Karl Weick chooses to describe adaptation in terms of “loosely coupled systems.” He argues that most management technology has wrongly assumed tight coupling — give an order or declare a policy, and it is automatically followed. “The more one delves into the subtleties of organizations,” says Weick, “the more one begins to question what order means and the more convinced one becomes that prevailing preconceptions of order (that which is efficient, planned, predictable, and survived) are suspect as criteria for successful evolution.” He suggests that two evolutionary processes are at the heart of adaptation. “Unjustified variation is critical,” he states, adding, “I am most sympathetic to purposeful complication.” Next, he urges that “retrospective sense making is the key metaphor.” By that he means that management’s prime task is to select, after the fact, from among “experiments” naturally going on in the organization. Those that succeed and are in accord with management’s purposes are labeled after the fact (“retrospective sense making”) as harbingers of the new strategic direction. The losers are victims of trying to learn from “impoverished, shallow surroundings.” That is, there’s little to learn from; the company is marked by few “good tries.” Weick logically concludes: “No one is ever free to do something he can’t think of.” And he provides a description by Gordon Siu of a marvelous experiment to clinch his point: 

…If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle down horizontally, with its base to the window, you will find that the bees will persist, till they die of exhaustion or hunger, in their endeavor to discover an issue through the glass; while the flies, in less than two minutes, will all have sallied forth through the neck on the opposite side…. It is their [the bees] love of light, it is their very intelligence, that is their undoing in this experiment. They evidently imagine that the issue from every prison must be there where the light shines clearest; and they act in accordance, and persist in too logical action. To them glass is a supernatural mystery they never have met in nature; they have had no experience of this suddenly impenetrable atmosphere; and, the greater their intelligence, the more inadmissible, more incomprehensible, will the strange obstacle appear. Whereas the feather-brained flies, careless of logic as of the enigma of crystal, disregarding the call of the light, flutter wildly hither and thither, and meeting here the good fortune that often waits on the simple, who find salvation there where the wiser will perish, necessarily end by discovering the friendly opening that restores their liberty to them. 

Weick concludes: 

This episode speaks of experimentation, persistence, trial and error, risks, improvisation, the one best way, detours, confusion, rigidity, and randomness all in the service of coping with change. Among the most striking contrasts are those between tightness and looseness. There are differences in the degree to which means are tied to ends, actions are controlled by intentions, solutions are guided by imitation of one’s neighbor, feedback controls search, prior acts determine subsequent acts, past experience constrains present activity, logic dominates exploration, and in the degree to which wisdom and intelligence affect coping behavior. In this example loose ties provide the means for some actors to cope successfully with a serious change in their environment. Each individual fly, being loosely tied to its neighbor and its own past, makes numerous idiosyncratic adaptations that eventually solve the problem of escape. Looseness is an asset in this particular instance but precisely how and when looseness contributes to successful change and how change interventions must be modified to cope with the reality of looseness is not obvious.