About complex adaptive systems (CAS)
And the limits of their application to organisational management.
Carmichael and Hadzikadič define complex adaptive systems as follows:
Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) is a framework for studying, explaining, and understanding systems of agents that collectively combine to form emergent, global level properties. These agents can be nearly anything, from ants or bees, to brain cells, to water particles in a weather pattern, to groups of cars or people in a city or town. These agents produce emergent patterns via correlated feedbacks throughout the system, feedback that create and fortify a basin of attraction: a persistent pattern of behavior that itself is outside of equilibrium …
These systems are so defined because they are resilient in the face of external forces, but can nevertheless also exhibit tipping points: situations where the stable system finally crosses some threshold, and begins a rapid transition to a new state.
This uncertain and dynamic transition between stability and change has been persuasively argued by many as being advantageous in surviving natural selection mechanisms in a competitive environment. Sometimes termed “operating at the edge of chaos”, Kauffman’s seminal theoretical work has found empirical support as Dual Phase Evolution (DPE), notably in the work of Paperin, Green, and Sadedin.
The key is the idea that systems survive where they are resilient against both local and global selection effects through periods of high and low connectivity between agents in the system.
During periods of high connectivity CAS agents operate more homogenously, which promotes global stability around a current basin of attraction (also known as a fitness maximum or attractor). Attractors exist where the benefits are higher, allowing the overall system to survive global selection effects in operation.
However, the dynamic nature of the environment means that any stable pattern of behaviour will become less effective as other agents learn to exploit it. To avoid this, as the environment changes over time, a CAS will transition into a low connectivity phase where agents exhibit high local variation and are responsive mostly to local selection effects. This increases the rate of change possible within the system, moving it elsewhere in the overall system landscape in search of a new attractor where it will stabilise once more.
[Note: Holling’s panarchy framework is a useful way to represent the operations of DPE across multiple levels of hierarchy, and we will discuss his approach more later.]
There is a common tendency to conflate organisational behaviour with CAS dynamics. Indeed the behaviours inside organisations can and often do exhibit complex dynamics, as most famously represented in Snowden’s Cynefin framework.
However, it is perhaps more accurate to say that organisations always hold the potential to exhibit complex behaviours. It is also true that organisations often seek to constrain or eliminate this complex potential, due to the desire for a high levels of predictability that are not achievable in the emergent present of a naturally occurring CAS.
Consider the foundational elements of an organisation as we understand the term: A group formed with intentionality including goals, a boundary, components, coordination elements, and specific activities undertaken.
On the other hand, a natural complex adaptive system requires none of these elements and in fact we can represent the “traditional” organisation and a natural CAS as being polar opposites, as set out in the table below:
Most of the terms are hopefully self-explanatory, but teleogenic and teleonomous will require definition:
A teleogenic system exhibits genuine goal-directedness via conscious foresight and planning, intentionally considering future outcomes.
A teleonomous system shows apparent goal-directedness as a result of natural selection pressures, but in reality the system has a functional purpose without deliberate intent.
Teleogenic systems are the exclusive province of agents with high levels of sentience. On the other hand the classically teleonomous system is flocking behaviour of birds and other animals, where the evolved behaviour has strong survival characteristics, but not through the result of conscious choice.
Where an organisation strongly exhibits these traditional characteristics, complex behaviours will not arise within its boundaries. It is only where these structures break down, including in emergency situations, that the latent potential for complexity is activated.
On the other hand, organisations rarely operate exactly as the prescription imagined by a traditional textbook view. Employees always adapt processes, cut corners, change components on their own initiative (hello, shadow IT) and otherwise act in ways which move away from the pristine ideal of the organisation.
Further, as the advantages of CAS in surviving natural selection pressures become better known, some organisational leaders are beginning to deliberately embrace lower levels of prescriptivism and higher levels of emergence.
Management of organisations thus occupies a grey space, requiring the exploratory question to be not “Is it a CAS?” but “How much is it a CAS?”. Further complicating the assessment, the hierarchical nature of organisations means that it is entirely feasible for some components to exhibit emergent, CAS-like behaviours while others do not.
These complex interactions and assessment all need to be taken into account as we seek to build our diagnostic and response toolkit for organisational management.