rationality with a view of people as acting on the basis of simple theories, while adapting along the way.”
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“… we’re adaptive rule followers, rather than rational automatons. But the model is surprisingly realistic.”
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“We are alive today because our ancestors had hardwired into their behavior a set of simple rules for making decisions that gave pretty good results – enough for their survival – but have little to do with rational calculation.”
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Capítulo após capítulo deste livro, dou comigo a repetir a frase “I love this game”.
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Aprecio esta flexibilidade mental. Cada vez mais acredito que o mundo é composto por paisagens adaptativas (fitness landscapes, business landscapes), que se movimentam cada vez mais rapidamente e que são implacáveis com estruturas lentas, ultrapassadas e agarradas a direitos adquiridos.

Um país como um "complex adaptive system"

Este artigo da revista Long Range Planning: "Strategy as Order Emerging from Chaos: A Public Sector Experience" de Elizabeth McMillan e Ysanne Carlisle, descreve bem o que sinto sobre a vida dos sistemas complexos, nomeadamente dos países e das empresas:
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"human organisations are dynamic feedback systems, and that research about the nature of these systems should be applicable to organisations"
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"Self-organising principles drive the creation of complex dynamical systems whether physical, biological, ecological, social or economic. If they also adapt and learn from their experiences then
they become complex adaptive systems. A laser beam, for instance, is a self-organising dynamic system, which adapts in response to physical changes, but it does not learn from this process. Complex adaptive systems that learn from their experiences actively seek to be opportunistic, trying to use their own internal dynamic models of the world to anticipate the future. These models are highly active and changing as the system constantly tries them out and tests them as part of an ongoing process."
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"First, organisations are non-linear webs of human interactions and feedback loops, and are capable of stable, chaotic and highly unstable behaviours. If an organisation is too stable it can ossify, but if it is too unstable it can disintegrate. Successful organisations work between these two conditions or states, in what Stacey called ‘the chaos zone’. This has implications for managers seeking to sustain competitiveness in changing environments. Rather than seeking to control their organisations to maintain equilibrium coupled with incremental change and innovation, they need to adopt a non equilibrium approach that interacts with their internal and external environments and embraces more flexible and adaptive models of change and innovation.
Second, Stacey defines chaos as ‘in its scientific sense an irregular pattern of behaviour generated by well-defined nonlinear feedback rules commonly found in nature and human society’. Systems in a chaos state are very sensitive to small changes and differences can be amplified over time, and it is thus impossible to predict their long term future. This challenges the notion that the future is to some extent predictable or amenable to long term planning systems.
Third, while chaos may be unpredictable, it has recognisable patterns which we can learn to understand and work with. Thus managers need to think differently about how they understand their organisations, seeking for patterning and using qualitative rather than quantitative data for business interpretation.
Finally, chaos and contention, along with self-organising processes of political interaction and complex learning, create new adaptive strategic directions. The implication is that being too committed to top down visions of the future carries the risk of inhibiting this complex learning and political interaction.