| 16/07/09 | | The Case for Complexity, the Pecha Kucha way |
Last week I gave a presentation to the Canberra Pecha Kucha group on complexity. I subsequently recorded the presentation and loaded it to youtube.
Pecha Kucha (explained in a you tube video here) is a presentation format where you have 20 slides and each slide is visible for 20 seconds. Putting the presentation together highlighted a number of things, the most important of which is that it reminded me that organisations and governments still have a long way to go to be able to make effective progress with complex problems. I am hoping the youtube video will help raise awareness of this issue.
The Pecha Kucha format was very useful in helping to really focus the message. All of the presentations last week were excellent, one in particular was very moving. Having seen a range of quite bad Pecha Kucha presentations previously, my conclusion is that you need to practice the Pecha Kucha a few times for it to work.
My thanks go to Scott Sharpe for following up a conversation on the night where I attributed the quote "I have written you a long letter as I didn't have time to write a short one" to Mark Twain. Scott did some checking and it turns out that this quote is often mistakenly attributed to Twain. It is actually Blaise Pascal's and the correct quote is "I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter." Thanks Scott.
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| 9/07/09 | | Two ears, one mouth |
I
can't remember who first said to me "you have two ears and one mouth, and you should use them in that proportion" but it is one of the best pieces of advice I have ever received. Also, when working in many organisations, I notice it is not applied that widely. Shawn and I have come across two examples earlier this year where 'listeners' were let go and noisy and opinionated people were never considered to be candidates for retrenchment because of their 'visible contribution' to the organisation (it was probably more their 'audible contribution'). These sorts of decisions further undermine an organisation's capability to make progress with complex problems.
Listening has a vital role in tackling complex problems, such as any change initiative, either social or organisational. We use our Narrative Insight (story listening) techniques to explore and help make sense of the patterns relating to these complex issues. The following excerpt from The McKinsey Quarterly emphasizes why we should put more effort into listening and less into telling:
In a famous behavioral experiment, half the participants are randomly assigned a lottery ticket number while the others are asked to write down any number they would like on a blank ticket. Just before drawing the winning number, the researchers offer to buy back the tickets from their holders. The result: no matter what geography or demographic environment the experiment has taken place in, researchers have always found that they have to pay at least five times more to those who came up with their own number.
The lesson is clear - you need to listen to and act on the needs and perspectives of the stakeholders. Even if you don't like what they are saying. People value what they have a sense of ownership in and you need to listen to find out what that is. And where there is anger, resentment etc around an issue I have found the advice of Professor Brenda Dervin to be spot on.."anger dissipates when people are listened to".
If you happen to know of the original research referred to in the McKinsey article we would love to hear about it.
Reference: 1. The McKinsey Quarterly 2009 Number 2, pages 101-109
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| 30/04/09 | | Apologies |
Last year I wrote about how the skill to apologize will become even more valuable as the world get even more complex and speedy. Things will go wrong.
Well it looks like some books are being published on the topic. Here's what Tom Peters has discovered.
In What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful, Marshall Goldsmith proclaims: "I regard apologizing as the most magical, healing, restorative gesture human beings can make. It is the centerpiece of my work with executives who want to get better."
All I can add is:
Amen!
I believe that skill at Apologizing is nothing short of a "strategic competence"!
"Strategic competence"? Absolutely! Customers lost for want of a timely and sincere "I'm sorry. My fault" number in the billions, from restaurant diners to aircraft engine purchasers.
And now there's an entire book on the topic arriving May 1, Effective Apology: Mending Fences, Building Bridges, and Restoring Trust, by John Kador.
Read a whole book on the topic?
Yes!
Damn it!
Stra-te-gic-com-pe-tence!
In addition to being an excellent "how to" guide, the book also captures hard evidence. For example, with a new policy on apologies, Toro, the lawn mower folks, reduced the average cost of a claim from $115,000 in 1991 to $35,000 in 2008—and the company hasn't been to trial since 1994. The VA hospital in Lexington, Massachusetts, developed an astonishing approach to apologizing for errors (forthcoming—even when no patient request or claim was made). In 2000, the overall mean VA system malpractice settlement was $413,000. The Lexington VA hospital settlement # was $36,000—and there were far fewer per patient claims to begin with.
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| 3/04/09 | | A simple explanation of the Cynefin Framework |
A while back I created a sketchcast of how I explain the Cynefin Framework and it became a popular sketch. Unfortunately Sketchcast went out of business and I lost my sketch so last night I recreated it and popped it up on YouTube.
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| 7/01/09 | | Trends that will affect enterprise collaboration |
The beginning of the year is a good time to take stock of where things are going and try and get a handle on the macro trends affecting our work. For me that means enterprise collaboration in all its forms. Here are six major trends that will encourage leaders to take action and help their organisations to be even more collaborative.
Six global trends that encourage enterprise collaboration
- Global financial crisis. Customers are tightening their belts in preparation for a tough year. Companies are looking for ways to reduce costs, and importantly for collaboration, this also means getting the most out of what they have already invested in. Sometimes this investment is in collaboration technology, which to my mind mostly under-performs because it's often implemented without supporting practices and processes. Mostly, however, the investment is in the salaries paid to their people who could become more productive with a systematic approach to team, community and network collaboration
- Increasing speed of business. Things will continue to speed up and it looks like, despite the GFC, economic growth is likely. This means opportunities will appear and disappear in a flash. Competitors will appear from nowhere and only the fleet of foot will survive. But organisations cant move fast enough by merely building their own capabilities. They'll need to partner and collaborate to create new products and services faster than their competitors.
- Rise of Gen Y. By some accounts Gen Ys make up a third of the population and are pouring into our workplaces. These guys expect to learn, to change, to have responsibility and they are already using a range of communication technologies to collaborate and expect similar capabilities in the workplace.
- Information explosion. This trend has been in play for sometime and it doesn't look like slowing down. It's a fact of life: we will never know everything and the percentage of what anyone knows is diminishing. At the same time, as our next trend describes, problems are getting trickier, more intractable. The only way we will be able to make progress is to combine our collective intelligence to nut these tricky problems out.
- Increased complexity. The world is getting more connected in all sorts of ways. We know more people, we visit more people, organisations are partnering, flights are increasing, information networks are getting more joined up and so it goes. When we increase the connections in a network things become more unpredictable. Small things in one part of the network can have a disproportionate impact in another part. There are no single rights answers in these situations. But groups of people can come together and work out initiatives to make progress. When things get complex, collaborate.
- Outsourcing to Asia. Dan Pink observed that outsourcing to Asia is a solid trend. Last week I heard a good example of collaboration directly related to this phenomena. Sony has been outsourcing some of its customer service functions to a range of outsourcing companies in Asia. The people in each of the outsourcing companies thought it would make sense to get together to share what they knew about being a Sony customer service representative, so they establish a community collaboration initiative.
Are there other macro trends that will encourage or discourage collaboration?
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| 3/12/08 | | When should we collaborate? |
Is it collaboration when you’re sent the yearly performance review spreadsheet and instructed to assess your staff’s performance? Absolutely not; it’s an act of co-ordination. Everyone is working separately to achieve the overall goal of conducting the performance reviews. Only a modicum of trust is required (trust in the system) to get the job done.
So, is it collaboration when you meet with your team to work out the performance review process? Not quite. Here we are co-operating with our colleagues to deliver a task that we all know needs to be done. When we co-operate there is often a medium level of trust involved (trust in each other’s competencies and character), the value of the activity tends not to accrue directly to the participants co-operating and, in most cases, someone else is driving you to do it. [1]
So what is collaboration then? It’s when a group of people come together, driven by mutual self–interest, to constructively explore new possibilities and create something that they couldn’t do on their own. Imagine you’re absolutely passionate about the role that performance reviews play in company effectiveness. You team up with two colleagues to re-conceptualise how performance reviews should be done for maximum impact. You trust each other implicitly and share all your good ideas in the effort to create an outstanding result. You and your colleagues share the recognition and praise equally for the innovative work.
The important factor is mutual self-interest. When people create things they really want to create, and it is also good for the company, it energises and engages people like nothing else. Just ask Google, who have institutionalised collaboration by giving every engineer 20 per cent of their work week to spend on any project that takes their fancy.
Today most commentators conflate co-ordination, co-operation and collaboration under the single banner of ‘collaboration’. All three types of working together are important, but creating environments where collaboration (as we have defined it) happens creates a spark that will truly transform an organisation. The important skill is knowing when to collaborate, co-operate and co-ordinate.
When is the best time to collaborate?
When thinking about good times to collaborate, it’s useful to start with a simple model that helps us understand the nature of the types of issues we might encounter in an enterprise. Here I’ve illustrated the Cynefin (pronounced cun-ev-in) framework which categorises organisational activity into four domains [2]:
Simple: this is when there is a clear relationship between cause and effect. When you do X you always get Y, and no matter how many times you do X you get the same Y result. Organising the performance reviews is a good example. You can predict with confidence the end result of the activity. In these cases co-ordination can be used to great effect.
Complicated: this is when there is still a relationship between cause and effect but you have to put effort in working out that relationship and there is often a range of possible answers. This is the realm of experts who put in the effort working out these cause-and-effect relationships. Co-operation is effective in this domain because there is often a clear end goal in mind but you need the combined forces of a range of people to achieve it.
Complex: this domain is characterised by causes and effects that are so intertwined and intricate that things only make sense in hindsight. You hear people saying: “Ah, the reason that happened was because ...”, but if you rewind the tape of what just happened and play it again, you get a different outcome; rewind and play again, and yet another outcome. This phenomenon occurs because in complex situations everything is so interconnected that a small change in one part of the system can have inordinate impact somewhere else, and vice versa. The system is unpredictable in detail, yet we can discern patterns. Designing and implementing a new performance management approach is complex because, regardless of how much analysis we do before putting it into practice, we won’t know how it’s going to work in detail. It is in these complex situations that collaboration comes to the fore.
Collaboration works well for complex situations because the style of working collaboratively matches the nature of the issues that complex situations pose. Complexity is unpredictable, and collaborating is adaptable; complexity is messy – it’s difficult to work out the question, let alone the answer – and collaborating involves bringing together a diversity of people and talents to improvise and test possible approaches, all learning as you go. Complexity offers unique and novel conundrums, and collaboration draws on a deep foundation of trust to that fosters creativity and delivers innovations.
