Modern Mendels and Organizational Adaptation

Abstract

There has been recent interest in an important mechanism of intentional, designed learning efforts: random controlled trials. We situate this mechanism within an evolutionary framework and then consider some modest propositions for our Mendelian executive. RCTs tend to suffer from a lack of consideration of context dependence, and in that regard pose an interesting contrast with processes of imitation and recombination. The Mendelian executive as envisioned here goes beyond experimentation in a narrow RCT sense and plays a broader role in nurturing organizational adaptation. Three fundamental roles of the Mendelian executive are identified: encouraging adjacencies and identifying ways in which the organization can leverage its existing strengths into new possibilities, agnostic selection reflecting the challenge of selecting out less promising pathways and amplifying more promising ones, and engaging the variegated environment in which the organization operates to both enhance the set of possible adjacencies and the diversity of feedback.