The principles of change

Automotive Manufacturing & Production, March, 1997 by Rick Dove

In moments of deep truth I suspect it's really because I have insufficient skills for perfect static planning. I can't play the chess game forty-seven moves in advance so I want my hands on the controls as the creation takes form. I know things will happen that I haven't foreseen or would fail to convey to someone else, and that I'll need to be there to make the corrections and guide the result to the end I envision.

There are, fundamentally, two completely different management styles. One builds things that are static, requiring constant attention and energy to remain useful and relevant over time. The other builds a self-organizing system capable of dealing with unforeseen challenges; able to adjust, correct, and augment its own capabilities to meet the needs of new environments - it evolves. From the designer/builder's perspective, one is under control and the other is out of control.

If you've been following this essay series you'll know that we are now searching for business design principles, principles that can guide the design of highly adaptable business practices, processes, strategies, structures, cultures, products, services, and whatever else it takes to keep the business entity viable and successful in a changing environment.

Author Kevin Kelly has done this on a broader scale in Out of Control (Addison-Wesley; 1994). He explores adaptable natural systems like bee hives, prairie ecologies, and the evolution of species, and also looks at man-made systems like computer viruses, the Internet, and artificial life. In the final chapter he postulates a set of nine common laws at work in natural evolving systems: Distribute being. Control from the bottom up. Cultivate increasing returns. Grow by chunking. Maximize the fringes. Honor your error. Pursue no optima; have multiple goals. Seek persistent disequilibrium. Change changes itself.

These so-called laws should be checked out in their entirety, in the book. They are useful inasmuch as they can aid in our pending examination of adaptable business systems and the extraction of the physics at work.

The principles we seek may well end up to parallel and include many if not all of the principles he has found. We will, however, be focused on business systems and business environments, and will build a physics of adaptability and a descriptive language that speaks in business terms rather than biological terms.

Kelly goes out of his way to recognize that the nine laws he offers are not the only laws necessary to make complex sustainable systems; but he suggests that "these principles are the broadest, crispest, and most representative generalities" of all the observations noted in the science of complexity. Complexity. That word keeps coming back whenever we talk about highly adaptable systems. Actually, it's skulking in the background whenever we talk about today's business environment. Nobody wants to hear it but it's right there in front of you. Business today is a complex endeavor, even when it looks simple. Your business operates in an environment that is re-shaped daily by the interactions of countless independent unpredictable events. We're not talking about supportive events like individual end-user sales transactions, we're talking about the effects of cataclysmic technology (overnight delivery, microprocessors, Internet, virtual reality), the effect of broad-reach communications on markets (Intel's microprocessor fiasco), the actions of governments (end of cold war, NAFTA, European Union, emergence of China), and much more in this vein.

The issue is not one of the total corporation or organization. The same complexity scales to the favored-vendor and plant level. Which plant stays open and which one gets closed. Which gets the new investment and which doesn't. Which gets the hot product to build and which gets the Edsel. These are not straight-forward, simple decisions that happen to a vendor or a plant - they are the result of countless events at the plant, in the market, with the labor union, among the management, in materials science, with acts of government, and in many other areas that can suddenly shift the balance to a completely different point.

If you're part of the plant and you don't like where things went, who's to blame? The environment you operate in is so complex that you generally have the most single-point leverage on the outcome. In complex systems control really is bottom up - no matter what the org chart says or who issues the decisive memo. Learn how to adapt and learn how to read the forces of change - move out of the way, move into the light, but keeping moving. Read Kelly's book and learn his laws. They are at work in your environment whether they are recognized or not. If you abdicate responsibility for understanding them they will work against you.

"You can't teach a kid to ride a bike in a seminar" said David Sandler. If you want to understand the principles of adaptability at work in your work, consider being part of the Discovery Workshop series this year. If you qualify as a site, you'll see them in your terms. As a participant on the site teams, you'll see them objectively as generic principles in someone else's environment. Either way or both, you won't just read about it, you'll be building your own physics of adaptability.