CONCEPTS & METHODOLOGIES

In an ever-changing landscape, it does not matter what type of organization exists or the nature of the work that it performs or where it is located, it is subjected to so many areas of rapid change that it has no choice but to learn to become more adaptive. Management structures must become as self-organized as possible. Information networks must become more the means of control for managers. To achieve these objectives we create and develop specific approaches, methods, tools and the training for their appropriate application tailored to the specificities of our customers within their environments. The following concepts and methods form the basis for this approach.

DISTRIBUTED STRUCTURES

Smaller, more numerous units with greater responsibility and flexibility to create interactions that result in synergies;

FEEDBACK LOOPS

Establish both formal and informal information systems that test and report on results, discuss what works best and what might be tried to improve things. Keep the good, minimize and then eliminate the poor and learn from both!

GROWTH

Simple interactions between working units that are otherwise independent yield, incrementally, to more complex structures to accomplish mutual tasks or new tasks within the overall organization. The new structure will pause to consolidate its new purpose and responsibility, and then continue to grow as required by circumstance.

DIVERSITY

Increasing the diversity of thought, backgrounds and areas of expertise within an environment of open and frank discussion greatly increases the ability for an organization to adapt and innovate. Maximizing the fringes stimulates and energizes the core!

MULTIPLE APPROACHES

Pursue as many possible ways as resources permit in solving problems, looking for solutions and achieving objectives. One optimizes results when one allows the better approaches to emerge from the organic process of co-evolution.

NEGATIVE RESULTS

Error, whether random or deliberate, must become an integral part of the overall creative process. Co-evolution can be thought of as systematic error correction management.

CREATIVE TENSION

Enough imbalances must permeate an organization to allow for spontaneity and improvisation as this promotes and develops adaptability, the key to success in a changing landscape.

BOTTOM UP CONTROL

When everything is connected to everything else in a distributed network, everything happens at once. Overall control must arise from the most humbly interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command.

CHANGE CHANGES ITSELF

Complex systems coordinate change. When large complex systems are the product of other complex systems, then each system begins to influence, and ultimately, change their organization as well as the organization of the other systems it is part of. Co-evolution, as it might be defined formally, is about how the rules that over time govern organizational change, change over time! One needs self-changing rules to maximize the output of the natural outcome of competing interests in an ever-changing environment.