Organisations: Through the lens of Emergence.
Why most of our attempts at replicating the success(es) of our “hero” organisations in our companies are futile, naive even! And how organisations are Complex Adaptive Systems.
We are in constant awe of the innovation culture at Google. We all revere the autonomous teams at Netflix. We all get inspired by the result-driven nature of the small (pizza sized) teams that Amazon created. We revere such companies so much that we start attempting to replicate (or at-least in theory) their mannerisms in the hope to be able to replicate the “magic” that such organisations were able to create for themselves.
However, trying to be like a Google, Netflix or an Amazon (or any other organisation for that matter) is trying to trivialise the complex adaptive system that an organisation is. An organisation is, ultimately, made up of many individual components which are hard to replicate and difficult to reason with a reductionist approach.
“Which part of the airplane is responsible for its flight?” : Emergence
To further the reasoning, it is important to recall the concept of Emergence.
When systems as a whole function in ways that we cannot predict by looking at their individual parts — This is emergence.
Emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviours that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. In short, one cannot understand the systems with emergent properties by reducing them to their components.
An airplane can be conceptualised as being composed of various engineered parts. Each individual part is responsible for handling a single function, which it is designed for, and handling it well. But it’s not a single component (or two) that is responsible for the flight itself. It’s the complex interactions of those individual parts, as a whole, orchestrated by a fine pilot that makes it possible for the hundreds of tonnes of machinery to be able to fly. So, can one answer: “Which part of the airplane is responsible for its flight?”.
Emergence is all around us. While hydrogen and oxygen exhibit their own properties, the property of wetness is an emergent property of water (and not exhibited by either hydrogen and oxygen individually) which only emerges when hydrogen and oxygen combine in a specific manner.
Emergence, however, is not alike in all the complex systems. Given enough computational power it is possible to simulate a weak emergence wherein systems exhibit functions identifyable by fixed rules. However, doing so for strong emergence is impossible.
We can construct a computer simulation of the flocking behaviour of a group of birds (weak emergence) but not of the interplay of cells in our brains that creates consciousness (strong emergence)
— an excerpt from “The Great Mental Models”, by Rhiannon Beaubien and Shane Parrish
Building upon, individually, humans exhibit certain characteristics which are unique to themselves. The emergence lens suggests that the cumulative actions of a group of people is bigger and non-intuitive while considering the individual people’s characteristics themselves. These groups of people create a behaviour unique to an organisation, in turn, making every organisation unique in itself.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it must be a duck!
There have been ample articles, books and talks by the experts themselves on how they helped grow and lead an organisation to the success it is known for, what policies they formulated, what initiatives they ran. When Google released information about their “20 percent rule” a lot of organisations jumped at implementing them. A similar pattern happened when Google talked about “OKRs”.
Amazon’s case is no stranger to this pattern. When it attributed a lot of its success to the “2 pizza sided teams”, every other organisation, coaches alike wanted to jump and execute it.
Also, how can we forget about the famous “culture deck” from Netflix ?!?
Learning about the framework responsible behind a success story is one thing, being able to replicate it within your environment is another.
In his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter M. Senge writes:
“Practicing a discipline is different from emulating a model. All too often, new management innovations are described in terms of “best practices” of so called leading firms.
I (Peter Senge) believe benchmarking “best practices” can open people’s eyes as to what is possible, but it can also do more harm than good, leading to piecemeal copying and playing catch-up”
A butterfly flaps its wings and a typhoon is caused!
David Levy conceptualises how industries are complex, dynamic, and non-linear systems in his paper:
Firms interact with each other and with other actors in their environment, such as customers, labor, the government and financial institutions. These interactions are strategic in the sense that decisions by one actor take into account anticipated reactions by others, and this reflect a recognition of interdependence.
— David Levy, “Chaos Theory and Strategy: Theory, Application, and Managerial Implications
Explaining the nature of chaotic systems further, David highlights that small disturbances multiple over time and that such systems are extremely sensitive to initial conditions, which makes forecasting very difficult. This is a formal study in chaos theory, often known as butterfly effect, a term closely associated with renowned mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz.
So if the organisations are chaotic systems and chaotic systems are highly sensitive to their starting conditions (the nature of market at the given point of time, the people present, the scale, the developments in competitive landscape etc.), can we, with confidence, ever really be sure how the same policies will fan out in another organisation? Sure, we might be able to get some benefits out of the detailed frameworks laid out by successful organisations. The benefits might not be the same benefits that the original organisation achieved. And sometimes that’s acceptable too I guess.
Fooled by Randomness
What is even worse is when we achieve initial success by piecemeal copying of the “best practices” and convince ourselves that “we have got it right!”. We have to challenge ourselves in ascertaining how much of our initial success was skill and how much was luck.
We tend to give ourselves too much credit for something that might just be an act of luck. The reverse is also true: we beat ourselves in the event of failure, more so because in organisations there is immense pressure on the leaders and managers to lead and “to be right”. We are not that great at comprehending true randomness.
“The human mind is built to identify for each event a definite cause and can, therefore, have a hard time accepting the influence of unrelated or random factors”
— Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
All hope is lost? Not quite. In fact quite the opposite. Being aware of the complexities and uncertainties (randomness) is a strong base (some would argue the very first step even) required to be able to work around them, to be able to make better decisions to foster your company’s prosperity. If you don’t know about them, that’s a bigger problem. Because you’re just playing luck!
So what can be done? Well, one of the starting approaches is to develop a systemic (Systems Thinking) approach, to be able to see the causality among various parts of a system (more on this in the upcoming blogs), and not just trying to optimise the individual parts.
When you’re looking to get inspired by any of the industry leading “best practices”, try to get into more details. Get rudimentary. This doesn’t mean to over simplify and trivialise things. Try to codify what values would have been required to uphold the vision, what principles would have been required to bridge the values and practices to make the initiative a success. Qualify which pieces are missing in your org/team and what can be done to find/substitute them.
The more the number of teams that get involved, at a given time with such initiatives in an organisation, the better the chances of getting a holistic view and able to realise the interdependencies.
On the closing note, a decision journal goes a long way in learning what worked and what didn’t. Remember that you need to avoid getting lucky!
Organisations: Through the lens of Emergence. was originally published in Geek Culture on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.