Landscape Design: Designing for Local Action in Complex Worlds

Abstract

In recent years, the management literature has increasingly emphasized the importance of self-organization and “local action” in contrast to prior traditions of engineering control and design. While processes of self-organization are quite powerful, they do not negate the possibility of design influences. They do, however, suggest that a new set of design tools or concepts may be useful. We address this issue by considering the problem of landscape design—the tuning of fitness landscapes on which actors adapt. We examine how alternative organizational designs influence actors' fitness landscapes and, in turn, the behavior that these alternative designs engender. Reducing interdependencies leads to robust designs that result in relatively stable and predictable behaviors. Designs that highlight interdependencies, such as cross-functional teams, lead to greater exploration of possible configurations of actions, though at the possible cost of coordination difficulties. Actors adapt not only on fixed landscapes, but also on surfaces that are deformed by others' actions. Such coupled landscapes have important implications for the emergence of cooperation in the face of social dilemmas. Finally, actors' perceptions of landscapes are influenced by the manner in which they are framed by devices such as strategy frameworks and managerial accounting systems.