The OASIS Model for Adaptive Organizations

Overview

Organizations and societies have been focused on pursuing and understanding the roles of growth often if not always neglecting the long term consequences of growth as well as its very nature.

Man-made, growth seems to derail from the rules that nature seems to persistently follow, in fact we are witnessing unprecedented growth, accelerating with regularity that has now surpassed the barriers of euphoria and surprise and is now revealing its real parasitic characteristics incrementally leading to degradation and depletion of common goods with irreversible damage to the very fabric of entire ecosystems.

Accounting the effects of the actions taken at all levels of organizations and societies pursuing growth while ensuring positive net contributions to the viability of sub and supra organizational levels becomes our mandatory duty towards the generations to come.

Science suggests that natural ecosystems tend to self-organize with specific configurations that balance the degrees of order and structure with the degrees of resilience and freedom indicating the existence of a window of viability where growth, development and evolution can arise and prosper from sustainable processes.

To achieve positive net contributions to the viability at all hierarchical levels of organizational and societal levels, should be the driving purpose for this generation and the generations to come.

Building Adaptive Organizations is about our ability to encode purpose, derive new knowledge and use all available and emerging new technologies at individual and collective level to create purposeful, nature inspired and compatible socio-technical ecosystems.

There are several forces contributing to the so-called singularity, namely computing power, cheaper storage, automation, AI. All of those forces are driven by higher levels of capability in managing and manipulating information.

As a first consequence any problem across the most diverse domains is approached and treated as an information problem, as a second consequence the acceleration in change rate and evolution of the environment forces organizations to seek more efficient ways to adapt to such pressure, organization-wide programs to improve agility and collaboration, to digitally transform entire departments, to automate communication between devices, to tackle the opportunities given by big data capabilities and new artificial discoveries, have become very popular but only in a few cases have proven to be successful, in such cases most often very successful, in most of the other instances have fallen short of their promises.

Adaptivity is a desirable capability, lately in high demand, but unfortunately, not well defined therefore not well understood.

The successful examples of adaptivity we can appreciate that at the same time exhibit solid traits of sustainable behavior remain related to the natural world and in particular in ecosystems where life has emerged and still thrives.

To define adaptivity we need to analyze nature and borrow ideas from the behavior of the hierarchical structures we find, by doing it can be easily recognized that biomimicry seems a good approach in order to lay a framework for adaptive behavior potentially able to cope with the complexity of the ever changing environment.

When looking at natural ecosystems that have been able to survive and evolve in the long term, we find congenital properties that are common to all instances leading to seemingly spontaneous or instinctive behaviors in some cases hereditary in other learned , namely, the intrinsic ability to interconnect (Open), the untaught ability to derive concepts and act with purpose (Autonomous), the inherent ability to produce synergetic, systemically emergent behavior, not derivable by the analysis of the single parts (Symbiotic), the inborn ability to learn and encode knowledge used across different domains (Intelligent), the spontaneous ability to produce holistic long term viable behavior by balancing the degree of order and the degree of freedom in the process of growth and evolution (Sustainable).

To resemble and mimic the behavior of natural environments organizations must embrace a new operational model, we propose here the OASIS Model, derived by the described key characteristics of Open, Autonomous, Symbiotic, Intelligent and Sustainable behavior that is presented as the foundation for a comprehensive conceptual framework of the key capabilities to be acquired and combined in order to achieve the required and expected adaptive behavior.

Open Organizations

Openness refers to the key concepts of Biomimicry and Open Systems Modeling in Organizations, open organizations must embrace Systems and Complexity Theory to be applied to Innovation and Change Management Processes by integrating a holistic approach to organization, business process management, and enterprise architecture through trends analysis as well as practical examples and real life applications explaining the benefits of going beyond the traditional secrecy and silo mentality and implementing modern open models of information exchange and organization.

Autonomous Organizations

Living organisms show a natural predisposition to learn from the environment and retain knowledge so that it can be applied in similar situations potentially across different domains. Organizations must similarly acquire the key capability of encoding purpose and knowledge in their strategy and operations.

Technologies are greatly contributing to the ability to leverage information and distill knowledge as never before through key capabilities such as data driven automation and machine learning and collaborations but in order to tap into the power, organizations need to be able to encode knowledge, trigger automated processes and orchestrate collaborative interactions and generate proper insights for decision making with a holistic approach.

