Strategy for Sustainability

Organisational Patterns

Andrew Terhorst — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 18:37:25 +0000

Gaye Evans (gevans@equilibria.co.za) has contributed some information on organisational designs (structural patterns). I intend modelling how business enterprises display ecological resilience i.e. undergo structural/regime change in response to changes in the external environment. Hopefully I can use this information in my ABM design.

organization-design.ppt

org-design-complexity.pdf

advanages-and-limitations-of-different-types-of-organiation-structure.ppt

Andrew Terhorst — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 21:02:31 +0000

Agent-Based Modelling Software (Continuously Updated, Reviews to Follow):

http://www.simsesam.de

http://www.agentisolutions.com

OODA Cycles

Andrew Terhorst — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 19:11:56 +0000

According to Dyllick and Hockerts (2004), the drivers for corporate sustainability are:

Environmental and social impacts
Stakeholder perceptions and demands
The competitive field

Maintaining competitive advantage seems to me to be the main driver. My current view is that competitive advantage is realised through:

Corporate agility
Ability to innovate
Creativity
Ongoing learning

The OODA loop is an interesting concept that supports this. Originally developed for the military by John Boyd, OODA loops have been applied in business strategy. The idea is to operate 'inside' competitor loops. I will see how this can inform the design of my agent architecture.

Sustainability Academic References

Andrew Terhorst — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 08:25:55 +0000

I am busy building a digital collection of research papers and technical articles on sustainability, systems thinking and practice, complexity theory, business strategy, multi-agent systems and agent-based modelling. I use JABREF, an open source Java-based reference manager to manage this collection. JABREF supports a number of bibliographic database formats (e.g. EndNote and RIS) and stores reference information in BibTex format. All my writing is done using LaTeX. This means that I do not have to worry about formatting or reference management as LaTeX does this all for me.

Click here to see my current reference list (PDF Document). Contact me should you want to share/exchange articles with me.

Agent-Based Modelling in Research

Andrew Terhorst — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 07:27:04 +0000

I was asked to make a presentation at a recent Ph.D seminar at the University of Kwazulu Natal Leadership Centre. My presentation was entitled 'Agent-Based Modelling in Research'. I explained how Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) can be used to simulate emergent behaviour. I intend to use ABM to model different economic scenarios and see what emergent behaviours contribute to sustainability

Presentation in PDF format

Blog site up

Andrew Terhorst — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 19:04:06 +0000

After much trial and tribulation, I finally have found a decent blog host. Thanks to wordpress for providing a site that meets all my needs. Now I am in a position to share with others some of my thinking and resources.