Technological improvement is a fact of modern life. Organizational improvement,
however, is not. B.F. Skinner, writing thirty years ago, observed
that an ancient Greek, transported to our time, would find the machines of everyday life incomprehensible. In
contrast, our Greek would feel right at home amid the bustling confusion of
organizational life – its enjoyments, disappointments, politics, petty rivalries, lofty hopes
and ineffectual decision making. Organizations have not improved much since ancient
times.
Improving a company, a school, a city, or a government is difficult because the
complexity of organizations exceed by many orders of magnitude our ability to
understand. Managers today, as always, work to solve identifiable, isolated, problems.
Sometimes managers succeed. But, often solutions fail to work over the long term or
else spawn unintended consequences that create new problems, perhaps in other
areas of the organization.
The problem of improving organizations in the face of ignorance is solvable. In fact, it
has been solved, just not by humans: Biological evolution has produced excellent
natural organizations (i.e. organisms) even though the organizations themselves are
completely ignorant of how they are put together and why they succeed.
The question we are addressing is how to apply principles of biological evolution to the
problem of organizational improvement. Central to our work is an analogy between
organizational policies and biological genes. By policy we mean an explicit or implicit
decision rule. For example, a manager might set prices by the implicit rule: Raise prices
when inventories are low, and lower prices when inventories are high. Such a policy
gives rise to a continuing stream of actions in the company and is quite comparable to a
gene, which produces a continuing stream of actions in the cell.
The creative mechanisms in biological evolution are mutation and recombination. In our
analogy, genetic mutation corresponds to policy change, intentional or unintentional.
The result of such a change, for better or worse, is a new policy. Genetic
recombination occurs when two DNA molecules mix to form a new DNA molecule. In a
company, genetic recombination corresponds to a particular kind of organizational
learning: Inter-personal learning whereby a person combines a part of someone else’s
decision rule (policy) with his or her own.
The purpose of our research is to help managers create an environment in which
beneficial policy change and learning (mutation and recombination) occur. Our
methodology combines two principle elements: Simulation and interview. The
simulations allow us to “speed up” evolution so that we can investigate what makes it
better. The interviews with people at partner organizations keeps us grounded in
reality. We anticipate talking to somewhere between three and ten people at each of
the partner organizations. The interviews will help us understand evolution in
organizations better and will also allow us to create more useful simulations. |
