Last time we looked at the way we see organisations as mechanical, clockwork structures. The reality is that organisations have never been static, clockwork structures. They have always been dynamic systems, constantly changing and evolving to better meet market needs. What allowed a clockwork model to make sense for so long was that the pace of change was slow enough to keep the cost of change relatively low. Today, as we have seen, the pace of change is increasing. This is making the cost of change more and more significant. No organisation can afford to throw away millions or tens of millions of dollars in lost productivity every year or two in a major re-organisation.

Organisations know the costs involved but they keep doing it because they see no other way to re-align the organisation to changing conditions; although I did work for one CEO who just liked to spill and fill the leadership team every year to “keep them on their toes”. They are trapped in this cycle because of this concept of the organisation as a machine.

As we have moved from the age of mechanisation to the age of knowledge and information, advances have been made in a number of fields that give us fresh, new ways to look at organisations. In particular we have the study of complex systems which began in 1948, with a paper by Dr Warren Weaver called “Science and Complexity”, and has since been carried on by organisations like the Santa Fe institute, established in the early 1980s. Complex systems are defined as systems made up of many interacting components that show emergent behaviours, like self organisation, collective behaviour and adaptation to change. Complex systems science has revolutionised fields like ecology, where ecologists now study entire ecosystems rather than individual species. Looking for the relationships between species gives us a much richer and more complete picture of how an ecosystem operates, than looking at individual species in isolation.

Other examples of complex systems include the brain (I can pick apart your brain neuron by neuron, and catalogue each one, but that tells me very little about you because all the information is in the relationship between the neurons), cities, cultures and yes, organisations.

Taking a view of the organisation as a complex system gives us a number of key advantages over the old clockwork model. To start with, they exhibit emergent behaviour. They can produce things that weren't built in from the start. In the old clockwork model, innovation comes only from the great operator up on his platform, changing the machine to produce new outputs. In a complex system, innovation emerges from interactions within the system. Innovation can come from anywhere, not just from the people in charge.

Most importantly, complex systems are not fixed. They adapt. They change. They evolve to better match their conditions. Complex systems are never static, they are always changing, experimenting and evolving.

If change occurs in a complex system like an ecosystem, you don’t need to re-design it from scratch. The system will evolve and adapt, provided it is not constrained. If an ecosystem warms, existing species will either adapt to the warmer conditions or migrate to higher altitudes where it is cooler, and new species will begin to colonise the warmer regions. Of course, if there are constraints, like no areas of sufficiently high altitude, those species that are not able to adapt to warmer temperatures have nowhere to go and will die out.

When a tree falls in a forest, it doesn’t burn itself to the ground and rebuild from scratch. Existing saplings on the forest floor will compete for the newly available opportunity and the winner will join the canopy.

Complex systems are adaptive systems. They will adapt to change automatically, unless they are prevented from doing so by some sort of constraint.

Evolutionary Organisations

Freed of their constraints, organisations, like all complex systems, can naturally evolve, adapt and innovate. This is the Evolutionary Organisation.

Tony Ponton and Phil Gadzinski pioneered this approach in their book “Govern Agility” -

“Dynamically Adaptive Organisations 1: organisations that are dynamically evolving, changing, and adapting to meet the difficulties of the internal and external VUCA environments that enterprises must navigate every day in order to weather and thrive through the storms of disruption.”

Ponton & Gadzinski - Govern Agility 2024

I prefer the term Evolutionary to "Dynamically Adaptive” because it gives a better intuitive sense of what is happening.

Organisations are made up of people, not cogs and gears. People, being complex, adaptive systems themselves, are naturally creative and innovative. They naturally adapt to cope with change. Therefore an organisation that is able to harness that creativity and adaptability is also able to adapt and evolve as conditions change.

An Evolutionary organisation is always changing. Rather than change in large, infrequent bursts like a clockwork organisation, in an Evolutionary organisation change is constant.

We look at organisational change with fear and trepidation. We see it as difficult and something that creates resistance. Something that needs to be managed and controlled. This is because we apply that change using a clockwork model - large, disruptive change that is applied from above, where workers on the ground see little benefit themselves. The machine may run better but the individual cogs may be working much harder than they were before.

Evolutionary change is different. Evolution is not directed top down but emerges bottom up. Evolutionary change benefits those doing the work as much as it benefits the organisation as a whole. Imagine everyone in the organisation free to innovate to improve the way they work, and improve the products and services they work on. Imagine all those tiny changes multiplying and scaling as they move through the organisation. Welcome to the Evolutionary Organisation.

Next time we will look at the key characteristics of the Evolutionary Organisation and how they interact to overcome the constraints we place on the organisations we lead.