Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

pose the most risk for incidents getting out of hand. The demands on a control system areinconsistent and neither set up is optimal. Complexity would suggest decentralization to buttight coupling suggests centralization to ensure rapid recovery from failure before tightlycoupled processes push the system over the brink. Suggestions that lower levels can beallowed latitude by setting decision premises by higher levels are invalid, because due to theunforeseeable nature of failures throughout the system, it is impossible to set correctdecision premises. In fact, those premises, according to Perrow, may actually becounterproductive 110 . So, decision making elites will need to balance both requirements.Managing complex organizationsThis is substantiated by recent studies. Various authors argue that models of organizationthat are based on living systems are naturally organic and adaptive. By design the interfacebetween organization and its environment is on the edge of chaos. This is in contrast to themechanistic models of bureaucracy, where discontinuous change requires a completeoverhaul of the organization if it is to survive.The problem for organization is autopoiesis. As discussed above, as with autopoieticsystems in general, organizations are open to data inflows but are closed systems with respectto information and knowledge. The system maintains its defining organization throughout ahistory of environmental perturbation and structural change and regenerate theircomponents in the course of operation. For organizations to survive however, they need toco-evolve with their environment. This requires variety, creativity and learning communities.An organization must embody enough diversity to provoke learning but not enough tooverwhelm the legitimate system and cause anarchy.These studies maintain that, like ecosystems, organizations thrive when equippedwith variety. Practically speaking, organizations (should) posses a range of coupling patterns,from tight to loose. Loosely coupled structures allow an organization to adjust toenvironmental drift, and when environmental shocks are particularly severe, loose structuresreact sluggishly, thus buying time to recover. Moderate and tightly coupled structuresprevent an organization from over-responding to environmental perturbation. Couplingpatterns, then, allow organizations to maintain relative stability in most environments andprotect the system even against severe shocks 111 .“Robust” systems are characterized by ‘rich patterns of tight, moderate, and looselycoupled linkages; chains of interdependency branch in complicated patterns across nearlyevery actor in a broad network of interaction. Such complex patterns of interaction protectthe organization against environmental shock by providing multiple paths for action. If onepattern of interdependency in a network is disrupted, the dynamic performed by thatsubsystem can usually be rerouted to other areas of the network. Such robustness makes itdifficult to damage or destroy the complex system, for complex interaction lends it amazingresilience’ 112 .The organizational form of such organic organizations reflect this. Here the keytheme is self-organization 113 . The optimal organizational form for adaptation in turbulentenvironments is seen as the “cellular” form operating in a network, an idea included in110 Perrow, p.331-34.111 Russ Marion and Josh Bacon, ‘Organizational Extinction and Complex Systems’, Emergence, 1(4),1999, p.76.112 Ibid.113 Susanne Kelly & May Ann Allison, The Complexity Advantage, How the Sciences Can Help Your BusinessAchieve Peak Performance (New York, 1999), p.5.151