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Enacted Emergence: Exploring Agility and Improvisation in Organizational Settings

This research delves into organizational improvisation and agility within the context of the Pegasus Project, shedding light on the Enacted Emergence theory. It examines the paradoxes of improvisation, the dynamics of large-scale collaborations in particle physics, and the intertwining of structure and agency in agile systems development.

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Enacted Emergence: Exploring Agility and Improvisation in Organizational Settings

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  1. Agility, Improvisation, or Enacted Emergence? Dr Yingqin Zheng, Dr Will Venters, Dr Tony Cornford This research was undertaken as part of Pegasus EPSRC: Grant No: EP/D049954/1 www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk 10 Dec 2007 ICIS, Montreal

  2. Introduction • Pegasus Project – Exploring practices of GridPP: the UK particle physics Grid • Agile systems development? • Methodology as faked? Fiction? Amethodical? • Organisational improvisation •  Improvisation Paradoxes •  Enacted Emergence?

  3. Organizational Improvisation • Metaphors • Jazz (Weick 1992, 1999; Barrett 1998, Hatch 1999) • Improvisational Theatre (Crossan, 1998) • Cunha (1999): “the conception of action as it unfolds, by an organisation and/or its members drawing on available material, cognitive, affective and social resources” • Convergence in time of conception and execution • Bricolage – finding solutions from available rather than optimal resources

  4. Improvisation Paradoxes

  5. Improvisation-Paradoxes Cont.

  6. Particle Physicists and Grids • Currently constructing the worlds most powerful particle accelerator… the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) • Searching for Higgs Boson – “1 person in 1000 worlds, or a needle in 20 million haystacks” • 12-14 million gigabytes per year. • 100,000 CPUs. • 40PB disk, 40PB tape. • “Worlds biggest Grid“ CD stack with 1 year LHC data (~ 20 km)

  7. Building the LHC Computing Grid (LCG): Highly distributed, complex and poorly defined systems development task. Cutting edge hardware and software used. New software standards being negotiated. Middleware and support software being developed in a range of languages. Grid must be distributed and proceed at different paces because of funding. Particle physics has a long tradition of such large scale global collaborations (Traweek 1988). GridPP (UK Contribution to LCG) To a significant degree agile… Collaboration of 230 people in 19 UK universities, RAL and CERN. Decisions are made democratically and consensually, and implemented by influence and persuasion. Network rather than hierarchy Virtual, federated, overlapping and inter-connected. Virtual meetings, wikis, blogs, mailinglists Background Context

  8. Research Findings

  9. Enacted Emergence • Enactment (Weick 1977) • “people invent organizations and their environments and these inventions reside in ideas that participants have superimposed on any stream of experience (ibid. p. 196)”. • Emergence • Temporally emergent qualities • Interactions of existing elements • In a historical context • The evolutionary approach of system development (Dahlbom and Mathiassen 1993) • Enactment of sensemaking

  10. Enacted Emergence

  11. Contributions • Improvisation paradoxes • Agility should embody a deliberate or natural mixture of structure and improvisation, order and changes, intentionality and flexibility, spontaneity and reflexivity, collectivity and individuality • Agile systems development “in the wild” • Embeddedness of agility • Large group performance is possible when the ambience is right. • Science vs art • Enacted Emergence • Duality between structure and agency

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