Designing Complex Organizations Computationally

Business process management is recognized increasingly as a critical factor in organizational success, leaders and managers seek to cope with increasingly complex and dynamic environments, and traditional approaches to process management become increasingly inadequate due to their lack of flexibility and adaptability. Alternatively, an organizational form receiving considerable current focus is the Edge, which distributes knowledge and power to the “edges” of organizations, and which enables organizational members and units to self-organize and self-synchronize their activities. The dynamics of such self-organization and self-synchronization, however, are extremely complex, and balancing the flexibility and adaptability inherent in the Edge with sufficient control to avoid chaos is very challenging. We employ the state-of-the-art POWer environment for dynamic organizational representation and emulation to develop and experiment with models of competing organizational forms, and to inform our understanding of complex organizational design and management—thereby making an important contribution to theory, research methodology, and practice.