Discussion on How Adaptive Systems Exist Within the Company’s Approach to Strategic Management

...

response, while do I believe this is a complex system, well for one we had no knowledge of what to do (knowledge management), and a lot of agents were involved within and outside the organization, and the number of partners, donors and security all had different roles with each person contributing towards its success. Another recent complex system in my organization is the humanitarian response occurring in the North East of Nigeria where a total of 600,000 children are said to be at risk of malnutrition and the areas have been declared a Grade 3 emergency by the World Health Organization, the response involves 5 countries and a lot of players including donors, partners, Government agencies, security agencies, aid workers etc. all of them are supposed to be working together with a plan and a common goal saving lives but this seems a misfit as a lot of egos are at stake which needs to be managed as the organization I work in have been given the mandate to lead the coordination of the health sector but with inputs (external) from security forces and of course the government.

The 3rd example is during the Methanol poison response which I led directly, it was complex as many external factors came to play and kept on throwing up new challenges. One had to do with the high level of case fatality rate reaching over 80%, what made it most challenging was the fact that a methanol poison was caused by drinking local gin, relatives of patients that died claimed that drinking alcohol could not lead to death and that it was spiritual. So I had to deal not only with the sciences but also with people’s faith and belief and every time an inroad was made 2 new blockades fell into place. We had to really think outside the box, even the management proved challenge especially the fact that the only 2 persons that survived out of 16 cases became permanently blind. Rehabilitation which is not part of our mandate had to be done as we needed to adapt.

Adaptive system used by the organization

In the first instance for the Ebola virus outbreak, the goal was to respond and by treating the sick and stopping the outbreak from spreading to other cities in Nigeria from Lagos where it was detected. But as these are examples of complex adaptive system a lot of activities and actions taken by persons involved were unpredictable, but the system itself had its mechanism to self-organize a characteristic of complex system.

We initially adapted using what Liedtka describes as intelligent opportunism making use of the organization strength and those of partners to quickly formulate a strategy that was presented and accepted based on current knowledge and best practices at that point, the organization quickly created an emergency operational center based on the Center for disease control model in Atlanta to accommodate the large number of players involved in the exercise, it is of note that the more the players involved in the response the more difficult it was to control the response as the different agents seems to have different ways of operating and at times it felt we were working at cross purpose a fact attested to by Kaufman, (Kaufman 1993) and over the course of the response as frictions were solved new ones arose.

The next thing that we discussed was how to handle the Ebola outbreak as we termed it a complex system from the onset and agreed that a lot of factors were out of our control and then tried to control for some of these factors such as how military personnel behave around Ebola contacts and if they used force how would the contacts respond to the daily visits to monitor their temperature, a need identified was training of security agencies on how to behave around civilians and not to use brutal force, even with these there were lot of issues and at the end the security had to be used only for difficult cases or contacts. We had to adapt and change the strategy.

Another principle which the organization used to adapt was by creating a good response plan, but not going into every minute details with the different teams allowed to determine their work plan with the only caveat that if fit into the goal of stopping the outbreak, as earlier mentioned when planning for every detail leaves little room for innovation and adoption and the detailed plan might not be feasible to occur due to the fact that the system and its players are usually unpredictable.

The organization had to use multiple approaches to tackle the same problem especially when we got stuck on what to do, this helped to bring about new knowledge and where such methods proved successful was adapted and benchmarked in order to track it and where necessary improve on it. At the end of the Enola outbreak in Nigeria Standard operating procedures were developed for the country.

Use of the informal sector knowledge and tapping on previous connections ensured that some actions that would never see the light got done, one that comes readily to mind is use of street urchins to trace the houses of persons that came in contact with Ebola patients and using the private sector to hire vehicles this is not the norm but due to the complex nature of the response the organization had to adapt.

Use of force and coercion was also a strategy used by the overall team lead during the response and this adaptation seemed to work, with the team lead showing strength to difficult partners and being soft on partners that were willing to work for the response to succeed. Eventually, all partners seemed to fall into place making the response smoother. By the way, use of force is discouraged by the organization but was brought in to manage the situation.

During the adaptation period, I think the best thing done by the organization was to give team and its lead a lot of space to really be innovative and this really fostered teamwork and allowed for cross-fertilization of knowledge among different units instead of the normal top-down approach we were able to learn from our mistakes, and at the end experts developed who were later deployed to different countries to help in the global Ebola outbreak response.

The role of Knowledge management in enabling organization respond.

Today’s best practice is tomorrow old ways of doing things, organizations that are flexible to changes tend to improve,(Sherif 2006) stay longer in a competitive world but some knowledge is better than none at all. As we battled both scenarios, new knowledge came out, new ideas were tried, new partnership had to be formed, old ones renewed. Past experiences while playing its role had to be reversed with the new knowledge built on previous ones, and feedback mechanism used to assess the validity and reliability of the new knowledge.

I believe the knowledge management

...