Landscape Design: Designing for Local Action in Complex Worlds

Abstract

In recent years, the management literature has increasingly emphasized the importance of self-organization and “local action” in contrast to prior traditions of engineering control and design. While processes of self-organization are quite powerful, they do not negate the possibility of design influences. They do, however, suggest that a new set of design tools or concepts may be useful. We address this issue by considering the problem of landscape design—the tuning of fitness landscapes on which actors adapt. We examine how alternative organizational designs influence actors' fitness landscapes and, in turn, the behavior that these alternative designs engender. Reducing interdependencies leads to robust designs that result in relatively stable and predictable behaviors. Designs that highlight interdependencies, such as cross-functional teams, lead to greater exploration of possible configurations of actions, though at the possible cost of coordination difficulties. Actors adapt not only on fixed landscapes, but also on surfaces that are deformed by others' actions. Such coupled landscapes have important implications for the emergence of cooperation in the face of social dilemmas. Finally, actors' perceptions of landscapes are influenced by the manner in which they are framed by devices such as strategy frameworks and managerial accounting systems.

Integrating Acquired Capabilities: When Structural Integration is (Un)Necessary

“…The link between technology and organization has been the backbone of various theories of organization design, in the guise of the principle that specific patterns of interdependence map onto specific forms of co-ordination (Levinthal & Warglien, 1999;Mintzberg, 1980;Sanchez & Mahoney, 1996;Thompson, 1967;Williamson, 1985). Yet, some of the classical empirical evidence for this intuitive proposition has been severely critiqued for not establishing a clear direction of causality from interdependence to organization, and for confounding measures of the two (Perrow, 1987;Scott, 1998).…”

Coping with uncertainties via resilient supply chain framework

“…Kauffman proposed a stochastic procedure to design fitness landscapes, which argues that a landscape can be more or less rugged depending on the distribution of fitness values and interdependences among the parts -the more complex a system, the more rugged the landscape. Kauffman's concepts have been applied in modelling organisational decision problems (Levinthal, 1997;McKelvey, 1999;Gavetti and Levinthal, 2000;Rivkin, 2000Rivkin, , 2001, new product development (Frenken, 2001), organisational design (Levinthal and Warglien, 1999;Rivkin and Siggelkow, 2003), strategic analysis (Gavetti et al, 2005), industrial collaboration (Schuh et al, 2008), supply chain management (Choi et al, 2001;Choi and Krause, 2006) and sustainable supply chains (Matos and Hall, 2007;Hall et al, 2012). …”

Positioning knowledge: schools of thought and new knowledge creation

“…by adopting a strategy that is best according to local searches but is sub-optimal from the perspective of a broader context (March and Simon 1958;Nelson and Winter 1982;Levinthal and Warglien 1999).…”