Self-Organization and Sense-Making in Architect–Engineer Design Teams: Leveraging Health Care’s Approach to Managing Complex Adaptive Systems

Abstract

Traditional management-led risk-mitigation and performance-improvement procedures tend to ignore the relationship dynamics of Architect–Engineer design teams, and instead focus on the credentials of the designers and the process for inspecting and controlling the quality of the team’s output. Management may acknowledge the complex nature of the design process, but the notion of design teams as complex systems, or more precisely, complex adaptive systems (CAS), with their inherently unpredictable behaviors, is not typically considered.