What is the relevance of the sciences of complexity to business and business-like organizations? And how can that relevance be made useful to business? The first question is easy; the second is hard.
T. Irene Sanders does a good job in this book of making the case for relevance. She presents an intellectual history starting with the Greeks and gives background for the on-going tension between mechanical and organic perspectives of human organizations. It is well done, and there is little to quarrel with. Not many years ago these ideas were very fresh, but as a result of any number of conferences and books, the general concepts are now broadly understood, even by obdurate business managers. Try to find anyone who will argue against the proposition that businesses function as, and have many of the attributes of, complex adaptive systems, and that they are adaptive, dynamic, and embedded in multiple external environments.
The more interesting question is why so many people who accept that view nonetheless manage businesses in the traditional, mechanical, command-and-control style. Obviously, there is powerful atavistic grounding for businesses as mechanical systems. So there is a formidable gap, in this case, between knowing and doing, and no amount of restating what seems obvious will narrow that gap. I believe that those of us coming to business from the complexity world will fail to have significant impact until we realize that simply understanding the dynamics of a complex system is only a first step in making it useful for businesses.
So the question of complexity’s utility in business remains open.
There are two categories of business activities to be considered. The one on which most people focus, including most of those who wish to find utility for complexity, is in operations. There is a collection of benefits possible: efficiencies; rapid adaptation; simulations that may turn out to be a significant improvement on extrapolations; less chance for external surprises; better awareness of markets and competition; improved (or at least faster) decision making etc. This book addresses primarily those opportunities. In that sense we might quarrel with the emphasis, in the title, on the use of the term strategic, which suggests attention to the other part of business. That part deals with fundamental innovation and growth of the company in ways that are not extrapolations of what it does or improvements in how it does it. It involves reinventing the potential of the business, something that is made much more effective when based on an understanding of the business as a complex adaptive system. This is the area that I would expect to read about in the realm of strategy, so that was a disappointment in this book.
Sanders does show how complexity is a good means for describing the dynamics of business operations. But that is primarily a retrospective look—observing the events and then categorizing them. Sanders points out that, since businesses are unpredictable in detail and since the future is not an extrapolation of the present, we must develop means for coping with, rather than just reacting to, the “future.” Her approach is to look for tools for foresight, and most of them build on scans of external environments that provide an impression of underlying connections and of “perking” information, which she likens to initial conditions. She provides a detailed process for conducting such a scan, which she calls FutureScape™.
Businesses surely need means for trying to understand how the confluence of external events may challenge them and may create new opportunities. To some extent, knowing how complex adaptive systems are embedded in other complex adaptive systems may give some businesses a little more confidence that it’s worth the effort to gain that understanding—assuming that they weren’t already doing this as a matter of very common sense.
But this gets to the heart of the limitation of this book: it focuses primarily on adaptation without regard to the nature of what a business is. In that way a business cannot be considered as much more than just another kind of adaptive system, looking for niches and trying to survive. What she suggests may well provide improvements in operations of a business, but the results are unlikely to meet the high aspirations held out for strategic thinking the “complexity way.”
Looking at a business as a complex adaptive system demands that we account for something that is not a factor in “non-human” complex adaptive systems. That something might be called the identity, or purpose, of the business. The argument that businesspeople offer when encouraged to “let go” of control of their business to permit it to be adaptive is that it will fly off in all directions and become less effective. They are right. We don’t worry about an ecology doing that, because we declare that whatever an adaptive systems does is what it is supposed to do. But businesses are purposeful, and if we intend to conceive of them as complex adaptive systems, we must then pay attention to how ideas provide the purpose and the means for virtual control.
Sanders offers “the” seven principles of strategic thinking, which she presents as a combination of insight about the present and foresight about the future. A short version is:
I think that these are better characterized as strategic observing: using a different (and better) lens through which to look at the external world. But strategic thinking has to include a healthy dose of introspection as well, because it must support strategic action—making decisions. And decisions are always specific to the particular company and to the purpose and potential of that company. No amount of understanding the environment, or dynamic processes, can obviate the need to relate it back to the fundamentals of the company.
