In addition, human complex adaptive systems, including businesses, have the distinguishing characteristic of carrying out socially coordinated activities. These activities require a mindset and language that goes beyond the mechanical and that includes learning and ideas. Yet human organizations, businesses, and much of science are still strongly embedded in and constrained by mechanical thinking and language. We know intellectually that is no longer sufficient, but centuries of conditioning pull us back to familiar patterns when we are under stress. We still try to organize and manage our enterprises as if they are clock-like and predictable because we aren't yet comfortable with another way.
Businesses consist of two complementary processes.
This consists of the routines and behaviors that produce things, create value, improve efficiency, satisfy needs. They remain largely a mechanical world, and they work well that way. This is the source of novelty and innovation and, in a very real sense, the source of sustainable success of an organization. It is the cognitive basis for the organization. In the Industrial Age, businesses operated in slowly changing environments, and the emphasis was on operations and development of infrastructures to carry out well described processes.