A Neurocognitive-Inspired Architecture for Evoking Complex Organizational Environments

Harold E. Klein
Center for Organizational Dynamics, University of Pennsylvania
and
Dept. of General & Strategic Management
Fox School of Business & Management
Temple University

Organizations confronting complex/chaotic/unstable/structurally-changing environments invariably need to reassess their strategic position. There is no rigorous analytical protocol for dealing with this situation. The conventional tools essentially pose a series of questions about general and/or specific environmental factors or subject areas with relevance for one or more important aspects of the organization’s strategy (i.e., Strategic Decision Issues, SDIs). Once these environmental factors are identified, their state/behavior are forecast/assessed/explained/conjectured and, if possible, related for their respective implications for SDIs . The difficulty is that there usually are dozens, if not hundreds, of directly or indirectly relevant environmental factors and dozens of SDIs. And, always, there are interdependencies (e.g., causal relationships) among the environmental factors and similarly among SDIs (e.g., coordination). IOW, a rather complex system.

A heuristic system has been developed and applied that identifies closely interdependent environmental factors that have relevance for commonly affected SDIs, based on inputs of environmental factor/SDI contingency statements. The output provides the specifications for a series of causal maps that are analogs of biological neuronal groups and networks with their attendant characteristics (connectivity, plasticity, etc.). Besides having a number of other uses for the strategic planner, the maps themselves reveal answers to key questions needed by decision-makers. Results of an application of the approach will be presented.