The Beauty of Complex Adaptive Systems and the Beast
How to leverage the properties of your organisation for rapid and lasting change.
Being a change agent is hard work — sometimes feeling like you’re pushing water up hill. However, it doesnt need to be this way — using the properties of the organisation to your advantage, one person, or small group of people can alter the fundamental fabric of the system in which they belong.
Nowhere can this been seen with such devastating beauty, than with the reintroduction of wolves back into Yellowstone park in 1995, initiating a trophic cascade with the most dramatic and stunning consequences:
In short, the introduction of the wolves reduced the number of deer, which in turn enabled the wild flowers and vegetation to grow back on the river banks (areas where the deer could easily be hunted by the wolves) causing the rabbit, hare and mouse population to return. This allowed the indigenous tree population to explode, creating a niche and materials for beavers to build habitats for ducks, musk rats, & otters (beavers are nature’s engineers after all). This in turn created an ecosystem for weasels, bears and badgers, which bought back the eagles.
The consequence being that rivers changed course — the ground now bound so tightly with flourishing vegetation and ecosystems eroded less, introducing a cascade of nature that flowed far beyond the boundaries of the packs of wolves, down into the river valley.
The learnings here are both stark and simple.
Avoid being overwhelmed by the seemingly robust man made hierarchies — even better ignore them — because the influence these structures actually have on the organisation dissolve into nothing, if you can understand — like the ecologists of Yellowstone, what stimuli can initiate the kind of change cascade that propels the ecosystem forward.
How does this apply?
What are the properties of the organisation you work in? Is it built for robustness, that is to stand firm in the face of change? Or is it resilient, maintaining its core functions whilst changing?
Understand the interactions between the different parts of an organisaton. After all, the performance of an organisation is dicated by the product of its interactions — not the sum of its parts. How do people commmuicate? What is the nature of their interactions? How could this be systemically improved?
A common pattern for improving interactions between different parts of the organisation is through colocation. This alone can leave a real and impacting change. Similarly, mapping the social structures that the organisation has (as opposed to the hieracrchical structures imposed upon them) can show the true centers of influence (post to follow on this)
To conclude…
Don’t be the eroding, meandering river, that eats away at the constitution of the system in which you live:
Be the wolf.
P.S. I always wanted to end a blog post like that :)
