ICoSS Project
(Integration of Complex Social Systems)

A 3-year EPSRC-funded collaborative research project working with BT, Modernisation Agency of the NHS, Norwich Union Life and Rolls-Royce Marine, which started in September 2001 and ended in December 2004.

· AIM: To co-create, with our business partners an enabling environment to facilitate integration and the emergence of a new organisational form.

By identifying the social, cultural, technical (as well as political and economic) conditions that facilitate the emergence of new ways of organising and new organisational forms. The ICoSS Project is using the principles of complexity as the underpinning theoretical framework.

Funded under the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Science Research Council) Systems Integration Initiative programme, the ICOSS research project is studying:
· the integration of national, business, cultural, and technical systems in the emergent organisational forms;
· the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in facilitating connectivity and the exchange of 'knowledge';
· the tension between globalisation and local cultures and requirements.

The project was awarded the highest EPSRC grant the LSE had received and the examining Panel rated it first in its list of project priorities.

OBJECTIVES

1. To identify and articulate the conditions that enable and inhibit the creation and sustainability of new organisational forms, able to co-evolve with a changing environment, thus reducing the need for constant restructuring.
2. To co-create with our Business partners, company-specific frameworks of enabling infrastructures (cultural, social and technical conditions that facilitate 'x').
3. To encapsulate the results in generic frameworks, analytic tools, diagrams and supporting computer-based models.
4. To explore processes for the sharing of knowledge within the Business partners.
5. To continue developing a theory of complex social systems, while testing it in practice.
6. To build a comprehensive methodology based on the logic and the principles of complexity, using both qualitative and quantitative methods and tools.
7. To contribute to a business language that allows line managers to use complexity concepts in practical contexts.

OUTLINE

· The project used a combined approach based on collaborative action research involving 'natural experiments'.
· Natural experiments are new ways of working and relating being explored by the organisation itself. They are different from the dominant culture and 'emergent' in the sense that they are not pre-designed or imposed top-down, but are exploratory and bottom-up.
·  The methodology uses both conventional practice studies such as case studies, interviews and opinion surveys for evaluation, as well as exploring and developing new methods and tools, such as agent-based models, art and visual facilitation, conceptual architectures, and email exchange mapping (NetMap). It also explored how qualitative and quantitative methods complement each other. It uses the logic of complexity to underpin the entire methodology as well as the principles of complexity as an analytic tool.
· By taking part in the collaborative action research process, business partners derived benefits which accrued in a continuous stream throughout the life of the project, not just at the end.
· The project  provided practitioners with a new conceptual framework, while testing and refining the theory in practice.
· A multi-disciplinary group of International Expert Advisors from academia and business  contributed different perspectives, knowledge and expertise