Managing AEC project organizations at the edge of chaos: An analysis of AEC projects' adaptive capacity from a living systems perspective

Architectural, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) projects are complex organizations that operate within complex, dynamic and uncertain environments. Project performance is based on the organizations' ability to manage efficiently and deliver innovative solutions, thereby delivering value to clients.; Conventional project management is grounded on the old mechanistic and deterministic belief that an organization and its environment operate as linear, cause-and-effect systems that, therefore, are predictable. Monitoring performance consists of identifying disturbances in the environment so as to predict change and work out a plan to manage it, thereby maintaining organizational equilibrium.; However, conventional management strategies have been rather limited in their effectiveness for managing today's project organizations in complex and uncertain environments. Complexity theory has shown that the behavior of complex systems cannot be predicted, because even the tiniest disturbance may be amplified over time by a nonlinear chain of cause-and-effects that cannot be foreseen.; From this theoretical perspective, an AEC project organization is a complex adaptive system and more specifically, a living system. A living system has the adaptive capacity to self-organize when faced with uncertainties, i.e., it can modify the connections among its components so that its overall behavior is better adapted to the new situation.; This exploratory study uses understanding derived from living systems theory as a means to develop a new AEC project performance model that provides a framework for assessing an organization's adaptive capacity. To illustrate, it describes two case studies, the International Terminal at the San Francisco Airport and the San Jose Martin Luther King Library, which were investigated through interviews with project participants in different disciplines and different companies that made up the respective project organizations. The case studies demonstrate that different project organizations respond to their challenges with different adaptive capacities that affect their ability to learn and self-organize. The higher the adaptive capacity of a project organization, the more value is delivered throughout the project life cycle and less waste is generated.; Based on these findings, it is suggested that new project management strategies emerging from a deeper understanding of organizations as living systems have the potential to produce improved project performance.