Harnessing Complexity

Harnessing Complexity

Robert Axelrod and Michael D. CohenThe Free PressISBN 0-684-86717£16.99Keywords:Science, Scientific management, Organizational effectiveness

This book is an attempt to combine the experiences and approaches of three distinct fields – evolutionary biology, computer science and social design– into a framework that will help managers in the effective management of complexity, hence the subtitle Organisational Implications of a Scientific Frontier.

The authors suggest that there are a dozen central concepts that can be said to lie at the heart of complex adaptive systems. These various concepts are then used to build a framework of the working of an organisation as a whole.

This process of extending and translating established scientific concepts into organisational underpinnings then allows the authors to draw out general conclusions and lessons such as:

• arrange organisational routines to generate a good balance between exploration and exploitation;

• link processes that generate extreme variation to processes that select with few mistakes in the attribution of credit; and

• build networks of reciprocal interaction that foster trust and co-operation.

Whether such lessons can be termed a breakthrough in organisational thinking is unlikely; admittedly, organisations are complex entities, but this book may not reduce or explain this complexity for many readers; the approach is more likely to be useful to someone who already understands the scientific concepts and can therefore make his/her own connections and interpretations of the general conclusions.