Abstract
Massive societal change will result from the rate of continuous technology advancement and the pace will increase. The enterprise will face operational and technical challenges and society will increasingly expect the highest ethical conduct. What strategy will allow the organization to remain innovative and thrive in these circumstances? To develop new insight, anticipatory skills, and better decision making, a case is made for the adoption of model building and simulation. In addition to the benefits of shared conceptual artefacts for communicating in the enterprise, modelling requires a deep understanding of the ethics and reflexivity needed to deal with complex issues and using a transdisciplinary framework for inquiry may increase understanding. For innovation to emerge, participatory and co-creative approaches for sense-making are proposed to shift the responsibility for ethical decisions to more actors in the enterprise. This approach allows leaders to engage with the informal coalitions in the enterprise and shape the required strategic direction.
TopBackground And Structure Of This Chapter
People, in general, experience a sense of unease around situations that imply change. Over the past 250 years, humanity has experienced unprecedented change. This was brought on by the first industrial revolution, in essence, an explosion of technology, and with it came an explosion of the population (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2016). Steam machines made mechanical production possible and allowed for the effective distribution of heavy loads of produce over long distances using steam trains. The supply chain was suddenly long, fast and potentially more complicated than before.
The second industrial revolution was made possible by the invention of electricity and the assembly line. Between the end of the Second World War and the turn of the century, the advent of the computer, digital technology and the internet ushered in the third industrial revolution (Schwab, 2017).
Around 2007 Apple released the iPhone. It was more than a phone, more than a personal digital assistant and more than a small computer. It integrated these concepts and offered an internet connected communications device, with small applications available to do a multitude of tasks. These applications, developed by a new breed of software developers, were available from an electronic repository, curated by Apple, and at prices that disrupted the concept of boxed software available only in a physical shop. Just as with electronic music and movie downloads, the concept of the supply chain for digital goods changed overnight. The world of advertising was impacted; Facebook and other social channels suddenly had a new portal for delivery, and advertisements could be served based on specific usage patterns.
Shapiro and Varian (1998) foresaw this type of disruption about ten years earlier and observed that software and hardware platforms must be collectively managed as an ecosystem to remain viable in the changing environment. Steve Jobs subscribed to the position of Alan Kay (2018), who famously said: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware” and took it one step further by also curating the type of content delivered by their ecosystem. The technology changed, but as Shapiro and Varian pointed out, the laws of economics did not change. In this case the innovation was around the control of the platform for delivery, the mechanisms of delivery and the deliverables that are tightly integrated and controlled to gain a competitive advantage. Being first to market with this complete package had the obvious advantage that it attracted more customers and subsequently more developers to the ecosystem.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Decision: Action based on judgement of a situation.
Innovation: an offering experienced as new and valuable and subsequently adopted for use by an individual or collective.
Complexity: A feature of phenomena that is hard to describe using reductionist (looking at the parts of a system) approaches, with no agreed upon theory or science.
Enterprise: A broad concept of all human activity, from traditional business to not-for-profits and everything in between.
Transdisciplinary: A theoretical (axiomatic) inquiry method and position that transcends disciplines and considers all knowledge bases on an even footing.
Reality: A view and experience of the world by an individual or collective.
Causality: A term to describe cause and effect. Several types of causality are recognized: linear (x causes y and a doubling in x causes a doubling in y), circular (x causes a change in y which in turn causes a change in x), recursive (x is caused by the system that is x – society is made of people that bear children that make up society), nonlinear (as opposed to linear the change in x causes a change in y that follows a power law, for example).
Holism: A concept to describe systems consisting of interconnected parts that combine in non-linear ways to make up the system so that the system is more than the sum of the parts.
Model: A representation of something in the world, used to reason about the world and to develop understanding. Models include artefacts, process descriptions, ideas, computer software (amongst others) that reflect aspects of past, current, or imagined future reality.
Abstraction: A term used to describe the level of detail in a model. Highly abstracted models have minimum detail and are used at the strategic level of thinking. Low abstraction indicates lots of details down to the micro level of process and parts.
Ethics: Values and moral principles that govern behavior in society.