To help with this daunting task new roles have been introduced at all level of the hierarchy such as data scientists, data architects even CDOs.

One role in particular has been gaining traction behind the scenes and has become in high demand; the business translator brings the key skill of transforming business needs into a language that is comprehensible by systems often without or with minimal intervention from IT departments, and allows to simplify the transformation process from requirements and informal habits or group routines into structured and automated procedures by leaving the proper levels of collaborative freedom at human level.

Workforce and Robotic automation play an important role and new actors have been introduced in the organization to deal with the operational and control complexities that span across multiple domains.

Symbiotic Organizations

Nature seems to follow fundamental unifying principles where single entities balance an inner, innate, propensity to nurture and advance their objectives, while fostering a shared purpose of the organization they belong to.

Such organization shows advanced properties emerging from very simple rules that when combined and observed by multiple entities give birth to behaviors that would be unimaginable when analyzing the behavior of the single parts.

Examples of this can be found in the collective behavior of simpler parts such as neurons in a brain or a single fish in a school of fish.

Understanding how natural systems behave and how phenomena such as self-organization, emergence, co-evolution are produced, can help in the daunting duty of combining the necessities and objectives of the single human with the objectives of the organization and the globalized community they both belong to; many of the innovations diffused in the last few years are heavily relying on advances in the mentioned fields, from the ability to model intelligence to the ability to model trust through the cooperation of humans and machines.

Intelligent Organizations

Able to reuse acquired knowledge and given internal and environmental resources for its “purpose”

To be truly intelligent, organizations must be able to harness the main components of modern organization intelligence; namely the individual cognitive capabilities of employees and collaborators, the collective intelligence they are able to produce when interacting with each other additionally augmented by the intelligence produced while interacting with automated systems that are becoming increasingly autonomous and able to manage with increasing rates of success cognitive complexities as new AI capabilities are developed and become publicly available.

Organizations must investigate and implement the realm of organizational cognitive capabilities, inheriting and building on previously introduced concepts such as organizational learning and modern knowledge management, with the key objective to master the art of data driven decision making using the sense-response-action-reaction paradigm with an incremental evolution approach and through the combination of individual and collective intelligence assisted by machine based intelligent processes.

Sustainable Organizations

Sustainability has become the mantra of our times, but it is often associated with one single indicator, i.e. carbon footprint, and when discussed with different perspectives and points of view tends to rely on ambiguous definitions and interpretations.

There are now over 30 solid years of research in the field of ecosystem dynamics and the integration of more traditional biological approaches with methods derived from information theory, seem to provide promising results when transformed into guiding policies.

The model proposes alternative ideas to approach the sustainability concept associated with growth and development of an organization, and provides practical examples of how methods derived from ecosystem dynamics theory can be transformed into policy and practice applicable to the most diverse disciplines

The OASIS Platform

Many of the most profitable companies are now platform-based businesses grounding their success on their ability to learn at different hierarchical levels and timescales, but this not exclusive to large companies in fact many smaller scale enterprises are gearing up and quickly learning to run platform based processes by introducing new components of the technological stack as well as new roles of the organization.

Platforms are the main ingredient to blend the human and machine factor in a data driven and process centric fashion enabling a wide variety of capabilities that would be impossible to seize with traditional practices.

The Platform allows to combine seamlessly capabilities such as collaboration, automation and intelligence by leveraging the large scale of data that can now be stored and computed at exponentially decreasing costs and applying the latest advances in computational science and AI. Companies able to ride the wave and transition to this new digital paradigm have secured tangible benefits in terms of new products, more efficiency, increased overall resilience therefore a tremendous competitive advantage opening a gap that might take years to close for followers.

It is of paramount importance to understand how the combination of collaboration and automation capabilities grants access to the power given by new technologies in terms of: computing speed, size of data being managed and communication between individuals and machines.

The OASIS Platform for Adaptive organizations helps to transform organizations by gaining power over different timescales and by encoding into the machine not only increasingly intelligent behavior but also the knowledge of the organization itself, for improved and more efficient day by day operations as well as decision making process at all hierarchical scales