Companies can gain a lot of competitive advantage if they will implement elements of complex systems into the social technology that determine how groups and individual in a company are working together.
Social technologies that define clear functions needed to reach company purpose, solicit and filter the right feedbacks/events for the company internal/external environment and enable functions to engage directly one each other to respond to events/feedback are a better fit for the complexity and uncertainty of today’s business world. Such social technologies, that can operate in any given organization structure are crucial to make companies successful not just in today’s world but even more in the future.
Social technologies that are build on complex systems provide an immense benefit, they enable the parts of the system to work as a collective function and therefore push systems to be greater than the sum of their parts. The end result is that the system as a whole has properties and functionality that none of its constituent elements possess.
Complex systems also encourage collaboration and cooperation instead of competition within the system. This system behavior makes the system much more resilient to changes, especially when this behavior is coming with the default attribute of complex systems to evolve and change to be able to deal and adjust to external and internal changes.
There are many other benefits that organizations can gain from a complex system. The main obstacle is that complex systems are wired to work that way; they have internal mechanisms that support and enable their operation mode. Organizations, on the other hand, are build from people and groups that currently are missing the right social technologies to allow them to work as a complex system.
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