The last domain of the Cynefin framework is chaos. This is where it’s impossible to discern a relationship between cause and effect. The best approach in this domain is simply to take action. Paradoxically it really doesn’t matter which group style is used here, as any way of working will either create opportunities in the complex space where collaboration can take effect, or push the situation into the simple domain where a co-ordination approach is effective.
With the Cynefin framework as a guide, we can better align the type of group work with the nature of the issue at hand. Collaboration is not the best approach in every situation and let’s not fall into the trap of thinking of it as a panacea. Sometimes it’s simply more effective to issue a direction to get the job done when the job is simple or complicated. It’s when things are truly complex that collaboration is most effective, and the reality is that the world is becoming more connected, faster moving and therefore more complex by the minute. Collaboration will have a growing role to play in every organisation.
References
[1] Economist Intelligence Unit (2008). The role of trust in business collaboration.
[2] Snowden, D. J. and M. E. Boone (2007). "A Leader's Framework for Decision Making." Harvard Business Review November.
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| 4/11/08 | | Knowledge strategy: little things making a difference |
The actKM conference was held in Canberra in mid October. One of the presenters was Jane Chrystal from the Central West Catchment Management Authority who were one of the pilot sites for the Regional Knowledge Resource Kit (RKRK) project. The RKRK project developed a process and supporting resources for the various Natural Resource Management regions to develop their own knowledge strategies.
Jane mentioned that one of the actions from their knowledge strategy has had a big impact. This simple action was for all staff to write a clear description in the subject line of their emails. Adopting this practice has helped staff deal with information overload by being able to quickly identify emails that they need to deal with, and which ones can be simply deleted. I recall when we were working with Jane and her team that another 'small' initiative was to encourage people to travel together as much as possible when driving around the region - the idea being that car trips are an ideal time to have conversations, build relationships and share knowledge.
Congratulations to Nerida Hart and the Knowledge for Regional NRM team from Land & Water Australia on receiving the actKM Platinum Award for their achievements in developing the RKRK and related activities. Anecdote is proud to have had a major role in supporting the RKRK project and we really enjoyed working with Nerida and her team on this project.
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| 23/08/08 | | Aphorisms we should dismiss in the face of complexity |
Life's little sayings have a big impact on how we think.
A stitch in time saves nine.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
They make up our common sense but as Einstein quipped:
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
I believe these aphorisms survive because they contain wisdom that work for us. But in the face of what we know about complexity there are some sayings that should go the way of the desert bandicoot.
Here are two that no longer make sense when things are complex:
- The definition of insanity is to do the same thing twice and expect a different result
- You can't fix what you can't measure.
Can you think of others that hold us back?
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| 7/08/08 | | Individual intelligence can lead to collective stupidity |
I am reviewing Fred Kofman's book 'Conscious Business' subtitled 'How to build value through values. He uses a soccer game to illustrate 'a puzzling paradox' whereby coherent and rational individual behavior often produces incoherent and irrational systemic behavior. Systems theory teaches that to optimize the system, you must optimize its sub-systems. Kofman's soccer analogy kicks this into touch...I have paraphrased it below:
In soccer, the objective of each team is to win by scoring more goals than the opponent. Teams are organized into sub-teams, offense and defense. The objective of the offense is to score goals; the objective of defense is to prevent the opposition from scoring. If the coach decides to use management by objectives and performance-based incentives the resultant compensation system sees the offense receiving payment in direct proportion to the goals they score and the defense in inverse proportion to the goals they allow.
If the incentive system works, the team will end up defeating itself. The offense would rather lose 4 goals to five than win 1 to 0. The defense would rather lose 1 to 0 than win 5 to 4. There is no incentive for the offense to help defend their goal and vice versa. While each sub-team tries to optimize its sub-objective, it sub-optimizes the team's objective. Substitute 'operations' for 'defense' and 'sales' for 'offense'; 'revenues' for 'scoring' and 'costs' for 'preventing goals' and you can see how this would work in organisations, and how easy it is to lose sight of the objective of winning the game as a team.
Kofman's book is an excellent read, using anecdotes and examples throughout to illustrate his ideas. It is a 'must-read' for all managers and leaders.
1. Kofman, F., 'Conscious Business: How to Build Value through Values', Sounds True, Colorado, 2006, p77-78
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| 5/07/08 | | The pond metaphor |
Here is something I have meant to post about for a while. It is a metaphor in the book 'Dangerous Undertaking' by James Harlow Brown. Shawn has previously blogged about the extensive use of metaphor in the book. The metaphor is in a story about a NASA engineer who discovered something that took him off his 'autopilot' and helped him realised the impact his behaviour and actions have. I have tried to paraphrase the story to capture its essence:
The engineer was sitting by a pond, contemplating. He saw a frog jump into the pond and noticed how the ripples spread right across the pond. He watched intently and realised that there were many other sources of movement on the surface of the pond. Insects would occasionally touch the water causing tiny ripples. A swallow swooped down and lightly touched the surface as it caught a bug. A light breeze came up and created more ripples. All these ripples interacted and caused complex patterns on the surface of the water. The engineer began to get an insight; each event was writing its unique pattern on the water and the ripples lasted long after the event happened. He realised that the whole world was the same way. We make ripples and create the future every moment.
The engineer's insight deepened. He realised he was watching the pond from a distance, as if he were outside watching others make ripples and he couldn't see himself in the picture. Suddenly it hit him that in the real world, there is no bank to sit on. He was right in the pond where the ripples were affecting him, and where he was causing ripples too. This was the insight that had a profound effect on the engineer, getting him to turn off his autopilot. Seeing himself as a part of the pond, not as some external observer.
For me, the pond metaphor has relevance to our work in leadership development. Some managers see themselves as sitting on the bank, carefully choosing where they want to drop a pebble and create patterns. They do so without realising that their every action creates patterns that have a big influence on the pond. Influences that may counteract the effects of their carefully dropped pebbles. 'Sitting on the bank' is a luxury that doesn't exist. We are all creating patterns, and the future, constantly because we are in the pond. Seeing ourselves as 'in the pond' helps change the way we think about the effects of our behaviour.
What ripples are you causing? Will your pebble drop with scarely a ripple in the pond, or will it have lasting effect?
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| 16/05/08 | | Criteria for implementing initiatives in a complex space |
Dave's written a excellent post on how to make progress in a complex environment. It's excellent because it comes at a time when I'm working with a client where their staff have come up with a range of initiatives yet there is a feeling among some of the project members that the initiatives wont make a difference—they are not clear winners.
In hindsight, I should have made my approach clearer to my client and said that we create a process for the client to work things out for themselves and that I don't have the answers. I suspect they're used to the highly controlled and 'expert' facilitator who leads the group to a conclusion that is mostly pre-determined. But I didn't do that. I used a combination of narrative techniques, open space and world cafe approaches so the business folk worked out their own way forward.
Mind you there's a spectrum here. I have insights to share. I've seen many other organisations and their initiatives but I know the context will be different and a tremendous success in one organisation might go nowhere in another. But they are still possible patterns for experimentation. I need to work on other ways to share these ideas and experiences.
I liked Dave's tests for whether an initiative should be tried. To paraphrase:
- If the proposed initiative fits in with things that have happened before and what might happen in the future, give it a go
- If a failure in unlikely to be overly costly and there are things to learn, give it go
I'd like to add another criteria,
- If people in the organisation are taking responsibility for making it happen, give it go
Failure is scary for organisations. But without a safe-fail culture new ideas and new opportunities will never stick.
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| 15/05/08 | | Lessons from Lewis & Clark—a new white paper is coming |
David Drake and I have written a new white paper describing a narrative approach to successful organisational change. We've built on our three journeys metaphor, which you might remember was inspired by the epic exploration of the the US West by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Apart from describing the three journeys we've drawn a set of lessons from the Corps of Discovery (the nickname for the expedition) for each of our three journeys. Here are the lessons from our first journey:
- It is important to be clear on sharing the rewards before there are any.
- Travelling requires both authority and freedom/permission.
- Change requires an organisation to venture into unknown territory; it is as much about discovery as it is about design.
- Every change process has its “St. Louis”—a jumping off point into the unknown, a hub for action, and a platform to which one can return.
- Often the landscape changes merely as a result of setting out on the journey.
If you'd like to early notification and the ability to get this paper before we publish it more widely, please sign up for our monthly newsletter. In the next few days I will share the lessons for the second and third journey.
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| 15/04/08 | | Leading from the front...complexity management basics for CEOs |
The damaging windstorm in Melbourne two weeks ago gave me an interesting insight into how poorly prepared the leadership of our energy organisations were to deal with a crisis. You could argue that a simple demonstration of the energy of Mother Nature and its effects on modern civilisation is hardly a crisis but I doubt that many of the 300,000 Melbourne households that were without power for days would agree with you.
I was one of those left in the dark both literally and figuratively for close to 55 hours. I understood that it was an “unusual weather event” and it would not be easy to get everyone quickly back onto the power supply. I didn’t mind losing everything in my fridge and freezer, having no hot water, reading by candlelight or being without my laptop, broadband internet or Foxtel. But I did mind not being able to speak to anyone at my power company…and I was surprised by just how much I minded. When things are not going the way they should, we all look for reassurance and information to help us wait it out. The situation across Melbourne was complex and complicated and I knew that SP-Ausnet would not be able to tell me when they would get to the fallen powerlines in my street and I knew that every available repair crew member was on duty and out there working through the night to get the job done. My appreciation to them knows no bounds. But…not once was I able to find out whether anyone at the power company knew that our powerlines were down. Our suburb was either not listed on their answering machine message as offline or being worked on. In fact, on the Friday morning, we once again woke to a cold, dark morning and the recorded message “There are no known outages in your area” Yeah, right! My congratulations go to the one exception in all this – the CEO of Alinta, Peter McGarry, who was a shining example of “The buck stops here”. He was personally available to radio and television interviewers and the number of interviews he had done by day three was close to twenty. He took on board the concerns expressed by disgruntled customers who were unable to speak to anyone or get any information from their power company. And like his repair crews, he and his team worked long hours to stay on top of things. An SMS service for customers to report outages and damage was quickly set up as was a website to give up to date information. I was impressed to find out that on Friday as my household entered its third day without light, power or information, Alinta had rung their 1700 customers still waiting to be reconnected to let them know how things were progressing and ask how they were getting on. Peter McGarry made sure his company looked after their customers and kept the communication coming. When one of his linesmen was killed working to restore power to houses on the Mornington Peninsula, most of us would have understood if Peter had gone to ground and hidden out at Head Office. But that was not his style. While under enormous pressure he made time to visit the family and colleagues, made sure there were condolence notices from himself and the company in the Melbourne newspapers and I have no doubt he made time to attend the funeral as well. In contrast to my supplier, he didn’t hand any of that over to “a company spokesperson” from the PR department. Complications and complexity are part and parcel of crisis situations where the shifting nature of the problem is a big part of the challenge of solving it. Peter and the Alinta team stepped up to that challenge, made sure they kept telling everyone what they were doing as they did it and, as far as I'm concerned, did it markedly better than the rest.Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 25/03/08 | | Making sense of history |
I am reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I enjoyed his description of how history is extremely opaque; how "you see what comes out, not the script that produces events." He describes three ailments the human mind suffers when it comes into contact with history (he calls them the 'triplet of opacity'):
- The Illusion of Understanding. This relates to the pathology of thinking that the world we live in is more understandable, more explainable and therefore more predictable than it actually is. It also relates to our tendency to reflect and conclude that events had a specific cause and that events could have been averted by removing that specific cause.
