Three Facets of Organizational Adaptation: Selection, Variety, and Plasticity

When considering the adaptive dynamics of organizations, it is important to account for the full ecology of organizational adaptation, including not only the possibility of learning and adaptation of a given behavior, but the internal selection over some population of routines and behaviors as well. In developing such a conceptual framework, it is necessary to distinguish between the underlying stable roots of behavior, which we term a genotype, and the possibly adaptive expression of those genetic roots, which we term the phenotype. Selection occurs over expressed behavior. As a result, plasticity, the capacity to adapt behavior, poses a tradeoff as it both offers the possibility of adaptive learning, but at the same time mitigates the effectiveness of selection processes to identify more or less superior genetic roots of behavior. These issues are explored in the context of a computational model which examines the interrelationship among processes of variation and selection, and plasticity.