Re: [apsa_itp] Top-down vs. bottom-up

["David Bray" <David_Bray@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>> In a Highly Complex World, Innovation From the Top Down

... quite an interesting article that Steffen sent! It raises some valid
points, others are debatable and need to be proven. While the jury's still
out on top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to innovation and sensemaking, I
do have an empirical paper that extends March's (1991) model of
exploration and exploration to consider multi-tier hierarchies
experiencing environmental turbulence; specifically considering 6,000
different organizational forms. As for the results: 

(1) When confronted with environmental turbulence, top-down hierarchies
*hurt* ... there's actually an interaction between the number of tiers in
a hierarchy and the probability of top-down flow of ideas in an
organization, such that when you have 5-or-more tiers in a hierarchy, the
accuracy of an organization's knowledge to that of external reality is
near 0 (these concepts are again from March's 1991 seminal model).
Top-down hierarchies are great at maintaining their own internal reality,
but not with changing to address a turbulent external reality. 

(2) However, when confronted with environmental turbulence, a bottom-up
approach with knowledge from experts in the organization being passed
upwards actually complements and benefits from a hierarchical structure.
However -- and this is the key point that relates to the article Steffen
sent -- the key is to include knowledge from experts (the top 1-2% of
knowledge workers in an organization), not the knowledge from everyone in
the organization. So in this example, a truly democratic organization
would *not* do as well. Details at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=962535

Ergo, from the empirical study of 6,000 types of modeled organizational
forms: a bottom-up approach *employing experts* is vastly superior to a
top-down approach (either democratic or experts-only) when faced with
environmental turbulence. 

Anecdotally, perhaps this might in part explain the problems the current
Presidential Administration has faced over the last 6 years? 

Two cents, 

-d. 
http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~dbray/

Michael Allan <mike@xxxxxxxxx>,Internet on Sunday, August 19, 2007 at 5:50
AM -0500 wrote:
>On Sat, Aug 18, 2007 at 06:42:01PM -0500, Steffen W Schmidt wrote:
>> Lets shift the discussion a little bit. Is elitism all so bad. Idealism
>> rocks. Unless we make unfounded assumptions about human behavior as
>> especially mob behavior.
>
>I've been too bold with paper ideas. You guys are right,
>the next step is to test them against reality.
>
>> In a Highly Complex World, Innovation From the Top Down
>
>( Ha! We'll see about that. ;)
>
>-- 
>Michael Allan
>
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