Specialised Perception, Selection, and Strategic Surprise: Learning from the Moths and Bees
Introduction
Lessons from the evolution of the senses of natural organisms offer insights into the limits and potential for peripheral vision in organisations. By understanding the way organisms such as moths and bees adapt their sensors to specific purposes, and the challenges this creates for exercising ‘peripheral vision’, we can gain fresh perspectives on the way organisations adapt their own sensing systems to specific conditions. Managers can then better assess the shortcomings in existing sensors and seek to correct them.
While thinking about organisations as biological organisms has its hazards, as discussed below, the specialised sensing systems of the two types of ‘orgs’ (organisms and organisations) share some common evolutionary dynamics that can make the comparisons useful. One important distinction is that organisations are composed of organisms; their behaviour is only partly determined by organisational arrangements. Like the evolutionary adaptations of organisms, the past experiences of organisations tend to leave a legacy of inflexibility. Organisations however may be rescued by the fact that the individual human beings within the organisation all have some capacity for peripheral vision.
Section snippets
Strategic threats: Moths that can hear bats
Some species of moths have evolved so that they can hear the sonar of the bats that prey on them. The sound triggers an evasive dive manoeuvre in the moth that decreases the moth’s chance of being eaten. These moths cannot hear anything else. They have no peripheral audition. They have evolved to sense the one type of sound that signals a threat to survival.
Evidently there is an evolutionary benefit of the flight manoeuvre that ‘pays for’ the fitness cost of developing the sonar hearing system.
Strategic opportunities: The puzzle of white flowers
In addition to evolution to avoid strategic threats, organisms and organisations also develop their senses in specialised ways to recognise strategic opportunities. The evolutionary explanation for the emergence of vividly coloured flowers is that these have evolved in a competition to attract pollinators. Bees or other insects are attracted to the flowers as they make their rounds collecting pollen, and in this process they help to pollinate the flowers.
Yet according to this explanation, why
Narrow evolution creates different worlds
The sensing systems we find in nature are often highly specialised. They are narrow band and differ from organism to organism. When an organism has a different sensor array, it is living in a different world of experience. The moth inhabits a world that is in many ways completely different from the bee, even though they may be flitting about in the same field.
Similarly, organisations that ‘flit about’ in the same marketplace will experience very different worlds if, for example, they are
Costs and benefits of different types of sensors
The above discussion of the evolution of sensors assumes that they are dedicated to a single purpose and have to be used in that way or eliminated. In fact, the situation is more complex. There are different types of sensors in natural organisms and business organisations, differing particularly in scope, range, flexibility and redeployability:
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General purpose sensors: These are flexible sensors that are capable of detecting a wide range of stimuli and can be redeployed among stimuli. Human
Organisations are not organisms
Although there are similarities between the two types of orgs that offer insights on peripheral vision, there are limitations to the analogy between organisations and organisms. On the one hand, it seems that most business organisations don’t really have general purpose sensors that might reasonably be compared to human vision. Rather, they tend to parallel simpler organisms in many respects, often accomplishing remarkable things in relatively stable environments while being decidedly weak in
Challenges for organisations
What are the organisational contexts where peripheral vision matters? To a substantial extent, the right answer is ‘we don’t know’, and that’s part of the problem. But experience does point to certain areas as ones where peripheral vision, or its absence, has often played an important role. These include:
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The problem of identifying new customers. The existing customers tend to monopolise the organisation’s attention (like the bees with white flowers).
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The problem of identifying threats and
Can peripheral vision be improved?
This is a hard problem. Almost by definition, the desirability of peripheral vision is a lesson that SAL does not teach—or teaches only insofar as the complementary resources of redeployable focal vision, interpretive capacity and appropriate effectors are all available. Many examples illustrate the problems. Sustaining alertness for the important signals that rarely come is difficult for organisations to do; the loss of the Shuttle Columbia and the recent Staten Island Ferry accident provide
Making the effort
While it may be difficult to make the necessary changes to develop organisational peripheral vision, we can sometimes be successful. Sometimes the new diet we try on January 1 actually works. Success is partly a matter of making realistic choices of what to try, partly a matter of devising ways to ‘lock in’ those choices, and very largely a matter of motivation. With the motivation provided by the rational recognition that a fast-changing environment may contain major challenges and attractive
Sidney G. Winter is the Deloitte and Touche Professor of Management at The Wharton School and co-director of Wharton’s Reginald H. Jones Center for Management Policy, Strategy and Organization. Before joining Wharton in 1993, he served for four years as Chief Economist of the US General Accounting Office in Washington, DC. Most of his research has been in the area of firm behaviour, industry evolution and technological change; his current focus is on the study of corporate strategy and
References (1)
- Feldman, Martha S. and James G. March, “Information in Organizations as Signal and Symbol,” Administrative Science...
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Sidney G. Winter is the Deloitte and Touche Professor of Management at The Wharton School and co-director of Wharton’s Reginald H. Jones Center for Management Policy, Strategy and Organization. Before joining Wharton in 1993, he served for four years as Chief Economist of the US General Accounting Office in Washington, DC. Most of his research has been in the area of firm behaviour, industry evolution and technological change; his current focus is on the study of corporate strategy and management problems from the viewpoint of evolutionary economics.