Inhibiting Adaptation

It is widely believed that whether we are talking about command and control teams, joint task forces or coalition forces, the “organization” must be adaptive. Unanticipated changes in mission, rapidly evolving technologies, intelligent and changing opponents, and so forth have created a need to create forces that can respond rapidly, accurately and can readily adapt to new situations. Over the past decade, progress has been made in understanding the set of factors that enable adaptation. If the opposing force can be made less adaptive, more predictable, more consistent then it will be easier to contain or constrain their activity. Consequently, it may be important to mitigate the adaptivity of the opposing force in order to minimize the need for both adaptability and high performance. Thus, we turn the question on its head and ask, “How can we inhibit adaptation?” This paper reviews the findings on what makes organization’s adaptive and provides suggestions for how to inhibit adaptation. A number of lessons learned about how to inhibit adaptiveness are presented. This paper is part of the A2C2 project directed by Daniel Serfaty, Aptima.This work was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), United States Navy Grant No. N00014-97-1-0037 under the direction of Dr. Bill Vaughan. Additional support was provided by the NSF IGERT for resesarch and training in CASOS and by the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University (http://www.casos.ece.cmu.edu ). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation or the U.S. government. Contact: Prof. Kathleen M. Carley Dept. of Social and Decision Sciences Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Tel: 1-412-268-3225 Fax: 1-412-268-6938 Email: [email protected]