Hmmm,

I was thinking about what i just wrote while i was in the bath just now, pretending to study...

(This is from a series of posts on the Open University's First Class server for B825 Marketing in a complex world)

The thing is, that decisions are made about purchases using criteria that we are often only slightly aware of. The natrure of a strong brand that is often overlooked is that "meanings elaborated in decision making have importance beyond the mundane realities of rendering decisions". (March 1994) Buyers of Apple computers, for example, are subscribing to the meanings attached to the slogan 'Think different'. They want to align themselves with a social meaning that is 'independent thought is better than conventional thought'. It's an integrated message that is savy to the segement that are hard core Apple 'advocates' (Yawn - and aren't they!). I use both Apple and PC. There's nothing in it...its a conditioning thing. This brand is not in the least bit fragile. People are not buying them for the price. They're not buyng them for the functions....thought they wont admit it....but there's hardly any programs written for them that are actually useful to me...(and one of my roles is as a storyboard artist) They're buying them because of the way that owning one makes them feel about themselves.

Decision outcomes communicate meanings and can be seen as occasions for the validation of social order in any particular society. To the extent that a brand is associated with some aspirational state that the decision maker values – will it face a secure future. The associtaton of self to the decision making process is tantamount to universal, and the branding process is, in this presentation, far from a desperate last ditch clawing at life for distributors of commoditites, since the commoditiy to which they are aligning their product is self esteem itself.

The role of information in the decision making process is not as central in this conception as it is in a purely rational one. Most decision makers searching the web will come away with more information than they need or want, and they subsequently may ignore the content of it, whilst being justified in their decisions BY the act of searching rationaly. The information is ‘reasurance’ of the validity of the decision, but is not a call to action. The process is the thing that is important. The validity of the claim that Apple is for ‘artists’ is highly contestable. It is not the same thing as Apple is for people who like to think of themselves as ‘artists’. We assume that a decision process is to be understood in terms of its outcome. But it is also to be understood in terms of meaning. What does it ‘say about you, about your life, aspirations, sucesses and failures, background, intelligence, ability to cope, to cook, to enunciate, to understand, to drive, to attract the attentions of those you value, to fit a ‘blueprint’? Heinlien (1978) says ‘specialisation is for insects’. I say rationalisation is for the deluded. Everyone gets suckered by brands…because ‘price only’ IS a fate worse than death.

Chris

"The term 'Organisational learning' is, strictly speaking, false: organisations cannot learn - only people can learn". Walsh and Ungson (1991)

If this is the case, the idea that an organisation is more than the sum of its parts is also strictly speaking, false. Whilst the process of learning requires cognition, and this is a human attribute, my view is that organisations can and do learn. To say otherwise would be to suggest that the football team does not score a goal, or that a Formula One racing team do not win a race. Organisational objectives are beyond the reach of individuals.

Chris Argyris ('On Organisational Learning' - 1999) states that "Organisations do not perform the actions that produce the learning. It is individuals acting as agents of organisations who produced the behaviour that leads to learning". The ability to learn is a predisposition, not a given. While most of us like to think that we are thinking, in reality, very few of us do.

Learning does not require us to think however, only to acquire ability or capability. Certain individual high flyers, once removed from their organisational incubators are unable to reproduce their performance elsewhere. The learning organisation, one assumes, must be capable of collectively learning from the collective mistakes that it makes. Just because an organisation is comprised in large part from tacit knowledge that can get up and walk away, doesn't mean that it's not capable of learning. In a large organisation, the strategy makers don't always know what the shop floor are up to, at least not all the time, and they have to be able to take it for granted. They use business models for cognition of their business just as they use 'world models' for cognition of their role in life.

It could be argued that ideas are in themselves a single entity, and that only those minds that are receptive to them will assimilate them. Group behaviour such as that seen in Mi Li during the Vietnam conflict and elsewhere, muddies the idea of individuality, explained away by 'groupthink' and 'mob mentality'.

That may be so, but surely it boils down to a question of levels of entity. Strictly, an individual is not a single entity, but a collection of thoughts, pre-dispositions, attachments, weaknesses, capabilities, futures, commitments, fears, past achievements, strengths etc. Is it the intangible nature of this collection that leads us to arbitrarily collect them into 'one individual'? We tend to think of a person as a tangible being, whereas in reality the parts of you that you would really describe as 'you' are not in general physical. Similarly, an organisation comprises many intangible elements that are embodied by our perception of the organisation.

So…do organisations learn?

Any thoughts?

Chris

Compelexity and OU B825

I wonder if the distinction that the course draws between complexity in nature and social complexity is right. The complexity of systems in nature, could be seen (and is by many) as just as complex as social systems. The issue seems to be one of detail, and perception. I raise this because the way that the course deals with the subject - in a 'reductionist' way worries me a bit.

Complexity 'theory' is not less defined than chaos theory – it’s a big subject, but it is considered (by some) to be more intractable. Complexity in relation to marketing refers to decision making by both sides of a relationship that are constrained by histories, so complex and unique that they are more than just intractable. When something has no simple yes/no answer, it can be said to be intractable, but the nature marketing means that the assumptions of reality (episteme) of one entity are interacting with the those of another. This is like the effect of a double pendulum, whose movements are complex until the they reach a level of dynamic that they are said to become chaotic. http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/DoublePendulum.html

In a network – the interactions are even more unpredictable…more pendulums, more influences on the simple dynamic, less predictability.

