About Exaptation

Exaptation is an anthro-complexity consultancy for organisations working in conditions where predictability has stopped paying off.

Most consultancies know software well, or organisations well. Rarely both, almost never in the same head. Exaptation is built from decades of production software work, brought together with anthro-complexity: the natural-science tradition (evolutionary biology, complexity theory, the work of Dave Snowden and others) that explains why optimised systems become brittle the moment the ground starts to shift.

The combination is the leverage. Software stops being a thing to deliver and starts being treated as a substrate to cultivate; organisations stop being modelled as machines and start being treated as the living systems they already are.

Who's behind it

Exaptation is Lasse Alexandros Diercks connected to a curated selection of 14 independent contractors and 6 partner companies.

What does the term Exaptation actually mean?

In evolutionary biology, an exaptation is a trait that evolved for one purpose and ended up serving a different one. Feathers warmed birds long before they flew, swim bladders became lungs, jaw bones became ear bones.

The shift was rarely planned. It tended to happen when an existing capability landed in a new context where it suddenly mattered more than the one it had been shaped for. We look for the same thing in organisations: the unframed use of what is already there.

Address

Exaptation GmbH

Osterbrooksweg 35-41

22869 Schenefeld

Germany