The Complex Adaptive Enterprise

In a world where the market, customer profiles and demands change constantly and the events in the global marketplace are unpredictable, it becomes increasingly difficult for an enterprise to sustain its competitive advantage. Under these conditions of uncertainty, complexity and constant change, it becomes very important for an enterprise to be able to learn from its experience and to adapt its behavior in order to constantly outperform its competitors. An enterprise that has these characteristics is a complex adaptive enterprise. The interrelationships between resources in a complex adaptive enterprise and its global behavior within the marketplace can be numerous and mostly hidden, and can affect many different resources throughout the enterprise. One of the main challenges of the modern enterprise is to understand this complex web of interrelationships and to integrate this understanding into its business processes and strategies in such a way that it can sustain its competitive advantage.