1999/06 Designing Natural Tension into the Design of Adaptive Enterprises -- 'Context and Coordination' in the Sense & Respond Organization

28th Jun 1999

Authors

David Ing and Ian Simmonds

Abstract

The sense-and-respond organization, as described in Haeckel (1999), is an approach to designing adaptive enterprises. One part of the design requires a shift from an orientation towards activities to an orientation towards outcomes. This "context-and-coordination" approach is suggested as an alternative to the traditional "command-and-control" model which is common in many businesses.

Using the categorization of purposefulness from Ackoff & Gharajedaghi (1996), the context-and-coordination approach to designing a social system is depicted as a natural tension between an animate model and an ecological model. This tension is considered to be a desirable property for the enterprise, and is refined in view of the model of shearing layers observed by Brand (1994).

The article concludes with a discussion of future research directions.

Citation

David Ing and Ian Simmonds, "Designing Natural Tension into the Design of Adaptive Enterprises -- 'Context and Coordination' in the Sense & Respond Organization", Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, at Asilomar, California, June 27 to July 2, 1999.