In the book, Sanders says that the purpose of strategic thinking is to “help an organization identify, respond to, and influence changes in the environment.” I wish she had expended more effort discussing the implications of the last element—influencing changes. Of the three elements, it is the only proactive one, and it is the only one likely to produce innovation.
Sanders is a fluid and graceful writer, but those attributes do not compensate for what is, essentially, a limited book. For people with little or no background in complexity, it will provide some basics, not of the science but of the reason for the science. Likewise, for business people for whom this would be an early exposure, it can be useful in drawing them into wanting to know more. But for others it falls short. I kept reading, waiting to get to the meat of her discussion of strategy, but it was not there.
BRUCE ABELL
This book describes the author’s explorations in the science of complexity, and aims at providing managers of private and public organizations with conceptual as well as practical tools to help them to cope with the continuously changing environments in which they are living. It could also be read, profitably, by a wider audience, such as students or teachers interested in a synthetic view of complex systems thinking.
The volume is divided in two parts, “Understanding and using the new science” and “The art and science of visual thinking.” The former reviews some key concepts from complexity science, while the latter describes the author’s own method (Futurescape™) designed to improve managers' visual thinking skills. These, it is claimed, are very useful in dealing with complex systems such as human organizations (“Visual thinking is the key to insight and foresight,” p. 98).
Strategic Thinking and the New Science is well written, with a lively and intense style that is fitting for its ambitious goal: “Ours is truly terra incognita ... This book is an explorer journal. It describes my journey into the new science of chaos theory and complexity and the search for what it might have to teach us about the world of people, politics and commerce. Mine is a quest to understand the nature of change and its relationship to the future, the dynamics behind the events we see and expe-rience in our everyday life” (p.3).
Suited to readers with no prior knowledge of chaos, complexity and the like, I think that this book may help to raise interest in the science of complexity among a readership that is not yet acquainted with its concepts. However, it should be pointed out that the treatment is not scientifically rigorous (I do not mean formal). It is likely therefore to be particularly attractive to people who are not concerned with rigor, but are, rather, sensitive to the beauty and power of the new concepts.
A beautiful metaphor, widely used in the first part of the volume, shows the charm and power of visual thinking: “campfires of thought.” It is used by Sanders to describe wondering about natural philosophy and science in western thought.
The first part of the book is filled with enthusiasm for the new perspectives provided by chaos theory and by the epistemological reflections triggered by it. While I share this enthusiasm, I should remark that there are perhaps too many paeans to the new science, the new perspective, the new thinking, etc. Nonlinear dynamics has greatly improved our understanding of many physical, biological and social phenomena, but it has so far provided only limited tools to control and predict the behavior of nonlinear systems, and in particular social systems such as organizations. Overemphasizing its power might be dangerous if it elicits expectations that are too great.
I would also like to have seen a more accurate treatment of some technical aspects. Although the lack of precision does not undermine the value of the arguments or the strength of the vision, it may cause some distrust in people coming from hard science or engineering disciplines. For example, one finds phrases such as: “translating the motion of planets, comets or other natural phenomena into approximate linear equations provided scientists ...” (p 56). But Newton’s equations of planetary motion are actually nonlinear (most of the equations of classical physics are linear, so the thesis is basically right, but the example is misleading). On the following page, we have: “In nonlinear dynamical systems ... a small change in a variable will create changes in another and another, because the variables are interacting constantly and changing in response to each other. ” Actually, this happens in any dynamical system, be it linear or not, so it cannot be considered a distinguishing feature of nonlinearity.
Moreover, in Chapter 3 and subsequently, the notion of initial conditions is used in a fairly nonstandard way. The notion of strange attractors also takes on, here, an unusual meaning: “a strange attractor is an issue, event or new development to which your system is sensitive” (p.76). Again, I stress that these remarks do not undermine the validity of the basic theses of the book, but it would be better to adhere to widespread definitions of technical terms such as these.
In Part One, both the role of Charles Darwin (in the brief outline of the history of science) and the concept of adaptation in complex systems theory deserve a wider treatment. On a more positive note, the author's criticism of the mechanistic approach of many total quality management programs (p. 46) is particularly appropriate.