- Retrospective Distortion. How we assess matters after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror. Taleb describes his impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of anything, capable of mounting explanations for all sorts of phenomena and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability. History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture with few vibrations in between. Yet we believe in predictable, incremental progression. This is a slightly different take from Dave Snowden's description of 'retrospective coherence' where cause and effect in complex situations only becomes visible in hindsight.
- Overvaluation of Factual Information. Taleb also calls this 'the curse of learning', referring to the "handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories-when they "Platonify."" In many cases, particularly regarding complex issues, experts are no better at knowing what is going to happen than cab drivers. The difference is that the experts think they know better what is going to happen. Taleb also describes how gathering more and more facts, details and information doesn't help us predict what is going to happen.
Not surprisingly, we see these 'ailments' all the time. The trick is balancing our tendency to 'Platonify' with the need to make sense and become aware of the inherent unpredictability of our organisational environments. A bit more inquiry and listening, a little less arrogance (believing we know best). Continuing to see good data..and supplementing it with the willingness to try things and see what happens.
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| 28/02/08 | | Meeting to talk about storytelling, narrative and complexity |
I run a meetup group in Melbourne call Emergence and we get together for drinks and dinner each month. Our next meeting is on the 13th March at 6pm. For full details and to RSVP go to here. It very informal and just a good way to catch up with new people and talk about things that interest us. Everyone is welcome.
| 12/02/08 | | Good intentions and the ability to apologise go hand-in-hand |
I caught up with Julie Perrin yesterday. Julie is a storyteller and performer and we got talking about the dangers of spin in teaching people storytelling. Julie made the important point that any storytelling effort must start with good intentions and be told with authenticity.
Then it dawned on me: in a complex world many outcomes are largely unpredictable and so while our intentions might have been sound at the outset, the result might unexpectedly cause pain to someone. Consequently the ability and willingness of people to apologise is a fundamental business skill. I wrote this post a year ago on ways to say sorry to rebuild trust.
This thought was prompted by radio discussion yesterday morning about the impending apology the Australia government will give to Aboriginal people for the past practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families and putting them into foster homes. Tomorrow will be a historic day.
One radio listener sent a message into John Faine (the radio announcer) and said something like: "Saying sorry is the first step when a mistake is made in order to maintain a relationship regardless of the intention" (she said it much better than that. Please let me know the actual wording if you heard it). The many relationships at work are important because they have such an impact on how we feel and our ability to do a good job.
The ability to say sorry sincerely is also important in the growing number of collaborations we are now seeing in business.
How to say sorry1
- recognise and acknowledge that a violation has occurred
- determine the nature of the violation—that is, what ‘caused’ it—and admit that one has caused the event
- admit that the act was destructive
- accept responsibility for the effect of one’s actions
- offer some form of forgiveness, atonement, or action designed to undo the violation and rebuild the trust
1. Lindskold, S. (1978). “Trust development, the GRIT proposal, and the affects of conciliatory acts on conflict and cooperation.” Psychological Bulletin 85: 772-793.
| 7/02/08 | | The link between complexity and narrative? |
Steve Hardy has written an article - What Specifically Do Generalists Do? To quote:
All the elements that make up experiences are very complex when viewed objectively ... but since experience is subjective, it is wonderfully refreshing and most useful to look at that kind of complexity through a human subjective lens and ask simply "what does the experience feel like from this perspective?". Literally seeking to understand the experience, the journey through time and space, for someone else. That perspective automatically integrates all the contributing elements into a whole and helps you appreciate the interdependencies in a way that doing only objective analysis wouldn't.
This is the most succinct--and perhaps the best--description of complexity I've come across. It captures the essence of what we are trying to do in our narrative projects.
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| 6/12/07 | | Follow That Feather |
A strange recurring pattern involving pigeons seems to have emerged in my life recently.
A pigeon walked into my house the other day after I had left the back door open. It caused a bit of a ruckus when my dog realised what was going on and started chasing it all around the house, bouncing off the furniture and trying to climb the walls to catch it. Relating this incident to a friend a few days later triggered childhood memories of Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines. Anyway, I digress.
Yesterday morning while having coffee with a colleague, we talked about the often inappropriate use of the 'target' metaphor so often used in business, and ended up having an interesting discussion about how pigeons find their way home. I'm no expert on pigeons, so intrigued, I decided to do a little research. Here's what I found:
When reared in a particular loft, a young pigeon can be transported hundreds of miles away and successfully find its way home from the release site. Because it requires the pigeon to pinpoint a specific location, this behavior necessitates more than the compass orientation system of migratory birds. Instead, the pigeon must be able to determine its position relative to the location of the home loft in order to orient itself in the proper direction. In doing so, pigeons use a variety of external cues such as the sun, visual landmarks, olfactory cues, and the earth's magnetic field. Depending on the weather conditions, where the pigeon was raised, and the nature of the release site, pigeons use a combination of these cues to determine their flight path. [1]
After exploring this in more detail, it seems like this might be a useful alternative metaphor for exploring strategy and objective setting, particularly in the complex and rapidly changing environments in which organisations operate today where linear thinking is mostly inappropriate and ineffective.
1. from a copy of articles published by Cornell University: http://albertaclassic.com/suncomp.php
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| 28/10/07 | | Cynefin now published in the Harvard Business Review |
Congratulations Dave and Mary for your HBR article. I've had a chance to browse it and it looks great.
The article is called A Leader's Framework for Decision Making. It covers the Cynefin framework, complexity, with a heavy dose on the importance of context in decision making.
Anecdote had it start as one of the groups that sprung from IBM's Cynefin Centre. So it's great to see Dave's work to get wide recognition. Well done.
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| 21/10/07 | | Why don't they just follow the procedure? |
On 29-30 August, a USAF B-52 bomber mistakenly armed with six nuclear tipped cruise missiles, flew from Minot, North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The incident has sparked enormous media attention and it is the first time the US military has publicly commented on the whereabouts of nuclear weapons.
The Air Force deputy chief of staff for operations announced the results of a six-week inquiry into the incident yesterday, the results of which pretty much conclude that the procedures were correct but the personnel simply didn't follow them. The incident was evidently not a one-off: "there has been an erosion of adherence to weapons-handling standards." The airmen replaced the schedule with their own "informal" system, he said, though he didn't say why they did that nor how long they had been doing it their own way. Apparently, up to 70 people will be disciplined over the incident; a wing will be removed from wartime status and the base commander has been relieved of his command.
My 20 year career in the Australian Air Force, and consulting back to Defence since, makes me pretty familiar with the rigorous documentation of policy and procedure in the military.... and with the way these procedures are often used. I remember the mantra "policies are for the guidance of wise men and the blind obedience of fools" and how this was embedded into many of the stories told in the bar and on the flight line. What was also evident was the enormous amount of experience, knowledge and understanding of context that enabled the tailoring of procedures to be done effectively and with due regard to the circumstances. The 'people' bit was always much more important than the 'process' bit.
If we wanted a procedure to be followed precisely there was a lot of work up front ensuring the necessary understanding (knowledge, context) was provided and a lot of resources monitoring compliance. As the drive for military 'efficiency' bit in the late part of my career the extent to which the basics were done dropped dramatically. In the Australian Defence Force this was exemplified by the annual audit of Defence accounts being qualified (a very bad thing) for years on end due to a decade of neglecting the simple act of stocktaking. It was like the organisation just started to assume it would get done 'because everyone knows its important' and yet it behaved in a way that gave no indication that it was, in fact, important. Hmmm, sound familiar?
So, in the case of the recent 'nukes across the US' incident, I would love the opportunity to do some narrative-based research (probably using anecdote circles) to find out what was really going on. Of course, if the objective was to determine blame we would not get much better information than provided by an investigation. But if the objective was to understand the context and behaviors relating to the incident the insights could be incredibly valuable. And with something important (and I guess nuclear safety would fall in that category) we should be using the full range of investigative/evaluation approaches available to us rather than relying solely on traditional, linear ones based on the scientific method and focused on who was at fault.
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| 8/10/07 | | The billiard ball example |
When I talk about complexity to clients I mention that complex systems are impossible to predict in detail especially as your forcast extends into the future. I point out that there are so many connections among the objects affecting the system and many of the cause and effect relationships are non-linear (a small thing can have a big impact and vice versa). Every now and then someone will say, “but if you could work out all those connections you could predict the outcome.” And this is where I will tell them the chessboard story.
The legendary information scientist, Claude Shannon, calculated how many possible moves there are on a chessboard. It's a finite system of 64 squares, 32 pieces, 6 movement patterns. The number is big and equates to the number of milliseconds the world has been in existence. And that's for a simple system. Imagine the possibilities in a social system where the objects have free will.
But I think I've just read a better analogy (perhaps equally as impressive) and the topic is billiards. The calculations were done by Prof. Sir Michael Berry in 1978 in his paper Regular and Irregular Motion, in Nonlinear Mechanics and recounted in The Black Swan.
If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can computer the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more complicated, but possible; and more precision is called for. The problem is that to correctly computer the ninth impact, you need to take account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table (modestly, Berry's computations use a weight of less than 150 pounds). And to compute the fifty-sixth impact, every single elementary particle in the universe needs to be present in your assumptions! An electron at the edge of the universe, separated from us by 10 billion light-years, must figure in the calculations, since it exerts a meaningful effect on the outcome. (p. 178)
No wonder I can't play billiards to save myself.
