An engineering approach to natural enterprise dynamics: From top-down purposeful systemic steering to bottom-up adaptive guidance control

Summary form only given. Enterprises are dynamical systems, formed by a semantic web of active servers of two kinds: Carbon-based servers, normally called Humans, and silicon-based servers, called Computers. These active elements change the state of the world through their individual and collective orchestrated networked actions, in real time. All an enterprise "does" is the sum total of the actions of its active servers. No more, no less! An Enterprise is an entity by itself, whose existence is associated with intentions, missions, goals and purposes that are in some degree shared by its active elements and inform the prescribed organizational elements of its structures. An Enterprise is under permanent change, due to external and internal conditions, and the enacted changes occur either by spontaneous actions of its active servers or by intentional systemic change that propagates top-down and is purposefully adopted by the baseline servers. This talk will show how relevant is the Engineering Body of Knowledge of Systems Theory and Dynamic Systems Control and the formal principles and methods of Enterprise Engineering to model, design and operate Enterprises and in particular, how to steer top-down strategic transformations and to combine them with adaptive bottom-up emergent adaptive phenomena.