The effectiveness of ambiguity in the management of complexity

This paper is aimed at exploring the role of natural language in organizational learning performances, particularly under conditions of high complexity of external environment. To address this issue, the stylized representation of organizational learning proposed in the seminal paper of March of 1991 “Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning” is used as a reference model to build up an agent-based computational laboratory. Through this lab simulative experiments have been settled and performed to verify in which environmental conditions a cognitive system capable of managing vague descriptions of reality is more effective than a formal system which instead provides precise descriptions. Experimental results show that in stable environments the language-based management of organizations does not offer significant advantages with respect to traditional approaches. In turbulent environments, instead, the benefits of natural language are related to the ability of the fuzzy organization to cope effectively with environmental complexity (modelled as turbulence) in the long run.