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| 23/09/07 | | Why we need stories from the edge |
I came across the idea of the power law when I read Duncan Watt's Six Degrees. It's the one that best describes city population distributions, the size of hubs in networks, the popularity of blog sites, word frequencies and the Pareto principle, to name just a few. In power law systems there's one standout (the biggest city, the most frequently used word, the most popular blog) then the rest trail off into a very long trail. Imagine one of those fun drop slides where you hang from a bar, let go and enjoy a terrific slide to the end. The shape of a drop slide is the same as a power law if you graph these distributions. Quite a different shape to the normal, bell-curve distribution we were all told at university best represented the world we live in. Power laws tell us to notice the extremes. Bell curves tell us to remove the outliers and look at the majority.
Do you know the difference between character and characterisation when you are crafting a story? In Story, Robert McKee tells us that characterisation is what you can see, the observable qualities: a person's age, gender, occupation, how they dress. Whereas character is revealed by their action when there are tough choices to be made. In the final season of the West Wing, Bruno (the Republican campaign advisor) finds Senator Santos' (the Democratic presidential candidate) briefcase and Bruno brings it to his boss, Senator Vinnick who's running against Santos. Vinnick is presented with a dilemma: leak the contents of briefcase and gain an advantage in the campaign or return the briefcase to Santos. His actions in tough situations when there is much at stake reveal his character. Vinnick returns the briefcase.
Stories are told at the edge and from the edge. We recount remarkable events which in turn communicate those events that reveal our colleague's character. This is why stories are at the heart of organisational culture but they don't magically appear without a trigger. They come from remarkable things that are happening.
Sometimes people say to me, “does that story really represent the majority of what people think?” My first response is to say we are less interested in a single story than the patterns many stories reveal. But the question does reveal bell-curve thinking where the outliers don't matter, they're an aberration to be ignored. But think of every major breakthrough in how things are done. Each one came from the edges. The trap we make for ourselves comes from the wonderful minds we have and their ability to make sense and explain things after the event. “Of course Google had to happen, 911 was a foreseeable tragedy waiting to happen, the ability to show videos on the net would result in a multi-billion dollar purchase”—bollocks! In hindsight it all makes sense to us and we believe we can predict what is coming next by analysing past events. Those days are well behind us now. From now on we need to design for serendipity, furiously take action, make mistakes, but most importantly create situations where ideas can bubble up and and be tried out.
Stories are a double edge sword. On the one hand they deliver the messages from the edge. On the other hand they are the carriers of sensemaking, explanation and encapsulate the causes that brought us here today. Stories help us simplify what happened. We need to be both wary of and embrace stories. Get used to paradoxes. Charles Handy said it was the age of unreason and I think he is right.
While I haven't finished the book yet I'm finding The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb an inspiration that's generating so many thoughts. Last week I had the good fortune to have a hour long chat with Tom Peters at the AIM Convention. It turns out we both share many intellectual interests such as Karl Weick's work on sensemaking, a love of storytelling and a desire to challenge the status quo. In that conversation Tom said I was crazy if I didn't read The Black Swan. I'm glad I took his advice.
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| 17/08/07 | | Wiki Patterns |
We're currently working on a knowledge project with a client, part of which involves setting up a collaborative environment for managing and editing content - in this instance a wiki.
As part of the initial setup, I've been looking at 'best practices' for wiki implementation and adoption and I quickly came across wiki patterns , which is such a fantastic resource.
But that in itself is not all that I find interesting about the site. For me, it was the observation of the structure and language of 'patterns' used on the site and my association of that with the process of sense-making that I find intriguing.
Now, being the new guy here at Anecdote, I'm still immersing myself in the use of narrative and complexity theory, but my current understanding using the Cynefin framework -- is that 'best practices' belong in the known domain ... when things are prescriptive, can be reduced to binary decisions; black and white, yes and no answers. There is a known solution.
On the other hand navigating complexity requires us to detect new and emerging patterns. Humans are good at seeing patterns, making sense from them and then acting on them. Deciding on courses of action or 'solutions' in this domain are about influencing these patterns and behaviours, reinforcing the positives and discouraging the negatives.
The wikipatterns site is doing exactly this - putting wiki adoption squarely into the complex camp, and using patterns to help people make sense of what to do and not what to do, rather than trying to lay out prescriptive answers on how-to implement wikis, because it's just not that simple when humans are involved!!
| 14/05/07 | | The story of a map - Massimo Vignelli's 1972 NYC Subway Map |
Imagine if you could get people to talk on camera about their achievements and mistakes. The result could be a powerful, especially if you use these stories to get people talking. Here's a tiny example on a topic dear to my heart: how to convey complex information simply. In this clip Massimo Vignelli talks about his 1972 information design masterpiece, the New York City Subway map. There are a couple of things I noticed in this four minute video, which is an out-take for the documentary Helvetica.
- the actual map was a powerful reminder device
- enough time had elapsed for Massimo to be comfortable to talk about his mistakes (just one) - mind you, you could imagine his self confidence soaring
- the beauty of the map comes from knowing what to leave out--and if Massimo could do it again he would have left out even more
Mr Vignelli was inspired by Henry Beck's 1933 legendary map of the London Underground. You can take a look at London's current versions here. Michael Bierut has written an essay called Mr Vignelli's Map which you might enjoy.
Thanks to 37 Signals for the pointer
Technorati Tags: information design, massimo vignellie
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| 6/02/07 | | What is happening to Melbourne's trains? |
There is something peculiar going on with Melbourne’s trains. A couple of years ago we received a new fleet of brand new Siemens trains and everything worked fine. This year the same trains have a mysterious and serious problem: they don’t stop when and where the driver wants them to. The brakes seem to have a problem and no one can pinpoint the difficulty. According to The Age, there is a glimmer of hope but the resolution is dragging out. Experts have been flown in and the best people are working on the issue, so why is it taking so long to resolve?
What increases my befuddlement is the apparent nuts and bolts characteristic of the problem (at least that is how it appears). A train is a system (admittedly complicated) you can pull apart, analyse each component, make a diagnosis and put back together and you still have a train. So the solution, therefore, can’t be just a simple malfunction of equipment there must be something more complex occurring.
Could it be that they just don’t have the right people working on the problem, that the true experts on maintaining Siemens trains are yet to be engaged? I think this is unlikely given the concern and inconvenience the absence of these trains is causing Melbourne commuters, Connex and the Victorian Government. Could it be that this type of problem hasn’t been encountered anywhere else in the world and the engineers are simply not equipped to handle the problem? That’s hard to believe given the number of these trains working diligently on so many tracks around the world. While the problem might not be identical, if it were a purely mechanical issue the mechanics would be able to spot it and fix it.
But any issue involving people is never purely mechanical. When people are involved in problem solving we need to consider how knowledge is flowing from one person to another; from one group to another; from one organisation to another. Here are some possibilities that might be hindering the resolution of the unstoppable train problem.
The people responsible for the day to day maintenance of the trains in Melbourne (I’ll call them the mechanics) don’t know the experts that well from Siemens (I’ll call them the engineers). Knowledge will only flow between these groups after a relationship has developed and trust formed. If the first time they have ever met is in the heat of resolving a high profile issue, then tempers are likely to be frayed, finger-pointing occurs and communications stop. In the future, prepare for emergencies by ensuring the experts know the people on the ground.
Mechanics tend to be practical, concrete thinkers. Experts like to work with abstractions. Engineers like to work with drawings and designs. When there is a problem, go back to the drawings to figure out what is going on. Mechanics like to try things out. Get another part, replace an old one, see what happens. The two groups speak different languages. One solution is help both groups become bi-lingual and show more empathy for the others’ approach. And mechanics and engineers wont be the only groups involved who speak a different professional language. The policy folks from the department, the politicians and the rail safety regulator will have a way of talking that will be different again.
While the absence of pre-existing relationships and the lack of a common language among experts will slow the flow of knowledge, there are a myriad of other possibilities and it’s impossible to predict which one will help resolve the problem. The key point is that a complex problem like this requires the team to try things, make educated guesses and see what happens, while ensuring the public is kept safe and services are maintained as best as they can.
The unstoppable train problem is unlikely to be a mere mechanical fault. It sounds like a knowledge problem: an inability to find and access the right knowledge when it is needed. But don’t be fooled in thinking this knowledge resides in a database somewhere. More than likely it is contained in the experiences and stories of groups of people around the world who don’t even realise they have the answer or that anyone is looking for it.
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| 21/01/07 | | The difference between a sound argument and a good story |
I spent a couple of hours today tracking down some papers for a course I’m helping to teach at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University on business narrative when I discovered this excellent paper by Tsoukas and Hatch called ‘Complex thinking, complex practice: The case for a narrative approach to organizational complexity’. I’m a bit of a fan of Hari Tsoukas’ work. Just read his paper on tacit knowledge to get an idea of what a great KM thinker he is. Anyway, there are a couple of paragraphs and a table that jumped out at me in this paper. The paper is based on two modes of thinking proposed by J. Bruner and goes on to say,
Bruner called the two modes of thought ‘logico-scientific’ (or paradigmatic) and ‘narrative’, arguing that:
the types of causality implied in the two modes are palpably different. The term then functions differently in the logical proposition ‘if x, then y’ and in the narrative recit ‘The king died, and then the queen died.’ One leads to a search for universal truth conditions, the other for likely particular connections between two events – mortal grief, suicide, foul play. (pp. 11–12)
To compare the two modes, Bruner claimed, is to understand the difference between a sound argument and a good story.
I’ve been working with engineers lately and I have been struggling to explain this whole issue of knowing the truth. Now I have some language to open the conversation up. This table elaborates this idea perfectly.
Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Tsoukas, H. and M. J. Hatch (2001). "Complex thinking, complex practice: The case for a narrative approach to organizational complexity." Human Relations 54(8): 979-1013.
Tsoukas, H. (2003). Do we really understand tacit knowledge? The Blackwell Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management. M. Easterby-Smith, M. A. Lysles and K. E. Weick, Blackwell Publishers.
