Stable, high-velocity, turbulent and high-velocity/turbulent environments

 

Emery and Trist (1965), Terreberry (1968) defined turbulent environments (TEs) looking at the problem from the standpoint of change in interactions between players (government, companies, external stakeholders).

Interested in the dynamics of change, Dess and Beard (1984) and Eisenhardt and Bourgeous (1988) introduced the notion of high-velocity environments (HVEs).

Jones and Mahon (2012) synthesized the above material and suggested updated definitions of TEs and HVEs. They also suggested the notion of high-velocity turbulent environments (HVTEs) and contrasted it to stable environments (SE). They wrote

High velocity environments are those situations where change is rapid, large and discontinuous (that is, changes occur at intermittent times and are not related to what occurred more recently).

Turbulent environments … are more long lived and reflect large (or small, but significant) changes in the interactions between and among players in an environment … AND where those changes impact on the processes of interactions themselves.

For Jones and Mahon (2012) high-velocity/turbulent environments are those in which the pace of changes, the magnitude of changes and the interactive effects of change and magnitude are significant.

They argued that stable environments do not present dynamic changes or noticeable variations in players’ interactions.

I  summarize the combinations in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The four types of environments

References

Dess, G. and Beard, D. (1984), ‘‘Dimensions of organizational task environments’’, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 29, pp. 52-73.

Eisenhardt, K.M. and Bourgeois, L.J. (1988), ‘‘Politics of strategic decision making in high-velocity environments: toward a midrange theory’’, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 31 No. 4, pp. 737-70.

Emery, F.E. and Trist, E. (1965), ‘‘Causal texture of organizational environments’’, Human Relations, Vol. 18 No. 1, pp. 21-32.

Jones, N.B. and Mahon, J.F. (2012), “Nimble knowledge transfer in high velocity/turbulent environments”. Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 16 No. 5 2012, pp. 774-788.

Terreberry, S. (1968), ‘‘The evolution of organizational environments’’, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 12 No. 4, pp. 590-613.