What is Evolutionary Management?

What in our world has demonstrated greater success than Evolution? To think that the seed of life has survived the passage of millions of years, all the while growing in complexity and awareness, and yet, after all this time, is still hard at work! Could evolution provide a business model suitable for overcoming all the setbacks a business faces?

In view of such remarkable success – and given the obvious elevated status of Life today as the proof of evolution’s success – the way forward might prove to be interesting, or at least inspiring, for helping us manage the activities of all our complex organizations.

Evolutionary Management requires taking an evolutionary approach to guiding human organizations (especially businesses), transforming them and applying lessons learned on a daily basis. Adopting an evolutionary approach is simply a way of recognizing that evolution is the fundamental organizing principle controlling the world, and that it is important to understand and use it to guide human activities.

The relevance and opportunity of this approach is magnified if we recognize that Man is on the verge of reaching a particularly exceptional moment in his evolutionary history. Basically, Man has recently come to realize that he himself is the fruit of Evolution (Darwin, mid-19th century). To the extent that this perception is embedded in his psyche, and that he broadens his scientific knowledge and expands his technological prowess, he can reach a point where he is in a position to take control of his own evolution.

Evolutionary Management is a systemic approach which embraces the natural phenomenon of evolution as an essential element for guiding reflection. It rests on a solid understanding of evolution, evolutionary phenomena, and a mastery of systematic thinking.

Our organizations are the product of evolution, and in this sense they are living organisms obeying evolution’s natural laws. We must therefore learn from evolution’s natural processes in order to take action at different scales.

In addition, evolution is characterized by an increasing rise in the complexity of organisms it generates. Understanding evolution, and situating it in the foundations of management, seems relevant to addressing the complexity of our organizations. Evolutionary Management is, therefore, a tool for coming to grips with the extreme complexity of our organizations.

Evolutionary Management brings many contributions to our toolkit. It should permit:

• developing the evolutionary capabilities of the systems to which it is applied;
• constant and continuing improvement, even for systems which do not experience major problems and are already thought to be functioning optimally;
• significantly reducing all sorts of friction experienced in making changes, by conforming to fundamental principles of evolution of all systems;
• accelerating the rate of change;
• overcoming the need to have to understand the complexity of each system individually (which is not possible in an increasingly complex world), by concentrating more on comprehending the overall organizational evolution (and even that is not simple).

Implementing an Evolutionary Management approach can take many forms.

The level of implementation may vary. One could exert influence on the actions of individual players and managers, on the interplay among the major functions of an organization, on the organization considered in its entirety, on its strategic outlook in its customary environment, or on the interactions and relationships among different organizations.

The course of action, even if it remains systemic, can be carried out on very different assumptions. The points of reference generally used to study an organization could be some natural models resulting from evolution (comparable to the functioning of an ecosystem or human organs), or could be the very mechanisms of evolution (for example, at the simplest level, based on a comparison of genes and their own method of evolution). However, an intervention on an organizational structure based on Evolutionary Management does not always require complete analyses of the system to arrive at reasonable results. Managers, for example, will be able to concentrate on smaller components of the evolutionary mechanisms, such as the development of meta-adaptive capabilities (i.e. characteristics of systems which are necessary to support their capacity to evolve).

The pathways to implementation are, accordingly, particularly varied.

Promoting the concept of evolutionary success, as we have done in the introduction to this article is, however, a little too simple. That is not enough to justify the contributions of Evolutionary Management. If the comparisons to living organisms and their evolution possess the capacity to inspire, Evolutionary Management cannot rely exclusively on analogies between businesses and systems of another sort, where evolution occurred on another scale. For Evolutionary Management to be an efficient approach to influence the transformation of our organizations, it must rely on a systemic approach based on a solid scientific foundation. These days, if the advantages of Evolutionary Management seem particularly engaging, its implementation will have to be significantly elaborated and substantiated.