Complex adaptive organisations: How three-dimensional visualisations can help to understand their structures and behaviours

Abstract

Many organisations struggle to achieve their true potential. In part it is a problem of organisational design, which is an outcome of a particularly common—command and control—leadership philosophy. The traditional linear hierarchical structure of organisations suggests that all knowledge and power concentrates at the top organisational layer, and that people in the lower layers need to be told what to do and when. These arrangements disempower people at the lower level, preventing them from providing the necessary feedback to pre-emptively address emerging concerns. Systems and complexity thinking provide different ways of understanding organisations and their complex adaptive behaviours. In this paper, we first describe the key characteristics of complex adaptive organisations—their structure and dynamic behaviours—and then propose a three-dimensional visualisation of a complex adaptive organisation that allows its members to clearly see and appreciate its interdependencies.