Organizational Dynamics and the Game of Life
Organizational Dynamics and the Game of Life
“Teetering around the brim of organizational development”
I remember one of the first big programming assignments we ever did in school was implementing the Game of Life. A grid of squares, randomly seeded with living cells, each of which started with an age of 1, each aging with the tick of the arbitrary game clock. New cells would be created or killed depending on the number of cells surrounding them or their individual age. The result was a technicolor menagerie of patterns that spread across the grid like waves. A crude biological model dictated by the rules of the game and random seeding of the cells at the start.
Having made a few job hops over the last few years, I’ve often found myself daydreaming about how different company cultures evolve and change over time. What makes the day-to-day easy at one place, but hard at another? What constraints might influence the development of individual team structures within an organization?
Maybe organizational development is nothing short of a more complex game of life simulation. The growth, stabilization and decay of organizational structures are constrained by the environmental resources available as well as the rules defined for intra organization development. Rules about team boundaries and interoperation, access to information, communication channels, individual incentivization strategies, funding constraints, hiring constraints, and whatever else you can think of all feed into the complex interoperation of what naively may boil down to rules in a Game of Life simulation. Each square in the grid is a unit within a larger organization, each contributing to the success or failure of the whole. The simulation, at its limit, is really just an overly simplified model for biological development in the natural world. I’m left to wonder what a more strict biological comparison might teach.
Obviously, others have walked further down this path.
A reading list (for me):
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo18990975.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-biological-approach-to-management-1541779072
https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Stephen_M_Colarelli_No_Best_Way?id=d-Y4T70Ws5UC