an evolutionary approach to understanding adaptive organizational resilience

AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING ADAPTIVE ORGANIZATIONAL RESILIENCE

Open Universiteit Resilient Symposium on March 23-24, 2017

Ian McCarthy, Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser UniversityMark Collard, Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser UniversityMichael Johnson, Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University

INTRODUCTION

● To understand the process of adaptive organizational resilience as a response to changes in disturbance and munificence.

● Use the example of automotive manufacturing industry.

● Offer an evolutionary process framework and a typology of resilience.

AN EVOLUTIONARY FRAMEWORK OF ADAPTIVE ORGANIZATIONAL RESILIENCE

Adverse environmental

conditions drive

configuration change

Process of configuration

changeConfiguration diversity

Disturbance

Munificence

Variation

Selection

Retention

RESILIENCE

Resilience: the ability of a system to cope with adverse change and still exist (Ge et al 2016; Mumby et al 2014)

Involves one or more of the following

Withstand the adversity

Adapt to the adversity

Learn from the adversity

(Limnios et al 2014, Hohenstein et al 2015, Kamalahmadic and Parast 2016):

CONFIGURATION THEORY

Configuration theory: sets of firms can share key characteristics, such as strategy, goals, practices and structures.

Manufacturing configurations include: craft, mass, lean and agile.

Configurational research is used to develop descriptions, explanations and predictions of organizational diversity.

Adaptive organizational resilience involves configuration change.

Prior research neglects the process of configuration change.

CHALLENGING ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONSEnvironmental disturbances are a temporary change in environmental conditions that provide shocks or jolts to the organization.

These can trigger withstanding and adaptive resilience.

Examples include: industrial disputes, scandals, natural disasters and regulatory change.

CHALLENGING ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONSEnvironmental munificence is the extent to which the resources available to organizations are abundant or scarce.

It impacts both the withstanding and adaptive forms of resilience

Resources include: raw materials, supplies, workers, energy and land

VARIATION-SELECTION-RETENTION

Evolutionary process

Definition Automotive Manufacturing Example

Variation Intentional or blind change in current configuration routines to produce a new configuration.

JIT, kanban and kaizen of = genesis of lean production

Selection Elimination of certain types of new but unviable configurations by the market or by the organization.

Labour disputes, poor quality, inability to innovate = fall of UK lean producers.

Retention Selected new configurations are preserved and copied within and across industries.

Copying, mergers and consolidations = smaller number of lean producers

(Aldrich 1979; McCarthy et al 2005; Simonton 2015)

CONFIGURATION DIVERSITY: CLADISTICS

(McCarthy et al 2000, McCarthy 2005)

WHY CLADISTICS?

● Organisations and their configurations evolve - adaptive resilience

● Like organisms, this evolution can be diverging and tree like.

● Organising knowledge and mapping relationships.

● Patterns and mechanisms of change suggest predictive abilities!

A CLADOGRAM OF AUTOMOTIVE MANUFACTURING CONFIGURATIONS

(McCarthy et al 2000, McCarthy 2000)

SUMMARY: A TYPOLOGY OF ADAPTIVE RESILIENCE

AN EVOLUTIONARY FRAMEWORK OF ADAPTIVE ORGANIZATIONAL RESILIENCE

Adverse environmental

conditions drive

configuration change

Process of configuration

changeConfiguration diversity

Disturbance

Munificence

Variation

Selection

Retention

SUMMARY

This research is not about what makes an organization resilient

It is about understanding the process of adaptive resilience

Disturbance, munificence and resilience interact to drive this process:

After the 9/11 attack airlines with greatest financial reserves not only withstood the shock, but reinvented themselves.

Inertia = withstand

Anagenetic resilience and cladogenetic resilience = adaptive

When might one type of resilience perform better than the others?

REFERENCESAldrich H: Organizations and environments. Prentice-Hall; 1979.

Ge, L., Anten, NP, van Dixhoorn, ID, Feindt, PH, Kramer, K, Leemans, R, Meuwissen, MP, Spoolder, H and Sukkel, W: Why we need resilience thinking to meet societal challenges in bio-based production systems. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2016, 23:17-27.

Hohenstein, NO, Feisel, E, Hartmann, E and Giunipero, L: Research on the phenomenon of supply chain resilience: a systematic review and paths for further investigation. International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 2015, 45(1/2):90-117.

Kamalahmadi, M and Parast, MM: A review of the literature on the principles of enterprise and supply chain resilience: Major findings and directions for future research. International Journal of Production Economics, 2016, 171:116-133.

Limnios, EAM, Mazzarol, T, Ghadouani, A and Schilizzi, SG: The resilience architecture framework: four organizational archetypes. European Management Journal, 2014, 32(1):104-116

McCarthy IP: Toward a Phylogenetic Reconstruction of Organizational Life. Journal of Bioeconomics 2005, 7:271-307.

McCarthy, IP, Ridgway, K, Leseure, M, Fieller N: Organisational diversity, evolution and cladistic classifications. Omega 2000 28 (1):77-95

Mumby, PJ, Chollett, I, Bozec, YM and Wolff, NH: Ecological resilience, robustness and vulnerability: how do these concepts benefit ecosystem management? Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2014, 7:22-27.

Simonton, DK: On praising convergent thinking: Creativity as blind variation and selective retention. Creativity Research Journal, 2015, 27(3):262-270.