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Organizational adaptation

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Abstract

A computational model of organizational adaptation in which change occurs at both the strategic and the operational level is presented. In this model, simulated annealing is used to alter the organization's structure even as the agents within the organization learn. Using this model a virtual experiment is run to generate hypotheses which can be tested in multiple venues. The results suggest that, although it may not be possible for organizations of complex adaptive agents to locate the optimal form, they can improve their performance by altering their structure. Moreover, organizations that most successfully adapt over time come to be larger, less dense, with fewer isolated agents, and fewer overlooked decision factors. These results have implications for organizations of both humans and non-humans. For example, they suggest that organizational learning resides not just in the minds of the personnel within the organization, but in the connections among personnel, and among personnel and tasks. These results suggest that collections of non-humans may come to seem more intelligent (i.e., show improved performance) even if the agents remain unchanged if the system simply develops duplicate copies of some of the artificial agents and if the connections among agents are dynamically altered.

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  1. Kathleen M. Carley
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Carley, K.M. Organizational adaptation. Annals of Operations Research 75, 25–47 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018963630536

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