Core concepts and terminology

Through this small, "growing" glossary, you will find the core concepts featured on this site regarding evolution, innovation, and organization. Terms and concepts are described also in light of the practical application they can acquire within a strategic framework for organizational innovation.

Evolution

On this site, we use neo-Darwinian theory, updated with the most modern lines of research. In the original theory by Darwin and Wallace (1858), later popularized in Darwin's On the Origin of Species the following year, changes in living beings are explained by the prevalence of certain variants over others through natural selection. Therefore, it is a phenomenon of probabilistic alteration in the number of descendants of individuals over many generations. A variant that helps provide an individual with an advantage in leaving more offspring, at a given time and in a given context, has a higher probability of establishing itself over alternative variants.

The original theory was updated in the 20th century with corrections and major expansions into the Modern Synthesis, which explains how variants are produced and inherited. Since the second half of the last century, thanks to the multidisciplinary accumulation of research on the history of living forms and their environments, the Modern Synthesis has been further corrected and expanded. The gradualism proposed by Darwin in 1858 has been integrated (and thus corrected) by "punctuated equilibria," the direct influence of the environment on the individual is recognized through epigenetics, population patterns such as "bottlenecks" are studied, the impact of variations on individual development is considered (evo-devo), and the phenomenon of genetic drift is introduced.

Today, evolution possesses an extremely articulated framework and a massive documented library of the changes of the Earth and its life forms. Nevertheless—or perhaps for this very reason—continuous progress in research, advancements in the disciplines involved, and increasingly sophisticated tools continue to integrate and update the methodological framework, fueling a lively internal debate within evolutionary theory.

Change over time is a vast field, and some general patterns are applicable to the study of organizations—how they change in relation to their context and the way specific innovations either take hold or are abandoned. In using evolution as a methodological integration and the stories of living beings as case studies, the significant differences between biological and cultural changes must be emphasized: primarily the fact that the latter are often integrated by conscious choices and can be oriented in a specific direction through a reasoned strategy.

Adaptability

In evolution, adaptation is the result of changes in a living population in relation to environmental pressures and internal group dynamics. It is therefore measured within a specific temporal and spatial context, such as an ecosystem niche; what proves to be "fit" in a given context may not be so at another time or in a different environment.

Consequently, adaptability is the potential capacity to change oneself based on the evolution of one's context to achieve a positive result, and it is a datum that is read ex post, with the benefit of hindsight.

In biological evolution, adaptation is a blind phenomenon lacking intentionality, whereas human activities can implement proactive strategies aimed at making an organization easily adaptable. Therefore, in these contexts, adaptability can be sought scientifically through flexible and fluid models, a pluralism of skills, and research and development activities that actively reason on context variables at multiple levels—transforming adaptability from a contingent outcome into a specific strategy.

Constraint

In evolutionary biology, a constraint is most often understood as a limiting factor that directs you toward a given path, rather than an insurmountable obstacle that blocks your way. On this website, we talk about change and possible trajectories; we reason about the range of possibilities in relation to the contexts in which we are immersed. Consequently, you will frequently encounter the concept of "structural constraint" when we refer to a pre-existing state—such as the general morphology of a life form or the foundations of a human organization—that cannot or will not be wiped clean to start over from scratch. The structural constraint that we experience most intensely as a living species is the one that shaped our bipedal locomotion, starting around 6 to 7 million years ago. Some bipedal animals are highly efficient, reaching speeds that are impossible for us, and they do not expose their most delicate organs frontally to predators: think of the ostrich and the velociraptor. When our phylogenetic branch split from that of the chimpanzee and the bonobo, a very imperfect bipedalism took hold, which nonetheless facilitated our incursions into open spaces.

If we imagine, with the benefit of hindsight, an engineered way to walk and run in the spaces that interspersed wooded areas (and which much later would become the savanna), our thoughts naturally turn to the wolf, the zebra, or the leopard. If, however, we add the requirement of bipedalism, with usable upper limbs, the velociraptor we have seen or read so much about in recent years, partly thanks to Jurassic Park, presents an ideal structure. If evolution had been an engineer capable of redesigning our structure from scratch, rather than a clumsy cobbler making do with whatever is at hand, we would probably have that very shape. Our pre-existing structure as a Miocene ape represented a "structural constraint" and took both the zebra and the velociraptor options off the table. In human activities, we must take structural constraints into account as well. If you want to add a floor to a building, you face constraints of shape and weight that force you to proceed in certain directions and not others, because otherwise, you would have to tear everything down and start over from the foundations.
Weaker constraints are those that do not necessarily restrict the range of possibilities but make some of the available options simpler, faster, cheaper, or more attractive; thus, they do not dictate specific directions, but they do influence us. These nudges are what produce a greater variety of solutions, because they are more closely tied to the spatial and temporal context and result from often highly tangled webs of contingent factors. One example is the "QWERTY" keyboard, which originated from a mechanical constraint—an engineering layout of letters designed to prevent the typebars from jamming when typing the most frequent English words. This model quickly established itself as the standard, despite competing systems. Once the mechanical constraint vanished with more advanced typewriters and later with computer keyboards, this model nevertheless remained dominant despite the availability of more rational alternatives (such as the Dvorak layout). The reason for the persistence of the "QWERTY" system is an organizational constraint: over time, an organization and a culture have been built around "QWERTY"—from touch-typing schools to the memorization of keystroke sequences for intuitive typing—and this fact makes it counterproductive and expensive to push for the adoption of a keyboard that, on paper, would be more functional today.

The evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould dedicated one of his splendid essays to the triumph of the "QWERTY" keyboard. You can find it in the collection The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (Gould, S. J. - 1980. The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. W. W. Norton & Company).