Complexity and Organizational Learning, Part I

According to neuroscientists such as Hanson and Mendius (2009) and organization development theorists such as Patton (2011), the evolutionary human brain is hardwired to seek order, stability, meaning, and patterns. This inherent tendency feeds our individual and collective illusion of certainty and control. Such illusions are comforting, and often serve as necessary pretense for human action. As it turned out, the evolutionary human brain positioned our distant ancestors for survival in a complex world. Left unchecked, however, our human illusions of certainty and control severely challenge our contemporary ability to adapt along the ever accelerating edge of existential change and disruption in the 21st century.

As an organization development (OD) article, let us turn this mindful lens onto the contemporary organization. Spend a few weeks in most any organization today and you are sure to hear talk about goals. Dig just a little deeper and you will come across strategic plans, logic models, budget forecasts, and the like. This is our evolutionary human brain in organizational form; the organization assumes that the factors determining what will happen in the life of the organization are relatively knowable, ordered, and controllable. Is this too an illusion?

To be fair, organizations operate in a causal, linear, and rational world - to a point. Complexity theorists accept that reality is not pure chaos - although we are less in control than we think (Patton, 2011). Postmodernists grant that an objective reality may exist - although it cannot be known outside its conditions of emergence (Levers, 2013). If we pay someone to come into the office, we can be reasonably certain that they will show up tomorrow - although they may not.

Each of these qualifiers supports an important premise for organization development: the notion of a stable and controllable organizational future is - in significant ways - out of touch with the emergence of complexity (Wiltbank, Dew, Read, & Sarasvathy, 2006). The traditional approach to organization development, with its logic of causality, linearity, and rationality, is incongruent with the dynamic and volatile environment that the contemporary organization experiences (Pisapia, Jelenc, & Mick, 2016). How then - fearless OD practitioner - should the contemporary organization respond?

Organizational learning is one key strategy to generate adaptive solutions to complexity. According to Marshak and Bushe (2018), organizational learning and adaptation emerge through experimentation and iterative moves carried out by participants throughout the system.

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Hanson, R., & Mendius,R. (2009). Buddha’s brain: The practical neuroscience of happiness, love and wisdom. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.

Levers, M. (2013). Philosophical paradigms, grounded theory, and perspectives on emergence. Sage Open Journal. 3(4). Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244013517243.

Marshak, R. and Bushe, G. (2018). Planned and generative change in organization development. OD Practitioner, 40(4), 9-15.

Patton, M. (2011). Developmental evaluation: Applying complexity concepts to enhance innovation and use. New York, New York: The Guilford Press.

Pisapia, J., Jelenc, L., & Mick, A. (2016). The foundations of strategic thinking: Effectual, strategic, and causal reasoning. In Raguz, I., Podrug, N., & Jelenc, L. Neostrategic management: An international perspective on trends and challenges (pp. 45-56). Switzerland: Springer International Press.

Wiltbank, R., Dew, N., Read, S., & Sarasvathy, S. (2006). What to do next? The case for non-predictive strategy. Strategic Management Journal, 27(10), 981-998.