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The Project in Organizational Evolution
Goals and Foundation
Technological improvement is a fact of modern life. Organizational improvement, however, is
not. B.F. Skinner, writing thirty years ago, observed that an ancient Greek, transported to our
time, would find the machines of everyday life incomprehensible. In contrast, our Greek would
feel right at home amid the bustling confusion of organizational life – its enjoyments,
disappointments, politics, petty rivalries, lofty hopes and ineffectual decision making.
Organizations have not improved much since ancient times.
Improving a company, a school, a city, or a government is difficult because the complexity of
organizations exceed by many orders of magnitude our ability to understand. Managers today, as
always, work to solve identifiable, isolated, problems. Sometimes managers succeed. But, often
solutions fail to work over the long term or else spawn unintended consequences that create new
problems, perhaps in other areas of the organization.
The problem of improving organizations in the face of ignorance is solvable. In fact, it has been
solved, just not by humans: Biological evolution has produced excellent natural organizations
(i.e. organisms) even though the organizations themselves are completely ignorant of how they
are put together and why they succeed.
The question we are addressing is how to apply principles of biological evolution to the problem
of organizational improvement. Central to our work is an analogy between organizational
policies and biological genes. By policy we mean an explicit or implicit decision rule. For
example, a manager might set prices by the implicit rule: Raise prices when inventories are low,
and lower prices when inventories are high. Such a policy gives rise to a continuing stream of
actions in the company and is quite comparable to a gene, which produces a continuing stream of
actions in the cell.
The creative mechanisms in biological evolution are mutation and recombination. In our
analogy, genetic mutation corresponds to policy change, intentional or unintentional. The result
of such a change, for better or worse, is a new policy. Genetic recombination occurs when two
DNA molecules mix to form a new DNA molecule. In a company, genetic recombination
corresponds to a particular kind of organizational learning: Inter-personal learning whereby a
person combines a part of someone else’s decision rule (policy) with his or her own.
The purpose of our research is to help managers create an environment in which beneficial policy
change and learning (mutation and recombination) occur. Our methodology combines two
principle elements: Simulation and interview. The simulations allow us to “speed up” evolution
so that we can investigate what makes it better. The interviews with people at partner
organizations keeps us grounded in reality. We anticipate talking to somewhere between three
and ten people at each of the partner organizations. The interviews will help us understand
evolution in organizations better and will also allow us to create more useful simulations.