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Introduction

Over the last two years, within the action research framework, the work-based problem faced by the operating leasing mobility organizations in Greece has been intensively and strongly affected by the environmental forces applied. The input and feedback received through the modules of the DBA have helped realizing a great deal of the forces in play and in addition facilitated knowledge creation in order to tackle the route causes and fundamentals of the initial and continuously reformed problematization. What is now more and more evident is that services are part of a complex system that adapts timely having in mind complex interdependencies that include production, logistics and delivery to the customer (Lusch & Spohrer, 2013).

Problem Identification

Within the context of the Greek financial and debt crisis and since then, the mobility and operating leasing market has emerged suffering a great hit (if not the greatest among industries in the country) that reconditioned the competitive set and added new puzzles to managers for solving. Initially back in 2012 when the current degree was first pursuit, the crisis left the various organizations in the business passing through reorganizations that where focused on reducing costs, resetting the supplier base renewing alliances and attacking the customer base in an price war initiative. Over the next two years, customers have learned to deconstruct the dynamics and positive aspects of the product asking more and more for additional discounts and further price incentives. The situation created a new reality for mobility organizations that includes low margins due to fact that costs can not be further reduced internally or externally, low customer loyalty shifting and changing decisions based on the fact of price, lack of focus that resulted to low adoptions of new concepts and eventually a commoditization of the product overall that made all organizations look the same to the customers eyes. This level of hyper competitiveness redefined the market in a chaotic way (Stacey, 2011) and made evident that the birth of something new was the next step to affect the market conditions.

In that view and within the realization and identification of the problem operating within a Complex Adaptive System, the learning had to be enhanced internally and appreciation had to be reinstated externally. In order for an organization to achieve such an emergence a deep restructuring is needed, not in term of cost and resources reallocation this time, but in terms of offering a new product that will include a complete Business Model redesign, suitable for the needs of customers and helping to develop their business in a positive and constructive way rather than adding fuel to the mill of price wars that at the end does not offer something better to the customers other than making the purchase managers look good. Having in mind also that the market has began to grow in very small numbers (a situation that is likely to be the case for the next 5-10 years) the problem faced by my organization could be reframed as following: “How can a mobility service organisation redesign its business model in a sustainable way, after exiting a crisis environment and experiencing hyper competition, in a slow growing market in order to meet near future demands and needs of the customer base".

Review on the Literature

It is increasingly evident that the biological evolutionary pattern witnessed over the millennia in living organisms, bears significant resemblance on how business organizations, move, adopt and evolve in complex environment (Businaro, 1983). The mechanics of the social, and hence the business world, entail a great deal of resemblance to the biological sphere. The main though question is what constitutes a reality and how reality is shaped in a complex world. The leanings in the module of Complex Adaptive Systems suggest that emergence of the new is happening at the edge of chaos (Stacey, 2011). The operation is a permanent move at the edge of equilibriums (Bouso & Hawking, 1998) in a way that reality is emerging again and again as a state of majority. It is important to understand though that like “the sympathetic quanta” (Hawking & Mlodinov, 2005) the realities experienced in the societal level are maintained as the learning and the experiential live through build the personal and social understanding that constitutes moral learning (Reed, 2011). Exactly this moral learning guides the “schemata” (Stacey, 2011), the personal and team rules that people tend to obey to. So it is possible for these schemata to change over time and hence this change would reflect the majority of what people think it is right in a democratic sense (Taylor, 1945), in reality the complexity of the matter tends to synchronize the moral and aesthetical appreciation (Veisland, 2005) similarly to what the “strange attractors” (Anderson, 1999) are facilitating in a creation of pattern reality. The theory of complex adaptive systems addresses the social world as a interweaving system that operates always at the edge of chaos and this is when co-evolution facilitates innovation that eventually resemble a hierarchical problem solving in the footprints of natural selection (Simon, 1962). What is important though to understand is that novelty is achieved as a result of self organization and participative action (McKelvey, 2002) that is guided also by adaptive policies that facilitate the formulation of majorities (Swanson, et. al. 2010).

The business environment is heavily depended on rules that guide the functions. People are interacting in a non-linear manner that respects the popular notions (majorities). Every organization is seen as a complex system (Stacey, 2011) making it possible to examine the interactive and interweaving behavior of agents that drive the change. Off course other aspects arise in investigating further those matters, the importance of the recourses and especially human resources in order to assist talent development. In this case talent identification that operates in complex system contains some additional rules to the ones mentioned above. Talent behaves in traits that are effective and acceptable, is well prepared, is choosing the right pasture in each complex situation, is able to solve problems well and is able of high-quality decisions (Bennet & Bennet, 2004).

