Complexity theory and strategy
Complexity Theory has been used extensively in the field of strategic management and organizational studies, sometimes called 'Complexity strategy' or 'Complex Adaptive Organization' on the internet or in popular press. Broadly speaking, complexity theory is used in these domains to understand how organizations or firms adapt to their environments. The theory treats organizations and firms as collections of strategies and structures. When the organization or firm shares the properties of other complex adpative systems - which is defined as consisting of a small number of relatively simple and partially connected structures -- they are more likely to adapt to their environment and, thus, survive. Complexity theoretic thinking has been present in strategy and organizational studies since their inception as academic disciplines.
Early Complexity-style Theorizing About Strategy and Organizational Theory
For instance, early strategy and organizational theorists emphasized complexity-like thinking including:
- Herbert Simon's interest in decomposable systems and computational complexity.
- Karl Weick's loose coupling theory and interest in causal dependencies
- Burns and Stalker's contrast between organic and mechanistic structures
- Charles Perrow's interest in the link between complex organization and catastrophic accidents
- James March's contrast between exploration and exploitation, which owes a debt to complexity theorist John Holland.
More recently work by organizational scholars and their colleagues have added greatly to our understanding of how concepts from the complexity sciences can be used to understand strategy and organizations. The work of Dan Levinthal, Jan Rivkin, Nicolaj Siggelkow, Kathleen Eisenhardt, Nelson Repenning, Phil Anderson and their research groups have been influential in the fields of strategic management and organizational studies.