Incorporating Complex Adaptive System (Essay Sample)

Incorporating Complex Adaptive System
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Incorporating Complex Adaptive System
For the last approximately 3 decades, the speed with which business cycle has been escalating is quite dramatic. There are significant changes that are taking place quite faster than the past product cycles while markets have turned out to be near unpredictable such that the traditional management paradigms are not capable of maintain at the rate. At our company, this had been a notable issue, transiting from the traditional to the adopted current organizational management styles was quite slow. The CEO would take time before adapting to any proposed complex adaptive system something that made the company lag behind in this industry. As a software development community, the CEO realized that he had to react to these transitions and was able to reduce software development cycle from 3 to 4 weeks down to 1 to 2 weeks. These were achieved by application of Agile development methods like Scrum or Kanban. The quick yet flexible address to the ever changing organizational needs have provided achievements recently like continuous deployment. After understanding these modern software development methods of management as well as its technical perspective, the CEO could now confidently do away with traditional way of doing things like bottleneck of software development and company started improving.
According to Stacy (2011), Agile methods are derived from complex adaptive systems. It is worth noting that Complex Adaptive System has been an area of research in several disciplines for the last two decades. It uses the philosophies of internal organizing teams and offers an environment in which the internal organization can develop.
Two major issues that were found in this company when reduced to specific department, although contributed by the CEO’s decisions and felt as complexity in chain of command were; significance issues in the administration and human resource departments in dealing with Agile software development teams due to the fact that they are built around management paradigms which are known to be often conflicting; and secondly, the increased speed needs coupled with failure to convert the quick development cycles realized organizational value, hence sustainable competitive advantage is often difficult to deal with.
It was through these issues that the company CEO used consultants to come up with solutions by exploring other possible business structures that would offer the advantages of quick reaction to all departments of the company. Together with the Agile community, we were able to come up with solutions to these issues. Our company was totally made around the values of complex adaptive systems which enabled a quick business approach.
We realized that the solutions we came up with had common characteristics which among others include; their management is founded on long term organizational value and adaptation; they adapt a catalyst method of leadership; they encourage an open communication method; there is consistent learning from experiments; their members specialize in their respective skills and; they comprehend the system as a whole.
In understanding the organization as a whole, McKelvey (2002) says that enterprises are naturally designed as complex adaptive systems. The organizations members comprehend and manage the business as a complex adaptive system instead of treating it like it were a steam machine propelled by mechanic action as well as pressure. The company therefore acts as a cross sectional team and collaborate heavily to get higher goal. They also strive with the ‘us and them’ mentality and value highly the mutual understanding across its different departments.
Another vital concept is identified by William (2007) is open environment. This is the ability to deal with unaccepted circumstances. The company was able to develop a vibrant physical as well as virtual environment that creates transparency and openness apart from investing in communication systems where various people share and collaborate. According to Stacey (2007), the way communication is done matters more than what is communicated. The CEO was therefore advised to emphasize on patterns of communication and encourage a culture that pushes collaboration as well as sharing within the organization’s departments. The organization succeeded in adapting to the unexpected by abandoning the narrow communication paths that do not achieve communicating expected information and set up unstructured, open communication paths like open space events that enable an open exchange for knowledge and ideas.
The last concept entails management and adaptation in the long run. According to Senge (1990), for an organization to adapt with the ever changing managerial aspects, it should think in terms of long term even when operating in the short run. He also maintains that management should be done upon a business long term value as opposed to short term target. The CEO followed this concept and based his...