**today** Lecture: Wed June 14 12:30p, Brian Tivnan: March-ing forward by leaps and boundary spanning

[Stephen Guerin]

TITLE: March-ing forward by leaps and boundary spanning: Coevolutionary dynamics
of the adaptive tension between exploration and exploitation

SPEAKER: Brian F. Tivnan

The MITRE Corporation &
Executive Leadership Doctoral Program
George Washington University

LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room
TIME: Wed June 14, 12:30p

Lunch will be available for purchase

ABSTRACT
Recognizing the inherent strengths of simulation-based research, James March
proved to be one of the earliest pioneers of simulation as a methodological
approach in organization science (e.g., Cyert and March's (1963) Duopoly Model
and Cohen, March and Olsen's (1972) Garbage Can Model). March appreciates that
simulation provides the researcher a platform: (a) to explore the inherent
complex dynamics of organizations (Dooley & Van de Ven, 1999; Simon, 1962), (b)
to conduct experiments that would typically be impossible or impractical in the
physical world (McKelvey, 1997), and (c) to study sets of actors who possess an
adaptive capacity (Axelrod, 1997) as an alternative to rational actor
assumptions which overlook the boundedly rational limitations of their actors
(Simon, 1976).

Because March's (1991) paper - "Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational
Learning" has emerged as a seminal paper in organization science, the
Organizational Code Model (OCM) represents an ideal candidate for replication.
As with Prietula and Watson's (2000) replication and extension of the Duopoly
Model, the following four points provide support for replication of the OCM: (a)
replication and repeatability represent two of the hallmarks of simulation as a
research methodology, (b) replicating the OCM in a modern modeling framework
(e.g., Repast) and providing it to the scholarly community in an executable form
brings the research to life through the addition of visualization and user
interfaces, and (c) this additional availability should increase comprehension
within the scholarly community for the OCM dynamics and the robustness of
March's findings, and (d) replication from the model description in the
published paper allows for the establishment of relational equivalence (Axtell,
Axelrod, Epstein, & Cohen, 1996) between the original and replicated models but
also highlights the necessity for additional information on the statistical
distributions of the original results to establish distributional equivalence.

If available in an executable form, the original OCM provides a platform to
conduct additional experiments of seminal concepts in organization science from
March and other theorists. For example, the OCM supports Ashby's (1956) Law of
Requisite Variety when comparing the complexity of the organization to that of
the environment. Furthermore, the original OCM can also be used to support other
March contributions to organizational learning concepts, namely the respective
absorptive capacity (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990) of competing organizations and the
path dependent nature of organizational learning induced by competency traps
(Levitt & March, 1988).

In addition to conducting supplementary experiments with the original OCM, a
replication of the OCM could also facilitate its extension. Some possible
extensions to March's OCM include: (a) boundary spanning organizational members
(Hazy, Tivnan, & Schwandt, 2003; Tushman & Scanlan, 1981) for a direct interface
to the environment and increase member heterogeneity in lieu of random
replacement of members; (b) interactions between organizational members and
boundary spanning members governed by the emergence of trust (Macy & Skvoretz,
1998); (c) generation of the competitive context to which March alludes in his
closing comments with multiple instantiations of the OCM as the Organizational
components (Tivnan, Forthcoming); and (d) extension of this competitive context
to also consider collaborative relationships between organizations (Tivnan,
2004).

REFERENCES
        Ashby, W. R. (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman &
Hall.
        Axelrod, R. (1997). Advancing the Art of Simulation in the Social
Sciences. In R. Conte, R. Hegselmann, & P. Terna (Eds.), Simulating Social
Phenomena (pp. 21-40). Berlin: Springer.
        Axtell, R., Axelrod, R., Epstein, J. M., & Cohen, M. D. (1996). Aligning
Simulation Models: A Case Study and Results. Computational and Mathematical
Organization Theory, 1(2), 123-141.
        Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1972). A Garbage Can Theory
of Organizational Choice. Administrative Science Quarterly, 17(1), 1-25.
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        Levitt, B., & March, J. G. (1988). Organizational Learning. Annual
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        Tivnan, B. F. (Forthcoming). Coevolutionary Dynamics and Agent-Based
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