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| 13/11/06 | | Measuring knowledge work - when measures become targets |
The whole fraud is only possible because performance metrics in knowledge organizations are completely trivial to game. Joel on Software
Joel demonstrates a weakness of metrics in assessing the performance of software developers and somewhat cynically suggests that large management consulting firms actively exploit this weakness. Whenever I have a choice between malicious intent and incompetence I tend towards the latter as an explanation. Personally I believe large consulting firms have these problems because they are steeped in particular mental models, namely the idea that organisations are machines and if you can’t measure it you can’t fix it. Fredrick Brooks understood this and painted a clear picture of the complexity of managing software development projects in his classic, The Mythical Man-Month
So what is the weakness Joel uncovers? Companies want to improve performance (excellent objective) and consulting companies have methods to measure the current performance (it’s good to know where you stand). But here is the big mistake: the consulting company makes the measure of performance a target. And this is what happens:
Consulting company comes in, gets all the programmers in a room, tells them all about Function Points [the measure of performance] and stuff, and how productivity is REALLY IMPORTANT.
Programmers remember that scene from Office Space where Bob and Bob, the consultants, recommended all the people to get fired.
Programmers start writing a heck of a lot more function points. For example you can triple the number of function points in your code simply by round tripping everything through an XML file. Big waste of time, prone to bugs, does nothing, but each file you touch adds a function point. W00t!
Consulting company comes back, measures again, and lo and behold, with all the round trips through XML the function point count is up drastically. Consultant announces that Oil Company is now at 151.29% productivity. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
Here is an alternative approach.
- Work with the leaders to get a broad picture of what they think performance is in the context of software development. Get them to paint that broad picture while resisting the temptation to fill in all the gaps.
- Ask the software developers to define the performance measures and keep them to a minimum.
- Be clear what will remain measures and what will be the targets
- Add to the metrics approach a qualitative assessment of impact using Most Significant Change (see Zahmoo to learn about this technique).
This approach is based on the idea that any journey of change (actually I prefer the metaphor of the expedition) should be created three times. The first creation is in the minds of the leadership group (however you want to define that). The second creation of the journey is in the minds of the participants. Finally the journey is created for real as everyone sets off together and it’s here that everyone discovers that is never turns out the way they expected, so a willingness to monitor and adapt is essential.
[thanks to Les Posen for the pointer to Joel’s post]
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| 2/11/06 | | Kurtz and Snowden on inter-organisational learning networks |
Cynthia Kurtz and Dave Snowden have written a thought provoking chapter on inter-organisational learning networks. I’ve seen their ideas develop over the last few years (on listservers, Skype chats, rare meet-ups and presentations) and this paper is an excellent synthesis and application of three key ideas (in my words):
- idealistic approaches predicated on predictability, analysis and the depiction of ideal future states are total nonsense for making progress in a highly connected, complex environments.
- dispassionate and objective observers can carefully analyse and diagnose ‘the problem’ then implement a solution—more nonsense. The fact is observers impact what they observe and every diagnosis is also an intervention.
- experts have the solution—even more nonsense. The knowledge required to change and successfully adapt exists within the group and participatory approaches seed and harness natural social processes.
The chapter goes on to say:
Two of the most important elements of the naturalistic sense-making approach are narrative (as one of the primary mechanisms of complex knowledge transfer, creation and interpretation in human society) and networks (as one of the primary realities of human life – we are still, unless artificially constrained, tribal and clan-like in our needs and perspectives).
The rest of the chapter looks at inter-organisation learning networks from the perspective of tangible benefits delivered by this type of organisational structure. K&S note that “Inter-organisational learning networks are valuable yet intangible: while participants feel that they and their organisation have benefited, they struggle to explain what exactly those benefits are and how they can be expressed.” According to K&S, the broader literature points to speed of innovation difussion and improved knowledge creation as tangible benefits of these types of networks, but Cynthia and Dave suggest three more:
- improved negotiation of multiple identities
- increased discourse regarding trust and rule structures
- greater productive conflict
I’m not going to give a blow by blow description of the paper. Instead I will highlight a few of the ideas that grabbed my attention—mind you, it sparked many thoughts.
Naturalistic approaches … seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted.
Most Significant Change is an obvious technique for monitoring because of its participatory nature and it’s story based. I know Dave has a slight reservation about MSC because he sees it as privileging some stories over others. I think Dave makes a fair point and MSC done badly will focus on the selection rather than the dialogue that’s created by the selection process. This is a danger to keep in mind for MSC practitioners.
Many employees do their work without being able to answer the question, "Who are you in this organisation?" (And possibly just as importantly, "Who are the others in this organisation?" and “Who is this organization?”).
When I was in London last week I met Martin Clarkson from the Storytellers and their business is entirely focussed on using a story approach to address “Who is this organisation?”
I was reminded at this point of the simple test I use to assess the likelihood a community of practice forming. If you can sensibly complete the sentence, “I’m a <blank>”, then there is a chance a community might form. For example, I was helping a Defence organisation start a community of practice for project managers. I asked them, “do people ever say, ‘I’m a project manager.’?” Absolutely! Great … people identify themselves as project managers so we could get a community going. The next community was more problematic. They wanted to create a community around the competency of ‘technical.’ Does anyone say, “I’m a technical.” No… I suggested they think of another possible community to establish.
One of the ways people have always talked about identity has been through the telling of identity stories which feature the individual or group as a coherent character with certain highlighted characteristics – the lone genius, the band of principled rebels, the misunderstood nobility. Stories told for purposes of identity negotiation (both individually and collectively) are fundamentally different from stories told for other purposes.
K&S point out three characteristics of an identity story:
- the story is well known
- they tend to have a dramatic or performance nature
- they are apparently useless; they appear to be about nothing
These stories help people understand what it means to be part of the group. I heard this story last week which I think is an identity story:
A new salesman joined the company and a week after joining was told by his manager that the team was meeting in Jervis Bay. On the day of the meeting the salesman got up at 4am and made the trip down the coast and on arriving at the bay phoned his manager on his mobile to find out the exact location of the meeting. The salesman was told the Jervis Bay is the name of the meeting room of their conference centre in the city.
The example of a sacred story of the nine day fortnight reminded me of the importance of trying to find these stories in organisations. One way might be to ask, in the middle of an anecdote circle, whether anyone is aware of stories that are told and retold. I did this a couple of days ago and the fellow I was talking could immediately recall two negative stories. I’m not sure these are the sacred stories described in the chapter but I’m sure they are important to how things get done.
I loved the analogy between a Tour de France team (a peloton) and an organisation dealing with complexity.
K&S suggest a set of three heuristics for ethical narrative work:
- always declare up front the use of narrative techniques (no stealth story work)
- if asked any question about what sort of narrative intervention you are doing (such as instructing executives in how to tell stories for cultural change), answer honestly
- appoint an independent arbitrator for any dispute over the use of narrative techniques in organisations
The last section of the chapter is about productive conflict. I have to admit that before reading this section and before chatting to Dave about the use of debate in a variety of forums I was sceptical about its effectiveness. As I saw it practised it seemed to be very much “I’m right, your wrong” approach that seemed to me less that productive. But I think if productive conflict is practised as described in this chapter I can see how a level a friction can be extremely beneficial. K&S’s main point, as I understood it, is that if a group focuses on conflict around ideas (cognitive conflict) and avoided conflict associated with interpersonal relationships (affective conflict) and conflict over who should do what (process conflict) a product outcome can emerge. This also assumes the group has a desire to improve the understanding or has a group problem to solve. Using a sporting metaphor, “play the ball, not the player.”
This chapter is well worth a read. The only criticism of have of it is the slight feeling of disjointedness throughout. Each section was interesting and useful but I couldn’t always see how it fitted into a larger picture.
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| 31/10/06 | | The Storytelling and Complexity Conference in New Mexico |
What is the link between storytelling and complexity?
This was the theme that found me travelling over 28 hours from Melbourne, Australia to Las Cruces, New Mexico to join with 38 other participants in the story circle. It was a fantastic conference. One of the highlights for me was the socratic circle process which opened up on the 2nd day of the conference. This I will definitely be sharing more about, after I’ve gotten over my jetlag. But for now, I thought I’d just share some elements which emerged for me during the conference.
During the socratic circle process, participants were asked to consider “what is complexity”. Some of the metaphors that appeared were:
Complexity is incompressible
Complexity is a methodology
Complexity is a language
Complexity is a theology
When asked in the socratic circle to define “what is story”, I really loved one participants response. She said “I have heard people say there is no story only storytelling, but I don’t agree with that. If I had a definition of story I’d be wrong”.
So, what is the link between storytelling and complexity?
I think one of the best answers came in the form of a question proposed by Theodore Taptiklis. He asked “Like storytelling, does complexity help us understand that “paradox” doesn’t need to be resolved?”.
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| 29/10/06 | | Facilitating a workshop of 90 futurists |
Last week I faciliated a workshop of 90 futurist gathered together for The Australian Foresight Conference. The organisers were keen to harness the energy created by the conference to explore new ways the group might collaborate into the future. With 90 people in a large atrium I was keen for the group to learn about themselves as a whole and go beyond an intellectual understanding. With Andrew’s help we designed a 90 minute session which included sociometry and getting people to vote with their feet. Here is what we did and a few things we learned from the process
We divided the session into two parts: understanding where the group was now; and exploring possible future collaboration opportunities. This session tool place about 2/3rds of the way though a three day conference. To kick things off I got everyone to stand and ask them to arrange themselves along an imaginery 20m line. One end of the line represented those people who thought this was one of the best conferences they had ever attended; a transformational event. The other end was for those people that thought the conference really sucked. With lots of laughter and chatting the group arranged itself pretty evenly along the line. I asked everyone to have a good look around at the result.
Using the same approach I then asked people to indicate the level of foresight experience they have with one end representing over 30 years (2 people) and the other end for those people just starting out. This time there were more people in the middle and the ‘just starting out’ end of the spectrum. Based on the movement from the previous question, it seemed like the people ‘just starting out’ were enjoying the conference more that the highly experienced practitioners.
The previous two questions where aimed at getting people used to moving around and learning about the whole group. My last question was directed squarely at the objective of the session: please indicate your level of comfort and preference for using technology to collaborate. One end represented those people who loved using technology and the other consisting of people who would rather avoid it eschewing even the telephone. Again, an even spread.
We then moved to creating a human social network diagram and I asked everyone to think about the time before the conference and recall those people they regularly collaborated with. Then stand next to a collaborator and place your hand on their shoulder. Within a few minutes a complex network of bodies emerged with clear clusters evident. I asked people to look around and then invited people from each cluster to describe their bunch.
