| The study explores how a new commercial shipyard emerged from a thought, incorporated lessons learned from best manufacturing and management practices and developed as a complex system. Second-career persons with limited resources were motivated to create jobs, cause defense conversion, and achieve a viable business. The findings contribute to the new literature that understands organizations as complex adaptive systems that can be managed with values using leverage techniques which result in surprising, nonlinear change. The theoretical emergence of adaptive human behavior is levered by metaphorical thinking and models (Holland, 1998; McWhinney, 1994). The theoretical properties and mechanisms of adaptation are shown to be coherent and operative in complex human systems (Holland, 1995). Additional leverage for adaptation from equilibrium states relates to theories of organizational learning (Argyris & Schon, 1996), self-organizing (Goldstein, 1994) and management (Drucker, 1998). The study used a whole systems approach bridging objective and subjective reality paradigms with varied magnification for explanation and understanding (Arbnor & Bjerke, 1998). Data for the study were company records produced from participatory action-oriented research (Park, 1993) conducted for business development over a 6-year period. The author's reflection on and in business development practice (Schon, 1983) used a quadrilateral framework to reveal personal and organizational values and escalation of commitment (Ross & Staw, 1987) as additional levers for adaptation and social change. Data analysis was accomplished and represented by modeling the findings as: (a) narrative story and detailed vignettes in a time sequence; and (b) graphical relationships of system agents or meta-agents. The models revealed the complex enterprise as an open system with external and historic connections to the traditions of shipbuilding, worldviews of enterprise persons, and the new core business building blocks of group technology (facilities, equipment, networks, etc.), knowledge base and open organizational structure. Feedback loops connect the business to external elements and link or bridge business sub-systems such as knowledge management and continuous improvement. Complex system strategic and operational management is described. A chapter technically details the modeled shipyard prototype. Themes developed in the study imply that a manager who behaves as scholar-practitioner can facilitate the creation of new business knowledge. |