What we've been studying used to be called 'systems theory' which is a collection of interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks about complex adaptive systems. Complex adaptive systems are things like bee colonies, the immune system, the ecosystem and of course the social terrain within, and for which our organisations exist. According to Pascale (1999) In order to qualify as a ‘complex adaptive system’, an entity must pass 4 tests:

1. It must be comprised of many parallel acting agents. These are not controlled hierarchically
2. It is in continuous re-organisation
3. It is subject to the second law of thermodynamics, exhibiting entropy – and ‘winding down’ over time unless replenished with energy
4. It exhibits a capacity for pattern recognition that it uses to adapt to its environment

Complex adaptive systems are at risk in equilibrium. Yet the pull of equilibrium to managers is highly seductive as it is disguised by strong brand values or a close knit culture. It is THIS that we should be aware of surely. The oscillations of ‘bounded instability’ are to be celebrated as opportunity and embraced. Self organisation arises out of the intelligence in the nodes of the constantly re-organising network. It is not hierarchical and as such we cannot direct it, or control it, only ‘disturb’ it.

Because they are self organising, and because they are marching to a drum that is among a great many other beating drums, they don't submit to easy analysis. From a marketing perspective, it is generally agreed that they are characterised by weak cause-effect linkages, and phase transitions in the oscillations of those pendulums can create disproportionate changes…or non at all. Positive or negative.


In the natural sciences, the search to understand self-organization derives from a very large question. How does life create greater order over time? Order is the unique ability of living systems to organize, reorganize, and grow more complex. But theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman has demonstrated that the inevitable desire to organize is evident even in a non-living system of light bulbs. Kauffman constructed a network of 200 light bulbs, connecting one bulb to the behaviour of only two others (using Boolean logic). For example, light bulb 23 could be instructed to go on if bulb 46 went on, and to go off if bulb 67 went on. The assigned connections were always random and limited to only two. Once the network was switched on, different configurations of on-and-off bulbs would illuminate. The number of possible on/off configurations is 10 to the 30th, a number of inconceivable possibilities. Given these numbers, we would expect chaos to rule. But it doesn't. The system settles instantly (on about the fourteenth iteration) into a pattern of on/off bulbs that it then continues to repeat.

http://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/irresistiblefuture.html

Kauffman’s subsequent work illustrates that the more connections that there are to each node in the boolean net, the greater the tendency towards chaos. But there’s a hook here. The simplification of a random principle in this way shows that a pattern emerges in a discernable time frame, but the addition of a few extra connections renders the pattern more difficult to see. It doesn’t mean that there’s no pattern – and if there’s a pattern, presumably, it could be tested in a mathematically rigorous way if that did it for you.

This is what Oliva et al (1992) are suggesting with the ‘purchase response model’ – which attempts to model behaviour (particularly loyalty relative to satisfaction) around the complexities of divergence, catastrophe, hysteresis, bimodality and inaccessibility.

There is a place for a reductionist approach in complexity, but as Stapleton and Ali suggest this on page 79 of unit 2, it is probably as metaphor – at least for most of us. Thinking of these things seems to require a certain distance, as if one needs to stand back to gain appreciation of the form.

Beinhocker (not referenced in the course material to my knowledge) argues that “strategy development inherently requires managers to make a prediction about the future. Based on this prediction, managers make big decisions about company focus, the investment of resources, and how to coordinate activities across the company. Yet developing strategies based on narrow predictions about the future is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline”

Eisenhardt and Brown’s recommendation for ‘time pacing’ rather than ‘event pacing’ therefore seems backward to me. We spend all this time getting our heads around discontinuity and the reflexive nature of networks and self organising systems – and then this idea (it seems to me) flies in the face of all that! If, as Stapleton and Ali suggest, the natural order of things is to be ‘event driven’ (page 97) – doesn’t that suggest that to be ‘time driven’ is ‘un-natural’?

From a theoretical perspective, all this complexity stuff is enthralling, and enlightening. From the perspective of a manager trying to do the job right here and now, its almost irrelevant. I say this because, as Kauffman’s experiment illustrates, each sub unit of each network is dependent in some real way on the units to which it is connected. If the other units don’t GET complexity theory, then the decisions that they make will not be cognisant of it either. Now if you happen to be the Boss, like Steve Miller at Shell, you can ‘make it OK’ to fly in the face of convention – but for the rest of us- its back to reductionism….as our current swatting is testament to.

(I failed my Art History dissertation at art college because (it was about Dada-ism) I tore it into little pieces and presented in a tesco’s bag – (as they might have done at the time of the Dada movement). I got 0% No one had ever got that before. The moral is that we have to boil down all this lovely stuff into – ‘complexity is less mathematically rigorous than chaos’ or something so ‘small’ that it’s a bit like calling a rainforest ‘green’. It is, but its SO much more too.




Beinhocker, E.D. (1999). Robust adaptive strategies. Sloan Management Review, 40(3),
95-106.


Pascale, R.T., Milliman, M. and Gioja, L. (1999)”Surfing at the edge of chaos”, Three rivers press.