The Adaptive Organisation
AI, complexity science, and the future of work
A weekly publication for leaders who want to think more clearly about AI — using the lens of complex adaptive systems theory.
Latest Articles
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Hysteresis: Why Your Organisation After AI Will Never Return to Normal
Senior leaders commonly treat AI adoption like a controlled experiment: if it doesn’t produce results, roll it back. This assumption shapes how organisations structure their governance, their vendor contracts, and their change management plans. It is also wrong, in a way that physics describes with unusual precision. When an external magnetic field is applied to…
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Why AI Governance Keeps Failing — and What Autopoiesis Explains About It
# Autopoiesis: Why AI Governance Keeps Failing to Stick Every major AI governance effort of the last five years has followed the same disappointing arc: ambitious framework, earnest implementation, system continues largely unchanged. The EU AI Act, algorithmic auditing requirements, GDPR’s application to ad-tech: each has produced genuine friction, some fines, a lot of compliance…
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Emergence: Why AI Cannot Be Managed, Only Cultivated
The most consequential things AI does in your organisation were not planned. Nobody decided that the recommendation engine would lock your customers into a narrowing content corridor. Nobody scheduled the moment when three AI-optimised suppliers simultaneously de-prioritised your orders because they all read the same market signal. Nobody chose the emergent norm where your AI-assisted…
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Co-Evolution: Why Your AI Strategy Is Already Out of Date
Every organisation deploying AI is making a version of the same mistake. They assess what AI can do today, decide whether to adopt it, and build a strategy around that assessment. The mistake is not being wrong about current capabilities. The mistake is treating capability as a fixed property of the technology. It is not.…
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Requisite Variety: Why AI Monocultures Will Fail Your Organisation
In 1956, British cybernetician W. Ross Ashby articulated a principle so fundamental it should sit above every AI strategy deck: Only variety can destroy variety. Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety states that a control system must possess at least as much variety — the number of distinct states it can occupy — as the system…