Kathleen M. Carley

Carnegie Mellon University
Department of Social and Decision Sciences
208 Porter Hall
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Phone: (412) 268-3225
Fax: (412) 268-6938
Email: kathleen.carley@cs.cmu.edu
URL: http://hss.cmu.edu/HTML/departments/sds/faculty/carley.html

ORGANIZATIONAL ADAPTATION


In this age of global competition and rapidly changing technology it is very important to better understand how organizations can evolve and adapt their behavior so that they can maintain or improve performance even as the environment they are facing is changing. Organizations respond to the environment by redesigning themselves Q shifting their structure and altering who is responsible for what task. This response can take the form of personnel changes or of altering the relationships among personnel and tasks. This response may be outside of the organizationUs control as when personnel become journeymen and pursue their careers by moving from one organization to another. The ability to adapt presumably contributes greatly to organizational productivity, even as individual learning contributes to personal productivity. Yet despite a strong tradition of theory and research on organizations, little is known about organizational adaptation, and particularly about whether such adaptation even has the theoretical possibility of improving performance. The situation is further complicated by the fact that organizational adaptation is constrained and expecation based. That is, organizations rarely have the luxury of redesigning themselves however they choose, but are often subject to severe design constraints (often in the form of institutional, historical, or legal constraints). Further, organizations often have to redesign on the basis of expectations about the future rather than actual feedback about how they are doing. This world of constraint based adaptation on the basis of expectations about a changing environment is difficult to study using traditional methods. Computational models, however, enable investigators to examine exactly these types of situations.

Indeed, there has been an upsurge of work in the area of computational organization theory in the past decade. Models of organizations are now much more sophisticated. Increasingly researchers are using more similar representations of organizational structure. Further, techniques for analyzing and validating these models have improved. Work in this area demonstrates that valuable predictions and prescription are only possible by modeling tasks and structure in detail. Also, the models, serve as valuable management tools in part because they get managers to think systematically about design issues and because they enable what-if analysis. Research in this area, broadly speaking, speaks to issues of (1) organizational design Q the influence of strategies for organizational adaptation on what organizational structures emerge, (2) organizational learning Q whether the aggregate impacts of individual learning or strategies for organizational adaptation are more effective in increasing organizational productivity, (3) technology transfer Q the influence of inter organizational personnel transfers and journeymen on organizations and their performance; and (4) computational organization theory Q use of adaptive architectures to explore organizational adaptation.

In this study, I use a computational model of constraint based organizational adaptation on the basis of expectations about a changing environment. The model represents organizational expectation based learning using a simulated annealing model and individual experiential learning using a fairly standard feedback based model. This dual level model allows the organization to learn separate from the learning of the individuals within it and captures much of what is meant in the literature by organizational learning. A series of virtual experiments are being conducted to determine the types of organizational adaptations that are most effective given different types of environmental conditions. The goal is to develop a general principles of organizational adaptation that are applicable to both human and non-human organizations. Initial results indicate that successful adaptation, at least in some environments, requires having a flexible structure in which there are a large number of personnel with wide and fairly specialized experience.



Golden Nugget:

ORGANIZATIONAL ADAPTATION:
THE USE OF SIMULATED ANNEALING TO STUDY ORGANIZATIONAL ADAPTATION

In this age of global competition and rapidly changing technology it is very important to better understand how organizations can evolve and adapt their behavior so that they can maintain or improve performance even as the environment they are facing is changing. Using a computational model of constraint based organizational adaptation on the basis of expectations about a changing environment a series of virtual experiments are being conducted to determine the types of organizational adaptations that are most effective given different types of environmental conditions. The goal is to develop a general principles of organizational adaptation that are applicable to both human and non-human organizations.



For related work see:

Kathleen M. Carley, forthcoming, "Constraint Based Adaptation" To appear in M. Lee (Ed.)Chaos, Complexity and Society, Sage.

Kathleen M. Carley & David M. Svoboda, 1996, RModeling Organizational Adaptation as a Simulated Annealing Process.S Sociological Methods and Research, 25(1): 138-168.

Kathleen M. Carley, 1996, RA Comparison of Artificial and Human Organizations. S Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. 896: 1-17.


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