Published research from
the Institute.
Summaries of ongoing work at the intersection of complexity science, evolutionary biology, and organizational adaptation.
Building Institutional Adaptive Capacity
Why awareness of change is not enough, and what organizations must build instead
The professional foresight field has spent decades building organizational awareness of future conditions. Awareness is necessary but not sufficient. An organization can have a sophisticated understanding of the forces accelerating novelty in its environment and still lack the structural capacity to do anything about it. Adaptive capacity is the missing piece.
Resilience vs. Efficiency: The Tradeoff Hypernovelty Exposes
Decades of optimization for efficiency have eliminated the slack that resilience requires
Modern organizations are optimized for efficiency in stable conditions. Lean operations, just-in-time supply chains, minimal redundancy, and maximum utilization of human capacity are all efficiency strategies that work well when the environment is predictable. They are liabilities when it is not.
The Shrinking Half-Life of Organizational Knowledge
Strategic knowledge expires faster than organizations can replace it
The half-life of a strategic insight — the time after which it is as likely to be wrong as right — has collapsed from decades to months in many industries. Organizations built around planning cycles of 12–36 months are operating with knowledge that expires mid-cycle.