The next step was to explore the potential for new collaborations, so I asked the group to think about the people they’ve met at the conference and who they would like to collaborate with in the future. Again I invited everyone to place their hand on the shoulder of potential future collaborators. The network changed considerably suggesting a substantial potential for new connections and collaborations.
At this point I asked everyone to grab a seat. The tables were arranged in groups of eight. To get people to consider what collaboration meant to them I ask each group to have a conversation and explore the question “why do you collaborate?” This discussion went for 15 minutes and was simply designed to get people to think about collaboration generally.
We wanted to move from this understanding of the reasons for collaboration to different forms it might take, so I invited the whole group to construct a final spectrum but this time with one person on the spectrum line representing a form of collaboration. The group made suggestions. At one end of the spectrum was formal approaches to collaboration while the other end represented informal approaches. The suggested structures, from formal to informal, were: association, community of practice, salon, virtual collaborators, partnerships, mentoring, adhoc collaborations. A addtional group formed calling themselves ‘the walkers’ and they paced up and down the entire spectrum highlighting that all the structures were relevant and useful.
Now that we had some structures identified I asked people to join a group that appealed to them most and for each group to develop a description of why their structure would be best suited for everyone to adopt. Each group then had a representative spruke the benefits of their approach. As the final move of the session I ask people to make a decision as to which group they would like to move to after hearing each benefits statement. This final group then develop a mini action plan on what they would do next to make progress after the conference finished.
The session seemed to be enjoyed by the group and the organisers were pleased with the outcomes. Lots of good actions and a commirement by people to take the next steps. One of the interesting things for me was how quickly strong groups formed and how strongly people identified with their chosen group. For example, in summarising the session I forgot to mention the Salon group and an indignant Salon member quickly pointed out that they had a very productive session and didn’t feel compelled to join any other group.
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| 29/09/06 | | The role of past patterns in discontinuous change |
Dave Snowden has written an excellent post warning of the dangers of simply looking at the past and attempting to apply, without adaptation, what happened then to what is happening now. After reading Dave’s post jumped on a plane to Sydney and as I was rushing out the door grabbed Charles Handy’s Age of Unreason from my friend’s bookshelf for some in-flight reading. Published in 1989, Handy’s words are prophetic and reinforce Dave’s message as Handy argues that the nature of change has morphed in the last 30 years from incremental change, where the past was a good indicator of the future, to discontinuous change, where the future is much less certain.
Of course we do learn from history (Dave makes this clear in his post) but it’s how we apply this learning that matters. I remember in Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation (1964) how he talked about creativity being like being faced with a canyon you wish to cross. Your first step it to find a bridge. You might find a bridge that nearly fits but then some extra effort is required to completely span the gap. These ‘bridges’ are our patterns which we develop through experience or by hearing stories about other people’s adventures. While we are good at recalling past patterns we must remain mindful of the need to reshape these patterns according to the context and needs of the issue at hand.
This view of decision making in a world of discontinuous change suggests two capabilities each and everyone should actively develop:
- seek out opportunities for new and diverse experiences or seek out people or accounts of new and diverse experiences – build your pattern repertoire
- learn ways to adapt bridges. As deBono says, “creativity thinking is a skill and can be taught.” Many of his techniques are applicable here.
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| 6/09/06 | | Complex systems for a complex world |
My friends Pascal Perez and David Batten have just had published a new book called Complex systems for a complex world. It’s all about exploring human ecosystems using agent based modelling. The best news is that you can download a copy for free here.
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| 14/08/06 | | The art of complex problem solving |
Check out this link from Marshall Clemens, a talented complexity graphics designer. Probably one of the most comprehensive diagrams I’ve ever seen regarding complex systems thinking.
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| 15/07/06 | | A question of balance |
For centuries (until the 1950’s), scientists believed that the left side of our brains (the rational, analytical, logical side) was the crucial side; the side that made us human. All sorts of evidence was collected to support this view. Our organisations are often reflections of this type of thinking: obviously we needed all sorts of rules, systems and procedures to adequately control things. So, this is where the emphasis has been and the result is a system out of balance.
Increasingly our organisations are realising that numbers are not enough in an increasingly complex world. They are realising that the ‘bossy, know-it-all’ left brain approach, and its associated capabilites, are a necessary but insufficient condition for success. The language of complexity teaches us that complex problems cannot be ‘analysed and solved’ per se and that new approaches are required to supplement (not replace) our problem solving capabilities.
Apart from helping organisations to tackle complex problems, building the organisation’s right brain capabilities creates the conditions for insight and empowerment and can help create a richer and more rewarding work experience. Used in combination with traditional approaches, the techniques that we use such as business narrative, most significant change, social network analysis, storytelling, communities of practice (and others) can enhance the ability to tackle intractable problems, achieve meaningful change….and to help restore balance to the ways we think about and manage our organisations.
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| 13/07/06 | | The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School |
Design Observer has republished an article by Michael McDonough listing the top 10 things they never taught Michael in design school. Design is a fundamental capability in a complex world and I think you’ll find Michael’s list useful. Here are the bullet points. For the explanations I recommend you pop on over to Design Observer.
- Talent is one-third of the success equation.
- 95 percent of any creative profession is shit work.
- If everything is equally important, then nothing is very important.
- Don’t over-think a problem.
- Start with what you know; then remove the unknowns.
- Don’t forget your goal.
- When you throw your weight around, you usually fall off balance.
- The road to hell is paved with good intentions; or, no good deed goes unpunished.
- It all comes down to output.
- The rest of the world counts.
[via Daniel Pink]
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| 10/07/06 | | The importance of dialogue |
Shawn’s series of posts on finding expertise has reminded me of one of my favourite quotes: an anthropologist’s description of an agricultural North American tribe from David Bohm’s book On Dialogue:
Dialogue provides shared meaning and empowers people. With the number of meetings in most organisations it is not unreasonable that we should expect high levels of shared meaning and empowerment…but this doesn’t appear to be the case. What is it that prevents our meetings from enabling us to engage in dialogue?
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| 28/05/06 | | Designing interventions requires new perspectives |
Designing interventions for complex environments requires the designers to see new patterns. Before I elaborate on this idea here is a story Steve Denning told today on the workingstories email list.
John Seely Brown sometimes tells a story (which he says is true) of a board meeting of a Fortune 100 corporation that took place one evening in downtown San Francisco in a neighborhood that had become quite dicey, with many vagrants and homeless people hanging around.
The directors were just sitting down to a luxurious meal in the building where the meeting was taking place. when there was a loud knocking on the door. The knocking was increasingly loud and menacing, and the board members suggested to their host that it might be wise to ignore it and not open the door.
But the host said no, it would be fine: the people in the neighborhood meant no harm. So he opened the door and indeed there were a couple of homeless men, ill-kempt, poorly dressed, and none-too-clean. They said that they were hungry and needed food.
To the horror of the board members, the host invited them in, and said, Sure, we’ve got a lot of good food. Come on in. Sit down. Make yourself at home.
So the homeless men sat down at the table and started greedily gobbling up the caviar, the foie gras, the salmon, the lobster and the rest.
Finally, when the homeless men reached a pause in their eating, they turned to the alarmed board members and asked: where did all this food come from? How come they had so much expensive food on hand?
The board members answered hesitantly that they were the board members of a big corporation and they were having an important meeting and food was a normal accompaniment of such meetings.
And the homeless men started asking, why don’t you share some of this with people like us? We are hungry. We need food. Would you really miss it if you shared some of it with us? What does your company do? Don't your ads say that you care about people like us?
The conversation went on like this for a while, as the homeless men’s questions became more and more insistent – why should the board members have all this food and we have none? Is this fair? Is this reasonable?
The board members’ answers became steadily more defensive.
After this had gone on for a while, and the board members became increasingly concerned as to how it was going to end, the host revealed that the homeless men were actors, whom the host had engaged, as a prelude to an item on the agenda about the board’s social responsibility.
JSB doesn't say what happened in the ensuing board discussion but my guess is that, whenever those board members saw homeless people after that, they viewed them with a different frame.
That’s one (rather elaborate) way to disrupt the frame.
The ability to see new patterns can be facilitated in a number of ways:
- New eyes—introduce people with different background and way of seeing the world and new patterns become evident
- New frameworks—a powerful new framework will help you see the world differently. I remember the first time I saw they Cynefin framework and from that day on I could see ‘complex’ phenomena.
- New experiences—people can talk about how something works but until you experience it the effects are typically limited.
- New combinations—Darwin famously envisaged a model of evolution via selection by combining Malthusian economics and countless observation made on the Beagle.
Our job in helping people design interventions is to create environments where new patterns can be seen. The above story is an excellent example of creating new experiences.
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| 12/05/06 | | The meme of control |
Thinking over how pervasive (and problematic?) the notion of control appears to be in organisations I was inspired to write a little piece around it. Here’s how it begins:
A change of mindset is needed for organizations to reach towards the next stage of their development. With this change of mindset comes along the needed change of language. Currently there is a tendency for organizations, and those ‘in-charge’ of organizations to lock in a very specific metaphor and language for tackling organizations. Rationalising the goals, specifying targets and then optimizing the outcomes. Applying matrix logic and mobilizing the troops. It’s time to make, manage and meet the plan!
Such metaphors and their resulting language are all driven from the underlying assumption of control. Someone having it. Someone applying it. With control holding such intellectual and emotional power over us it may be useful to consider it a meme and in doing so, provide us with a new refreshing perspective.
Read the full article here
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| 25/04/06 | | 8 ways to avoid complexity |
- Do not do business
- Reduce your activities to zero
- Don't leave the house
- Don't call
- Don't talk to anybody
- Stay in bed
- Close your eyes
- Stop breathing
This list comes from a German business magazine which devoted an issue to complexity in business. You will need to be competent in German to read the articles but Walter Baets provides a short summary.
Thanks to Walter Baets for the links.
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| 22/04/06 | | Complex adaptive system—driving in India |
From YouTube. Driving in India. Mesmerizing!
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| 22/04/06 | | The problem with Wayne Gretzky's puck advice |
Last week we were talking about metaphors used in organisations and how they affect they way people think, and act. One popped up which got me thinking. I’d heard it before, in fact I’d heard many times—this Fast Company article has a great dig at consultant’s over-use of the phrase. Attributed to ice hockey great, Wayne Gretzky, who apparently said:
“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
There is an underlying assumption contained in this quote: we can predict an outcome (where the puck is going to be) based on the detection of weak signals (where the puck is and what is happening at the time). I’ve only seen one ice hockey game (in Boston) so I can’t really comment about ice hockey specifically but I watch and coach a lot of basketball so let’s move the analogy to the basketball court.
