نظریه ی تناسب چشم انداز و رقابت در تولید

Manufacturing organisations recognise that the business environment has varying levels of unpredictability. To serve such unpredictability, they utilise forecasting and decision modelling techniques at all levels (strategic to operational), but with business and customer demands intensifying, the levels of unpredictability have been increasing and the confidence in such techniques is reducing. In order to satisfy customers and remain competitive, manufacturing organisations must be able to “sense and respond”. This paper provides an introduction to the concept of developing and applying fitness landscape theory to help manufacturing managers make decisions in such a manner. This approach treats the organisational system and its decisional situation as a complex adaptive system, which is continually co-evolving with its environment, whilst searching for solutions and making decisions. Although this theory has biological origins, it has been applied to various areas including economic and organisational studies. In summarising, this paper argues that managers should learn from nature and develop decisions, which rely less on inaccurate forecasts and more on the ability to sense and respond (adapt). The paper concentrates on the process of making strategic decisions and the resulting organisational forms.

Many studies analyse manufacturing organisations and their problems by reducing or simply throwing away the interacting components, with the assumption that the latter are either negligible or behave linearly. These studies (referred to as reductionism) tend to overlook the importance of these interacting components. An alternative view is to adopt a “complex systems” approach, to understand the manufacturing organisation as a system which evolves over time by adopting characteristics to survive. This approach focuses on the interacting components in order to understand the emergent behaviour. The notion of emergence is that the characteristics of the whole organisation cannot be understood by simply studying individual sections of the organisation and then extrapolating to obtain holistic views. Manufacturing organisations are complex adaptive systems and thus can never be completely controlled, because researchers have discovered that complex adaptive systems are often impossible to predict, because they exhibit punctuated equilibrium and path dependence. Managers need to understand and live with emergence. The biological world faces similar issues, in that species are constantly adapting to unpredictable environments. Nature does this without using sophisticated forecasting techniques. Adapting biological organisms are faced with conflicting constraints in their internal organisation as well as in their interactions with the environment. These conflicting constraints imply that it is impossible to search for the optimal solution and that there are many locally optimal compromise solutions that exist in the large space of possibility. For six decades, biologists have pictured a biological landscape where organisms adapt and search this space for genotypes which are fitness peaks on a rugged, multi-peaked, mountainous “fitness landscape”. Although the fitness landscape concept has biological origins, it has stirred up interest in areas such as economics, computer science and organisational studies. Fitness landscape theory could help manufacturing organisations obtain new insights and understanding about the interrelation between internal characteristics (such as strategy, technology, management practices, etc.) and external environment (competition, demand, market legislation, etc.).

This paper introduces the language, metaphors and ideas of complex adaptive systems and fitness landscape theory. Manufacturing organisations are systems of many individual active agents that interact with one another, learn and adapt to the changing environment and attempt to predict the future and use this prediction for advantage. By accepting this view and the organisational mechanisms which accompany it, organisations can be viewed as species walking on a fitness landscape. However, fitness landscapes as with benchmarking, and other strategic initiatives may help managers to create strategic maps, but organisations should not lose sight that competitors are at the same time moving their strategy away and hence changing the contours of the map. Competitive evolution in the business world is a continuous journey, there is no finish line.