The World of Complex Adaptive Systems
Ever wonder why the performance of organizations is so often surprising? Why strategic plans so often fail to produce their desired results? Why forecasts are so often erroneous?
The scientific answer is that all social organizations are ‘Complex Adaptive Systems’ (CAS). That’s right, all social organizations – including families, companies, communities and countries – are CAS.
That sounds like jargon, but it simply means all our social organizations are ‘complex’ because they exhibit surprising (‘non-linear’) behavior. They are ‘adaptive’ because they continually evolve based on feedback and learning. And they are ‘systems’ because the parts continuously interact and affect each other over time, and they are coherently organized around some purpose.
The single most important thing to understand about CAS is that they cannot be precisely predicted or controlled. Because the ‘agents’ who make up the system have choice and continually reorganize themselves through shifting patterns of relationship, their behavior is ‘emergent’ and therefore unpredictable.
That’s why most strategic plans never produce their desired outcomes. Because stuff just happens.
Successful organizations understand how a CAS manifests its behavior, and how to effectively influence that behavior through appropriate interventions. So that’s a big part of what we teach.
How does a CAS manifest its behavior?
To greatly simplify it, in two key ways.
First, through the complex interrelationships and interactions of:
1. the ‘initial conditions’ in place at the ‘start time’ of the system (which continuously ‘refresh’, just as the ancient Greeks said you can’t step in the same river twice)
2. the rules under which the system operates (internal and external, written and assumed, like ‘don’t make the boss look bad’)
3. the relationships among the agents and quality of their interactions.
Second, through the quality and flow of information and meaning through the organization. Specifically:
1. the strength and coherence of the ‘identity’ of the agents in the system. That’s how we view ourselves, what we value, what we hope to achieve, how we treat each other. Identity is what motivates us to act, and to a great extent, determines how we act, because our actions have to be consistent with how we see ourselves.
2. the networks over which information flows. CAS can only ‘self-organize’ to accomplish their goals if they a timely and effective way of sharing information and meaning.
So leadership – whether positional or collective – can significantly influence outcomes by adjusting those initial conditions it can influence, challenging and changing (or breaking!) rules, strengthening relationships, forging identity and optimizing networks.
How, exactly? Well, that’s what you learn and practice in one of our workshops.