When getting yourself free in basketball, say on a fast break, the good player creates a range of possibilities rather than running to a single point where they think the basketball is going to be. They help create a pattern which takes account of the weak signal but creating possibilities which are resilient to a range of outcomes.
I think if organisations take the Gretzky’s quote to heart and think it means they need to be able to predict outcomes, they are setting themselves up for failure. It should also be noted that a player with the skills of Gretzky can create a far greater set of possibilities and a stronger resilience when things don’t go to plan.
I’d like to thank Dave Snowden for helping me see this idea of resilience as a desired outcome of detecting weak signals. Dave, would you like to expand on this idea?
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| 14/04/06 | | Westpac's use of Cynefin techniques |
As a Cynefin practitioner and a business partner of the Cynefin Centre (soon to be renamed I hear) it is always good to see some descriptions of how the techniques are being used.
Over at Michael J’s Notio there is an interesting post talking about a presentation done by Bruce McKenzie and Robert Kay (Westpac) on the risk management work they are doing at Westpac.
http://www.notio.com/2005/09/sol_cynefin_cas.html
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| 10/04/06 | | Tapping into the right brain through sensemaking |
In January, I described Communities of Practice as ‘the right brain of the organisation’, and Shawn recently posted about the role of sensemaking in creating new knowledge. During the recent international symposium on meaning making in organisations held at the ANU, the group I was working with identified a list of additional approaches that take a sensemaking approach and help organisations tap into their right brain capabilities. I have added to the list since the symposium, and am sure there are many more that can be added:
- Narrative techniques, including story telling, business narrative and Most Significant Change
- SNA sensemaking
- Open Space Technology
- Lessons Learning approaches including concepts such as alternative histories
- Appreciative Inquiry (although is may also be not sensemaking in that the negative is effectively out of scope)
- Clean Space / Socio-Drama
- Prediction / Value Markets
- Complex Systems Model (Ralph Stacey)
- Syntegrity Protocols (Stafford Beer)
- Dialogue (David Bohm)
- Clean language
- Delphi Techniques
- Social dreaming
What other approaches take a sensemaking (rather than analytical) approach and help organisations get more value from their right brains?
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| 22/03/06 | | How social indicators influence our choices |
Just a few weeks ago I was wondering, “What’s Duncan Watts up to these days?” Duncan wrote a terrific book called Six Degrees and re-investigated Stanley Milgram’s famous six degrees of separation phenomena using a web-based experiment. Well, it seems like Duncan is at the Sante Fe Institute, the bastion of mathematical complexity research.
Watts has resurfaced (on my radar anyway) and written a paper with Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds reporting on a recent experiment to test the effect of social influence on cultural markets. Their ingenious experiment involved building a mini-itunes where people could only download 48 songs. Some of the 14,000+ participants could rate the tune (5 star system) and see the ratings of others. A second group were denied any indicators of others selections.
Here are the key points as I understood them:
- social indicators have an enormous influence on the outcome
- social indicators make the result far more unpredictable
- the rich get richer and the poor get poorer—popular songs become very popular and vice versa
- a good quality song never ends up on the bottom of the pile but impossible to predict whether it will be at the top and by how much
Here is a quote:
We conjecture, therefore, that experts fail to predict success not because they are incompetent judges or misinformed about the preferences of others, but because when individual decisions are subject to social influence, markets do not simply aggregate pre-existing individual preferences. In such a world, there are inherent limits on the predictability of outcomes, irrespective of how much skill or information one has.
It’s a scientific paper so a little heavy going but it’s short and definitely worth a read if you are interested in how networks operate, how crowds respond and wish to further your understanding of complex systems.
[via Decision Science News]
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| 19/03/06 | | Observation: leaving things to the last minute |
Have you noticed that people seemed to leave more and more things to the last minute? There are some good reasons for a decision-delaying strategy. If the situation you are facing is uncertain, changing, and their are plenty of options and competing possibilities then one strategy is to just wait and see what happens. The problem of today might very well be a distant memory tomorrow. Technologies like mobile phones support this strategy. Who needs to precisely plan a get together when you can text some friends on the spur of the moment, find out where they are and nominate a rendezvous point there and then. Does this sound uncomfortable? Get used to it because this is the way the world is moving.
A decision you shouldn’t delay, however, is signing up for our communities of practice workshops. The early bird discount is available up until the 31 March. You can download the brochure here.
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| 17/03/06 | | Weak signals |
There is a discussion on ActKM this morning about weak signals and Dave Snowden has relayed some observations he heard from Gary Klein this week which I thought I would share. Four things which are commonly believed yet are untrue about sensemaking:
- Sensemaking is basically ‘connecting the dots’ and fitting the pieces of the puzzle together
- Sensemaking builds up from data to produce a story
- People should avoid premature consideration of a hypothesis
- More data leads to better sensemaking (I’ve posted what Karl Weick’s thoughts on this)
Just trawling through my hard disk and del.ico.us and found these things people have said about weak signals:
- Dave Pollard on Innovation, Discontinuity and Weak Signals
- Bryan S. Coffman on Weak Signal Research
- Hagel and Brown say things like this:
"… we must regrind our lenses to monitor the periphery, that is, the edges of our business. At these edges lie our richest opportunities for value creation and our strongest protection against value destruction." (Hagel III and Brown 2005: 10)
- S. Dyer Harris and Steven Zeisler on Weak Signals – Detecting the Next Big Thing
Roy Greenhalgh, from ActKM, provides the following references:
Weak signals were written about by Ansoff in the mid 1970s, and in 1990. See Ansoff, Igor H, "Implanting Strategic Management" 2nd edition, 1990 Prentice Hall.
But a more readable paper is by Turo Uskali, which formed his PhD submission. See Innovation Journalism, Vol 2 No 11 2005 or ISBN 1549-9049. Uskali reviews weak signals from a journalistic viewpoint, and discusses the four main categories of weak signals in his definition: feelings, uncertain signals, almost certain signals and exact signals.
Hagel III, John, and John Seely Brown. 2005. The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
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| 15/03/06 | | A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink |
If I were to write a book laying out the argument for our Anecdote approaches, I couldn’t be happier if I’d written A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. This book makes a simple and powerful case: to thrive in a complex, outsourced and topsy-turvey world people need to augment their rational, linear and analytical thinking (how you got ahead in the information age) with empathy, creativity, meaning and the ability to sense patterns (required to flourish in the conceptual age).
Pink wants us to increase our skills in 6 areas:
- design
- story
- symphony (ability to see the big picture and integrate)
- empathy
- play
- meaning
You can imagine my excitement when I read this list of what Daniel calls ‘the 6 senses.’
Here is a short article by Pink describing the basic argument of how outsourcing to Asia, the abundance of almost everything and automation are creating an environment where right-brain thinking (the creative, holistic side) increases in importance.
And here are a couple of mind maps describing the book.
But neither sources replace reading the book.
Of course I quickly flipped to the chapter on story and I was pleased with Pink’s reasoning for including story in his list of 6 senses, which includes the observation that facts are so ubiquitous that people need to place these facts in context and deliver them with emotional impact; a role served superbly by stories.
I have, however, one concern with the story chapter. A reader without a background in narrative techniques might believe the only use for narrative is how to craft a persuasive story to affect change. I’ve talked about the difference between storytelling and story listening before, and Pink provides examples of story listening, such as the use of narrative medicine. But these ‘listening’ example follow compelling stories of Robert McKee’s script writing workshops and Steve Denning’s World Bank storytelling examples.
And because it’s a best seller you should be able to find a copy at your local bookstore. Or if you are like me, just pick one up at the airport newsagent.
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| 18/02/06 | | Research supporting the role of intuition in complex situation |
Nature has just reported on research which found people make better decisions by going with their gut if the situation is complex. The evidence is growing. Gary Klein’s work on naturalistic decision making supports this idea and Malcolm Gladwell has certainly popularised the viewpoint in his book Blink.
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| 12/02/06 | | Who said determining the cause and effect was easy? |
The clever folk over at Cognitive Daily show us some experiments that suggest that determining cause and effect relationships depends on what you are looking and how things are grouped.
Nearly 100 years after Gestalt psychologists developed principles of grouping, suggesting that much of our perception of causal relationships is due to how we group objects, this research suggests that grouping does not explain all of how we perceive causal relationships. Instead, the critical factor appears to be where we focus our attention.
Be prepared to get a little dotty :-)
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| 1/02/06 | | Complexity thinking can change how you think about problems in your organisation |
Inspired by Kurt Richardson’s work exploring the parallels between systems thinking and complexity thinking I couldn’t help myself but to take a few of his gems and add my own angle.
The complementary law: A complex system is a system that has two or more potentially contradictory descriptions.
There is no right person, right answer, right perspective, right description.
System holism principle: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
You’re not going to be able to get an outcome you want through control.
Incompressibility (Darkness principle): The best representation of a complex system is the system itself
When organisational issues and problems arise, it is a common mindset to want to dive into analysis mode. More and more analysis. Lets strive towards a description and understanding of this problem. The only problem is that it won’t happen. As this principle suggests, we will always be in the shadow the whole, and of course, the whole is greater than the parts. Couple this with the first principle and what do you do with all those contradictory descriptions and findings anyway?!
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| 13/01/06 | | Harnessing complexity takes time and effort |
Late last year I facilitated an open space event involving knowledge coordinators from a large government agency. These coordinators had never attended an open space event and it was interesting to watch how each person reacted to the format. At about the half way mark I could tell that one person in particular was bothered by the proceedings. “It’s moving too slow. Why can’t we just jump into designing the solution?” she quipped. As a good open space facilitators I kept my mouth shut and only asked a few questions. At the end of the day my agitator approach me and said, “We needed to go through all that discussion and I’m glad we did.”
With this anecdote in mind I was heartened to read this comment by Dave Pollard:
Most participants have been taught to address ‘problems’ in certain traditional ways that are well-suited for simple and complicated problems but often ill-suited to complex situations. We tend to embrace these inappropriate techniques too readily, instead of using the more difficult, unfamiliar and time-consuming processes appropriate to dealing with complex issues, and allowing understanding and resolutions to emerge instead of jumping to quick, comfortable, traditional ‘solutions’.
