سیستم و مدل سازی، شبیه سازی و پویایی های استراتژی

The paper presents, for consideration, the tools of systems thinking and simulation as a framework for managing the complex and dynamic process of strategy formulation, evaluation, and implementation. It addresses the question of how strategic thinkers can experience the paradigmatic shifts required to survive and prosper in the face of unremitting change, competition, and environmental turbulence. In response to this question, the paper argues that managers need to develop and cultivate a capacity to perceive and analyse relationships between their organisations and the business environment as a complex, adaptive, dynamic system containing nonlinearities, inertia, delays, and networked feedback loops. Principles of, and linkages between, systems and control theory, complexity concepts, business process orientation and simulation are explored, through discourse, within this context. The need to integrate fully operations management within the strategy development process is also emphasised. This leads to the presentation of an illustrative generic model of a marketing, production, and selling causal loop. Influence diagrams and dynamic modelling concepts are then applied to implement this representation and explore its dynamic behaviour using computer-based simulation and experimentalism as a research method. The results demonstrate how, even in a relatively simple case, nonlinearity can produce very different system behaviours depending only on minor changes in operational circumstances. The potentially counterintuitive behaviour of complex managerial systems and the implications for the strategy-making process are thereby highlighted.

Managers face an unremitting challenge to their capabilities in both the volume and complexity of factors to be reconciled. Rapid rates of change in the business environment are coupled with unprecedentedly fierce competition and the ‘deification’ of the customer. Additionally, in the search for optimal trade-offs between resource utilisation and customer service fulfilment, conscientious managers are faced with the potentially contradictory task of simultaneously upholding the interests of ‘supply-side’ product and service providers; their colleagues, team members, and employees. This can impose what often appear to be conflicting, if not impossible demands on those who seek to introduce and sustain organisational effectiveness. In order to address these issues, managers, especially those operating at a strategic level, need appropriate tools to develop the thinking and learning paradigms that enable attainment of a more holistic and dynamic perspective. The role of organisational learning (OL) de Geus, 1988, Argyris, 1990 and Senge, 1990 and knowledge management Hall, 1992, Boisot, 1995, Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995 and Davenport and Prusak, 1998 have been quite rightly associated with these requirements. Similarly, the importance of business process as a continuum of seamless, cross-functional activity integration, is now seen as a vital prerequisite of organisational success Hammer, 1990, Hammer and Champy, 1993, Wolstenholme and Stevenson, 1994 and Youssef, 1998. However, in order to assist managers to harness these theories and implement their objectives appropriate models and analytical frameworks are required, which accommodate the full dynamic complexity and uncertainty, which characterise contemporary strategic management. This paper argues that the theories of ‘systems thinking’ and ‘complexity’ can potentially provide such frameworks. Furthermore, the supporting ‘toolbox’ of continuous system and hybrid (continuous and discrete) simulation potentially provides an excellent medium for enacting and exploring the dynamic nature and complex behaviour that characterise the phases of strategic analysis, development, and implementation, respectively.

Although acquired experience and inherent managerial ability may engender impressive capabilities attributing to individual managers, there remains a limit to the extent to which the unassisted human mind can simultaneously retain and process the full dynamic complexity associated with the wide-ranging and far-reaching strategic change management scenarios featuring in contemporary organisational life. Furthermore, the difficulties experienced are potentially magnified in scale and multiplied in number when large, step change initiatives are encountered, such as occur in BPR or supply chain reconfiguration. This may account for many of the failures, which are experienced, in practice, during strategic realignment of dynamic systems. In response to these concerns the principles of systems thinking, complexity and continuous system simulation have been presented in a context that fully acknowledges the contribution of operations management in the implementation phase of strategy. This has been illustrated using a simple example to show how even relatively elementary dynamic structures inherently contain the ability to display complex behaviour. Hence, the argument has been promoted that a structured approach to modelling, simulating, and experimenting with proposed strategic designs, at a preliminary stage, can often prove highly rewarding. The author has also argued that strategic effectiveness requires a holistic view of the organisation and its competitive environment with an emphasis on complete business processes and avoidance of functional suboptimisation. This requires a multidisciplinary team approach with careful and imaginative system scoping and analysis. Furthermore, it is clearly desirable that the complex nature of organisational life is realistically accommodated (in so far that such a task is humanly possible) within the conceptual models that such teams create and apply during their analysis and decision-formulating activities. At very least, this usually requires a shift in paradigm from a linear, sequential, and quasi-steady-state perspective, to one, that accommodates nonlinearity, networked relationships, and truly dynamic behaviour. However, the attainment of such a dynamic perspective is difficult, if not impossible, without recourse to appropriate information systems, ‘intellectual tools’, and corresponding support facilities. Here again the author has argued that the systems thinking, simulationist approach, can prove highly effective in bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative approaches harnessing the strengths of both and mitigating respective weaknesses. In conclusion, it is thereby argued that competitive advantage and ‘survivability skills’ can potentially be achieved through a process of OL that, in turn, leads to an enhanced ability to adapt quickly and successfully in complex, unstable environments. Furthermore, such outcomes may be enabled through improved decision-making and risk attenuation afforded by insights gleaned through the application of dynamic modelling and simulation concepts. Hence, although it is not possible to produce prescriptive, generic models and solutions for the strategy process, the dynamic modelling approach does provide a forum for craft-building strategies and evaluating, at least partially, potential outcomes. In this sense, the approach appears strongly oriented towards the emergent perception of strategy development and therefore highly appropriate in the existing, turbulent business environment.