The Adaptive Organization and Fast-slow Systems

Contemporary organizations operate under turbulent business conditions and must adapt their strategies to ongoing changes. This article argues that sustainable organizational performance is achieved when top management directs and coordinates interactive processes anchored in emerging organizational opportunities and forward-looking analytics. The fast and emergent processes performed by local managers at the frontline observe and respond to environmental stimuli and the slow processes initiated by decision makers interpret events and reasons about updated strategic actions. Current experiential insights from the fast response processes can be aggregated systematically from frontline employees and fed into the slow process of reasoning. When the fast and slow processes interact they form a dynamic system that adapts organizational activities to the changing conditions which identifies the adaptive organization.