More Lessons for Business From the Natural World
April 01, 2011
The natural world: Is it a metaphor for management, or a paradigm for a new generation of leadership? Once again I'm writing this week's interactive column on the road, this time from an Ernst & Young conference in San Francisco called Embracing Complexity: Exploring the Application of Complex Adaptive Systems to Business. By coincidence, I'm here within a week of devoting my regular Vast Press column to the question of whether business has anything to learn from adaptive systems and other aspects of the natural world. Many of the luminaries of this fascinating field are here, as well as corporate delegates eager for the buzz on the latest and most interesting thinking about the structure of organizations, markets and economies. Intel is here, along with McDonnell Douglas, Nortel, Hewlett-Packard, Cummins Engine, Southwestern Bell, Conoco, Underwriters Labs and dozens of other far-flung outfits. Perhaps the most unlikely conferees are here from the U.S. military, including a three-star Marine general who made the rather startling announcement to this group that the biological models arising from complexity theory one day may replace -- indeed ought to replace -- the linear command-and-control model of the battlefield that has persisted for generations. In the interests of interactivity, though, I'd like to turn the floor over to my readers, as I do in this space every week, for another round of reaction to the question of using biological systems as a model for business. And I'd like to lead off with a thoughtful reality check from one of the leading figures in this area, whose book, Leadership and the New Science, has played a strong role in the formulation of my thinking on this subject --and, if you'll accept the recommendation, might do the same in yours. Subj: Biological metaphors for business Date: 96-07-17 16:22:37 EDT From: simpleway@msn.com I was delighted to see the detailed coverage you gave to ... the concept of self-organization. Since I'm out there pushing the biological metaphor for rethinking organizations, I wanted to make you aware of some of the problems I observe in misappropriations of biological models for organizational thought. To begin, there are significant differences in understanding within biology. Deterministic, reductionist, Newtonian principles are rampant in molecular biology. So when people speak about the DNA or genes of the organization (a large consulting firm tried this and it flopped) -- they're simply transferring a search for new control mechanisms to organizational thought ... When any of us reach for biology-based understandings, we can find either newer systems models or older deterministic examples. Biology embraces both approaches right now. Also, I see a great deal of ``paradigm layering'' -- where people seize upon a biological concept such as genes and then simply overlay it on their traditional approaches to organizations. Very few of us are deep enough into the new biology to understand how it affects everything we've held sacred in our beliefs about organizations, human nature and the way the world works. So people take a concept like leadership and apply a recent scientific finding about brain functioning and come up with a very deterministic model for who can be an effective leader. They've moved from new biology back to a deterministic universe. I get to see an enormous and distressing number of these applications. Once we're deep into the new biology ... but we realize that concepts such as ``leader'' don't even apply. Lastly, we seem to have developed -- both through Discover channel viewing and general beliefs -- a view about biological truth that is quite far from the world that is being painted by new biologists. You quoted Lynne Setzer, and it's through her work that we see the need for a fundamental reshaping of our ideas about competition, struggle, diversity. People think they know biology and the way the natural world functions because they've seen bighorn sheep locking horns on PBS. We've created corporate cultures of senseless competition (editorializing here) and justified foolish levels of in-fighting, self-promotion and bombastic behavior (not editorializing, just reporting the facts) because we think this is the way ``nature'' functions. I see a great need for us as a general populace to acknowledge how different the world appears through the eyes of new biologists, to seek to learn about it in depth, and to cease taking isolated cases or biological facts and merely slapping them on to our existing beliefs. Learning to see the world anew requires great thought, discipline, and good companions who keep us honest. Thanks for creating more space for this discussion. Margarete Pressley Cribbs Dr. Pressley: You've locked into an issue that is very much on the minds of the people attending the conference from which I'm writing: the concern that ``experts'' are misappropriating fashionable labels for traditional concepts. Just as bad, I've lately seen the terminology of the natural world applied to anachronistic business concepts -- for instance, the entire notion of what constitutes competition and ``survival of the fittest.'' The new biologists are keenly aware that species prosper far more through cooperation than competition, just as we are finding that organizations flourish if they emphasize alliance over strife. Rams locking horns on the Discovery Channel, after all, provide no covers for managers acting like animals. Thanks for the thoughts. Subj: Self Organization Date: 96-07-17 20:30:52 EDT From: asdevany@iron.ss.uci.edu Yes, business can learn from biology. I don't think it is structure that one looks to biology for; structure follows function and the cell is too specialized to be a good model. An organism of many cells may be better. And here the crucial issue is a poised adaptiveness, maintained much like the immune system. A wide repertoire of potential behaviors are maintained, each in small number ... Good organizations show the dynamics of a living thing, and that is described by a power law; like the music of Bach and Stapleton there is novelty and variation within a patterned structure. It is well-known that price changes in the stock market follow a power-law distribution. The size distribution of firms follows a Pareto law (the economist's term for a power law). I show that motion picture revenue dynamics follow a power-law distribution in a forthcoming Economic Journal article -- just like brain activity, heart beats and just about every other human dynamic. Arthur De Vany Department of Economics University of California Irvine, CA Dear Sir: Have you ever been to the Imaginarium in San Francisco? There's an exhibit underway there called Turbulent Landscapes. Among the displays is a large pile of grain, constantly being supplemented with new grain from a hopper. The pile continually breaks down in a succession of small and large avalanches as the supply of grain surpasses the point of criticality. It was fascinating, I must tell you, to watch this otherwise prosaic demonstration while listening to one of the keynote speakers here, Sunni Alia of the Sante Fe Institute, hold forth on the physics involved. And, to pick up on your point, he described the cycle of small and large avalanches in precisely the same terms you used in your e-mail to me. The shape of the curve depicted by this activity, he explained, was a power law -- very nearly the same curve generated by the life cycles of products and firms. So maybe in the end the natural world is a bit more than a metaphor for management. Thanks for the note. Visit the Front Lines Center.