The second part of the book emphasizes the power of visual thinking in dealing with complex situations, and describes a method to improve one’s own visual thinking skills. The author proposes a methodology to interpret the dynamics of changing environments, which is called the Futurescape. Once an issue has been defined (e.g., “new products”), a map is created where all the main factors and interactions that affect it are represented (according to a sequence of steps). Futurescape is paper based, not computer based: I suppose that the main reason may be the size of the picture, which easily becomes too large for most computer screens. The goal of the approach is that of “grasping the big picture” and of eliciting information early. Here again, an image helps: after a number of questions have been addressed and after a fairly complicated map (or a number of them) has been created, then one should leave the previous knowledge aside and “let the information float” (p.128).
As far as the second part is concerned, it would have been interesting to provide more examples of how the approach has been applied in real organizations, as well as to work out, in detail, a didactic example to illustrate how to develop a Futurescape. Finally I wish to emphasize that the book is intense and stimulating. It is certainly useful, both in getting more people involved in the science of complexity and for its practical suggestions.
ROBERTO SERRA
Irene Sanders is a strategy consultant specializing in the visual facilitation of strategic thinking. To the extent that she writes from her own experience, her book is eloquent and practical. The second half of the book, “The Art and Science of Visual Thinking,” provides a good overview of the importance of visualization in developing strategic insight, as well as outlining the Futurescape™ process and its associated techniques. Many of these tools and approaches will be useful to executives who are scanning and visioning.
The first half of the book, unfortunately, does not do the second half justice. Entitled “Understanding and Using the New Science,” the entire section is based on an implicit assumption that chaos theory provides the organizing principles for how the business environment works. Complex adaptive systems are first mentioned on p. 68, and complexity theorists and theories are represented by a single reference to Stuart Kauffmann.
The first 50 pages of the book are dedicated to outlining the history of mechanical, clockwork thinking. Although in the first few chapters an attempt is made to explain that cosmologies and philosophies construct how we know what we know (or, more technically, how worldviews coevolve with methods of enquiring to co-produce epistemologies), this is not good enough reason to force readers interested in new science to plough through 50 pages of ancient philosophy. By p. 50 this reader had concluded that the title of the book should have been: “Management and the Old Science”.
Things improved in Chapter 2, where chaos theory and the idea of the world we live in as a complex adaptive system emerged (although this E- word is seldom mentioned in the book), and by p.70 we actually have a useful summary of the metaphorical implications of chaos theory, and one sentence on the implications of complexity theory.
In Chapter 3, the idea of “perking” is introduced, although why the word “emerging” was not good enough I am not sure. A phrase from p.76 illustrates what I mean: “First, these underlying or perking conditions may erupt into a powerful strange attractor and catch you off your guard, giving you little or no time to influence what is emerging.”
The most useful tip at this stage is that the recognition of a system and its initial conditions affords managers an opportunity to influence what is beginning to take shape. There is no discussion, however, of how businesses as complex adaptive systems co-evolve with each other and their environment, and several significant opportunities are missed to cover hot topics in the new sciences, such as:
Even as a work on business strategy this book is sorely lacking in strong grounding in more recent thinking, be it from views that are resource based, learning based or complexity based, or drawing on the configuration, cultural, cognitive, power, positioning, environmental or other strategy schools. The author was adept in selecting a powerful title, but the difficulty with that is delivering on what could be an agenda the size of a few Encyclopaedia Britannicas.
To sum up, although the book’s title promises much, the substance of Strategic Thinking and the New Science is disappointing. Irene T. Sanders should take this opportunity to truly acquaint herself with the real science in the new sciences, as well as the powerful new philosophies and management theories emerging from the supercritical soup of ideas in the field. I suggest that she attend the next NECSI conference, and prepare by reading several of the other excellent books reviewed within these covers. There, other attendees and speakers, I included, would welcome an opportunity to debate related topics, and to share and develop some of the insights that make this such a rewarding field in which to be working.
ROBIN WOOD