Two additional very important aspects were revealed in the quest of identifying literature evidence to attack the problem that my organization is facing. The 1^st is the way that leadership is facilitating problem solution and the 2^nd is the dynamic capabilities and their evolutionary capacity inside the organization. In regards to leadership, the complexity leadership theory sheds light in the evolving leader since it states the importance of being an enabling leader as well as an adaptive one (Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2009). The environment though in that case needs to support the leader by being attentive to the globalization rules, addressing the important technological issues that arise, respect the liberal notion of deregulation and be guided by the democratic notion and behavior (Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2009). In that sense environment and capabilities should allow managers to enable emergence (Stacey, 2011). This brings us to the 2nd aspect of what was revealed through the leaterature study, the dynamic capability of the organization. As Eisenhardt & Martin (2000) state dynamic capabilities are experienced and facilitated through a recourse-based view. Integration and reconfiguration of recourses facilitate product development as cross-functional teams by interacting develop a unique product aspect that is closely related with the unique idiosyncratic processes that emerge from a dependent history path (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000).

This last statement is again closely related with the way that agents have been educated, grown and how they have learned to appreciate personal, life and organizational decisions. It is again a matter of formulating majorities on policies that are appreciated in the broader extend of the competitive set. This way though, as shown earlier, an organization achieves innovation by co-evolving and meeting in time the next majority appreciated. As such it needs the assistance of a political entrepreneur (Björkman, & Sundgren, 2005) that will facilitate further organisational emergence.

Additionally, the importance social cognition and the constructive psychology that this cognition entails (Stacey, 2011), highlight the idea of risk taking in shaping the organisational future. Managers that understand the notion of risk taking and its levels may have a greater chance to support a novel idea and an emerging solution (Howells, 1995).

Application of CAL to the problem

Overall, the application of the CAS model in the problem of operating leasing mobility, helped identifying and understanding why organisational and environmental realties have been shaped as they have been and how co-evolution and co-construction assisted to that result (Stacey, 2011). In addition, the application of learning’s to the organisation helped realising the importance of Service Life Cycle seen from the scope of Complex Adaptive Systems. As policy making inside the organisation facilitates the realisation of how interaction is achieved and how this leads to the co-construction of reality (Swanson, et. al. 2010). The next learning and understanding were how the organisational build-in intelligence can support the change of the service system in this case and in addition how it can support the co-evolution of service delivery. This service delivery though needs to be backed up by a new product development or in this case a redesign of the business model by “working” at the edge of chaos that can be productive in the sense of facilitating the emergence of this new business model (McCarthy et. al. 2012). The final learning and realisation suggested how the simple (or not so simple) rules that are embodied in the agent’s behaviour i.e. schemata, can affect the flow of evolution following the path of emergence.

The examination and further development of this last understanding is supporting the idea that those schemata are mostly morally and aesthetically (historically) derived rules that contain bias forms shifting emergence towards an appreciative stance that is based on amortising majority forces.

So far, the above learning’s have helped the realization that a series of issues needed to addressed inside the organization. First, the management understood that the current operational IT system is not a suitable system that can support the next emergent organizational reality. Second it was commonly agreed that talent should be supported internally so that it acts as primary agent of next reality experiences. Third it was understood that the organization can no longer act within an environment of price wars and as such it was agreed that we need to examine the ways and possible service delivery levels that a customer would consider as a business development tool adapted to its strategy. As a last understanding it was clear that the case of holistic mobility should be examined in order to offer a breakthrough in appreciating the new business model proposed in an attempt to facilitate the formulation of new majorities in the quest of new realities.

The Plan

Having identified that the service system is a complex integrated system that entails production, logistics, product development and service delivery (Chathura & Takao, 2013), the management of the organization has developed and approved a plan that will enable the redesign of the operating leasing business model in a sustainable and effective way. The plan includes the adaptation of a completely new and with increased capabilities IT system that is scheduled to be in place in the last 2 months of 2014. A parallel step is to support the design of holistic mobility products i.e. the ability for a customer to utilize the vehicle or vehicles according to its own needs and be able to switch vehicle segment or mobility choice (vehicle, train, electric vehicle, plain, taxi) according to its needs that are dictated by the level of the business development of the customer. The final step of the plan includes the possibility to develop new and technologically advanced service delivery options that will entail smart phone applications for the booking of services needed, the replacement vehicles, the tire changes and any additional service that may rise at the moment.

Part of the plan is to be able to access the evolutionary unique path by learning how to do it (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000). In order for that aspect to be facilitated the organization needs to be able to have a breakthrough to what the majority of the customers consider a business development and supportive mobility business model for them. In order to achieve the above-mentioned quality, we need to research the opinions of the customers and put the findings into testing. Additionally, we need to be able to apply experiential and experimental thought techniques in regards to the near future reality so that the findings could be challenged in a productive and constructive way. As we have witnessed evidence that reality emerges in the system of the competitive and market set through majority formulations that base their success in the schemata that obey to rules dictated by the historical and experiential background of the market, it would be also very useful to research and test this possibility. The idea of supporting that is to be able to embody sustainable features in the then newly designed business model.

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