Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier

A state-of-the-art guide to the new field of complexity-the tool leaders use to understand how people and organizations adapt in a world of rapid change.

Harnessing Complexity will be indispensable to anyone who wants to better comprehend how people and organizations can adapt effectively in the information age. This book is a step-by-step guide to understanding the processes of variation, interaction, and selection that are at work in all organizations. The authors show how to use their own paradigm of "bottom up" management, the Complex Adaptive System-whether in science, public policy, or private commerce. This simple model of how people work together will change forever how we think about getting things done in a group.

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The author pointed out three points of "Complex Adaptive System"
- variation
- interaction
- selection

It looks like something new. However, the author only talks on the very surface level of these three concepts. He explained why variation/interaction/selection is good to corporate organization, just as it is good for living beings. Yet, you can't find specific action steps to work on. In addition, if we do not go into deeper level (or new meaning), these three concepts will be just like old concepts with new names (i.e. diversity/teamwork/performance evaluation).

Net, I find this book is hard for practical use, and only recommend it to people who are extremely interested in complexity theory.

8 of 8 found the following review helpful:

Harnessing complexity... without the harnessJan 27, 2003
In the first paragraph of the preface of this book, Axelrod and Cohen ask, "In a world where many players are all adapting to each other and where the emergring future is extremely hard to predict, what actions should we take?" As a "reader from Boston" recommended, providing recommendations for practical application (7 Habits of Complexity?) would have helped answer this question.

Unfortunately, even the authors' anectodal examples provide little insight into HOW to "harness" complexity. While this book is primarily aimed at "designers and policy makers," it may actually be most useful to consultants looking to add new buzzwords to their bs lexicon.

I would recommend Briggs and Peats's "Seven Life Lessons of Chaos" for those who are looking for a more nuts-and-bolts approach to these issues.

A beginner's viewDec 01, 2002
As my first venture into the world of complexity and complex adaptive systems this was an interesting book. A lot of what I anecdotally thought about complexity was reinforced through the authors' own anecdotal examples. The examples were from a wide variety of situations, but were explained in a way to be understood by someone without a background in those various areas. However, I think the title was somewhat misleading. It seemed that a lot of the value of the book depended on having at least the initial, possibly intuitive, understanding of the interrelatedness of events, structure, and environment.

The diversity of the areas affected by complexity would seem to make it difficult to formulate a simple step by step approach for using complexity. However, it would have been helpful if the authors spent some time on what initial or environmental conditions might have been changed in their examples and how those changes would have affected the end system.

2 of 2 found the following review helpful:

A beginner's viewDec 01, 2002
As my first venture into the world of complexity and complex adaptive systems this was an interesting book. A lot of what I anecdotally thought about complexity was reinforced through the authors' own anecdotal examples. The examples were from a wide variety of situations, but were explained in a way to be understood by someone without a background in those various areas. However, I think the title was somewhat misleading. It seemed that a lot of the value of the book depended on having at least the initial, possibly intuitive, understanding of the interrelatedness of events, structure, and environment.

The diversity of the areas affected by complexity would seem to make it difficult to formulate a simple step by step approach for using complexity. However, it would have been helpful if the authors spent some time on what initial or environmental conditions might have been changed in their examples and how those changes would have affected the end system.

14 of 17 found the following review helpful:

Full of FluffFeb 21, 2001
How anyone can rate this book at 5 stars is beyond me. This book is not only one of the weaker contributions to the literature on complexity in the past two years, it fails to live up to the title. No one who reads this book will know how to take the first step toward "harnessing complexity." At best, they will have the broadly useful idea that it's good to experiment with new ideas (exploration) every now and then, and then pick the ideas that work (exploitation). That hardly seems like a great breakthrough. Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier?! Get real.