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30 Jul 2019Working Paper Summaries

‘Organizing’, ‘Innovating’, and ‘Managing’ in Complexity Space

by Michael C. Moldoveanu

This paper explores organizational complexity by proposing a two-dimensional framework to help us understand organizational coping mechanisms and failure modes. The framework makes it possible to ask new questions about organizational adaptations to complexity that investigate its underlying structure and dynamics.

Author Abstract

We two-dimensional measure of organizational complexity that distinguishes between the informational and computational dimensions of complexity and aims to function as a maximally context-invariant environment for posing fundamental questions about organizational dynamics, akin to the role and function of a phase space in classical mechanics. The new measure and associated space allows us to understand the effects of a researcher’s or manager’s choice of model or representation on the resulting complexity measure of a phenomenon and to measure the complexity of any organizational phenomenon that can be represented in a form amenable to an algorithmic description. We use the new complexity measure to present a unified treatment of complexity coping mechanisms, complexity-driven organizational failure and complexity-adaptive innovation and draw new distinctions enabling new questions whose answers will be useful to researchers and executives alike.

Paper Information

Full Working Paper Text
Working Paper Publication Date: June 2019
HBS Working Paper Number: HBS Working Paper #19-128
Faculty Unit(s): General Management

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