Published research
A qualitative, real-time, longitudinal (2006 – 2008) study with
National Healthcare Services (Scotland)
This project investigates the multi-level dynamics of organizational adaptation. The proposed process model emphasizes how local agents modify their cognitive representations to include uncovered interdependencies and synchronize their adaptive search across organizational boundaries.
Abstract
We use the case of a “whole-system” change program in a national healthcare system to empirically examine the multilevel dynamics underlying organizational adaptation. Our analysis demonstrates how the cognitive distance between agents’ causal representations affects opportunities to cooperate in hierarchical systems. Using complexity theory, we identify a scale-invariant causal pathway that can be applied recursively across many organizational levels. At each level, three coupled feedback loops determine how local agents modify their cognitive representations to include uncovered interdependencies and synchronize their adaptive search across organizational boundaries: a “boundary work” loop, a “small wins” loop, and a “parochialism” loop. Our results also point to the scale-dependency of the strength of dissipative processes across levels. These novel results further develop the theory of organizational change and have practical implications for large multilevel organizations, especially regarding the sustainability of improvements.
This research project was conducted in collaboration with:
James Barlow (Imperial College London)
“Achieving coordinated search initially faces the problem of cognitive distance between inter-organizational agents, preventing them from mutually recognizing their interdependence in the first place.”
Experiential search efforts can cumulatively improve performance despite the causal ambiguity of a broad search radius, heterogeneous local solutions, and inaccurate cognitive representations. Yet such equifinality raises the
question of the sustainability of those improvements. Agents’ cognitive representations play a key role in multilevel organizational adaptation and they are updated by discovering overlooked epistatic interactions.
A key organizational design task is to make self-interested agents across an organization, with competing goals, reciprocally aware of their interdependence.
This is a precondition for synchronized search.
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