Tough problems can’t be resolved in one fell swoop. They take time and dedication and a willingness to listen and learn from others. Those people who believe there are quick and efficient solutions to issues such as culture change, leadership, innovation, and any of the other myriad of business issues involving people will be equally deluded in the following 12 month ad-infinitum as nothing improves.
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| 8/01/06 | | Michael Crichton and complexity science |
Here is a set of videos of Michael Crichton (author of Jurassic Park and other techo-thrillers) presenting at The Smithsonian Associates and The Washington Center for Complexity & Public Policy. His 60 minute talk (plus Q&A) focuses on the topics of fear, misguided predictions and the impossibility of managing the environment with a mindset of linearity. Using the environment as an example of the ultimate complex system, Crichton exposes the inadequacies of conceiving the environment as a predictable and stable system.
If you are wondering about the relevance of complexity thinking to your organisation, this presentation is a great introduction. Just substitute ‘the environment’ for ‘the name of any large organisation.’
Here are a few quotes which pricked my ears:
“To learn how to manage complex systems takes humility.”
“To manage complex systems takes the ability to admit we are wrong and to change course.”
“If you manage a complex system you are frequently if not always wrong.”
The video is divided into 8 parts. Background material is provided in parts 1–4 and his ideas on complexity start half way through part 4. Parts 7 and 8 are questions and answers. The video is a little wonky in parts but I’m glad the camera operator was able to include the presentation slides where appropriate.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
Thanks to Mary Alice Arthur for pointing me to this presentation.
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| 7/01/06 | | Margaret Wheatley on Radio National next Tuesday |
Radio National is broadcasting a set of programs called New Dimensions. I caught an excellent discussion about Thomas Jefferson by Thom Hartmann on my way home from Cape Patterson. I noticed that Margaret Wheatley is a guest speaker next Tuesday at midday. Here is the description of the program from the New Dimensions (the company that produces the series) website. After the program is put to air they make it available as an audio file.
Never before in human history, have we been exposed to so much data from so many sources, a veritable deluge, Is it any wonder that people are anxious, cynical, worried, unhappy in their work, and seeking ways to escape? Is there a way out beyond drugs, legal and illegal, or losing ourselves in television, which doesn't tell visions ever? According to Wheatley, "We have to slow down. Nothing will change for the better until we do. We need time to think, to learn, to get to know each other. We are losing these great human capacities in the speed-up of modern life, and it is killing us." For years, Margaret Wheatley has written eloquently about humanizing our organization and helping people work together more effectively and compassionately. In this engaging and provocative dialogue, she shows how organizations can function more like responsive self-organizing, living systems, rather than cold mechanisms of control. Wheatley also expands her ideas into the wider arena of human society.
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| 1/01/06 | | New words are new worlds |
I’ve just arrived home from a week at Jervis Bay—stayed with my folks. My family and I spent lots of time on the beach and reading books. I was kept entertained by Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English which, among other things, got me thinking about how to keep abreast of new developments. Rather than trawling through bit-oceans of online resources perhaps we should just keep an eye on the latest words which make it into our dictionaries. As Bragg points out, new words are new worlds. And these new worlds might help us see new opportunities.
This part of the year is a great time to look for new words, or so I thought. Yes, there are many lists of the top 10 most popular words for 2005. For example Dictionary.com lists the words most searched on for the year which included:
- love, karma, virtue, cynical, fallacious
But these popularity contests merely reflect the events of the year in some way. Words like tsunami, refugee and pandemic, which made the Merriam-Webster’s Words of the Year 2005, reflect what was in the news last year.
It was more difficult to find where new words are reported. Probably the most accessible source of new words is www.wordspy.com which posts new words as they appear in our news, marketing and literature. While I love this site I suspect there are many faddish and ephemeral words here. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Oxford English Dictionary. While only available to subscribers I found you could sign up for a week for 8.80 pounds and search for words first cited in specific years.
Well there are no new words first cited between 2000–2005. But here are some words first cited in 1998–99:
- blog, blogger, blogging, kiteboard, kiteboarder, Ofgem, weblogger, Bluetooth, Furby, spintronic
Sadly each entry is entered years after it is first cited which makes it useless for picking up emerging trends.
Another approach is to use Blogpulse. If you are interested in a term, such as “narrative,” you can track its use across the blogosphere over the last 6 months. Here is the “narrative” trend and for comparison I’ve added “intelligent design,” which is a hot topic on the net at the moment:
There are probably other good sources for new words. Perhaps one day we will have a tag cloud for the entire blogosphere but would that be useful? Probably not, because it will only highlight the popular, the mainstream. What we are talking about here are ways to detect emerging fields, weak signals and tapping into the long tail. Come to think of it, some interface to wikipedia which illustrates new concepts would be a fabulous tool.
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| 2/12/05 | | To deal with complexity, keep it simple and make it fun |
This post from Kathy Sierra on Never underestimate the power of fun really resonates.
Earlier this year I completed what was an 8 month long Delphi project investigating facilitators perspectives and practices in natural resource management. One of the questions which we explored was “What are the ingredients for successful facilitation in NRM?”. What has stuck in my mind since was how one participant replied:
“To deal with the complexity, keep it simple and make it fun!”
I think there is alot of wisdom in that…
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| 27/11/05 | | Making better decisions in a complex world |
A business that’s a hedgehog could go good to great, but a business full of hedgehogs could be a disaster. At least, that’s what I’m thinking after taking a look over Tetlock’s latest book on Expert Political Judgment - How good is it?
Tetlock used a spectrum model of hedgehogs and foxes to investigate the thinking styles of experts and how they make decisions. Suggesting that generally they have two extremes– the fox and the hedgehog, and there is a range of hybrids in between. I’ve summarised it in the figure below:
What I found particularly interesting is that in his research which has spanned over 2 decades and included 284 world experts, Tetlock has found that it is the Foxes that have got a leg up (so to speak) over the hard nosed hard ball hedgehog. Apparently Fox style experts are more likely to have a balanced style of thinking which helps them to better deal with a constantly changing complex world. Hedgehog style experts tend to dig themselves into their intellectual positions and have a real problem dealing with counter-evidence to their decisions.
Some tell-tale signs of a hedgehog being near by is that you might hear statements like:
- “I was almost right”
- “Yes, but”
- “I made the right mistake”
- “There was some bad luck in getting it wrong”
So what are you? A fox or a hedgehog?
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| 25/10/05 | | Anecdote: Ready, aim, aim, aim |
I was in Brisbane on Thursday and had a great opportunity to catch up with some friends. One of them, Vince Aisthorpe, related an anecdote from Tom O’Toole who founded the Beechworth Bakery, one of the largest in the southern hemisphere. The anecdote was about why many Government agencies don’t seem to get much done.
“They aim for perfection, and end up going ready, aim, aim, aim. They aren’t prepared to fire because they cannot be certain they will hit the target. Sometimes you just have to fire: you might not hit the target, but you might find out where the target is.”
Apart from being a good anecdote, this reveals one of the common problems organisations have in dealing with complex problems. Thinking that they need to know the ‘correct answer’ in advance, they suffer ‘paralysis by analysis’ because complex problems tend not to have one single correct answer.
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| 14/10/05 | | Language is vital for addressing complex issues |
Dave Pollard is highlighting the similarities between wicked problems and complexity. I had a similar thought a few months back so it’s good to see others seeing a connection. Of course Dave does with much greater thoroughness.
I was interested in this comment because I agree that the word ‘problem’ is a problem when addressing complex issues.
They even avoid using the term ‘problem’ because its connotation is something that has a solution. But the terms that are appropriate instead are awkward, because they hit home the impotence of those trying to tackle them: instead of solutions and problems they talk of “approaches to deal with or cope with” a “situation”. And instead of analysis and cause they use complex-system terminology like “pattern recognition” and “correlation”.
If it is viewed as a problem you tend to want to fix it which encourages you to think in project management terms: tasks, milestones, targets, efficiency, pre-defined outcomes. For a complex issue the approach should be to improve the situation knowing full well that it can’t be ‘fixed’. At what point is culture fixed? When is trust fixed? When has an organisation done and dusted innovation?
What is frustrating is hearing professionals talk about issues like culture using metaphors that suggest it’s a mechanical problem. I’m referring here to a presentation I attended two weeks ago by someone using the Human Synergistics diagnostic. The talk was sprinkled with terms like ‘levers’ and ‘drivers’ and asking questions like ‘what is causing your culture?’
Language is vital. When I help clients design interventions I tell them to stop trying to solve the problem. Until people understand the importance of a new language for complex problems we are going to slip back into our old ways. And these old ways are not going to help.
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| 5/10/05 | | The problem with strategic planning |
It’s interesting how many organisations do strategic planning and yet how little value is considered to be delivered as a result. In an article called Eight problems with strategic planning a few points tweaked my interest.
- Does our process produce a plan that's "real?"
- Does our plan really work for the organization?
- Is anybody doing anything?
The danger I see with the normal model of highly facilitated (the facilitator is driving) strategic planning sessions is that the 3 points raised above are often missed. As mentioned in the article, often the facilitator is too academic (in which case a framework is used) or the facilitator is too much of a content expert for the industry and ends up taking over the meeting, when really, it should emerge from the work of the participants.
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| 27/09/05 | | A couple of things I've learnt about interventions |
Late last year I described some initial thoughts on what makes an intervention. Here is an excerpt:
We call them ‘interventions’ because they are designed to intervene in the ‘natural’ way of things. They are undertaken to create a ‘disturbance’—thus allowing new patterns to form. This approach is different from a project in which a clear end-result is envisaged from the outset. A project approach assumes an ordered world. In contrast, interventions are small ‘probes’ that are designed to create new possibilities.
Over the last year we’ve helped a range of organisations design interventions. During this time I’ve learnt the following:
- people have a strong desire to completely solve the issue they’re facing and can easily move from intervention design to project planning. Interventions shouldn’t attempt to solve the issue. Rather, they are designed to head the system in the right direction.
- interventions are discrete tasks which can be implemented within about three months.
- interventions are not further research or planning, they involve action
Here are some examples:
- turning off the blind copy functionality in an email system to send a message about trust
- providing manager’s with notebooks with the inside cover listing all the things a manager CAN do: what they can spend on whom, what awards they can give etc.
- stocking the stationary cupboard for mobile employees — a statement about trust
A set of small interventions can then form a portfolio approach to tackling a complex issue.
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| 21/09/05 | | Don't Prepare - Just show up! |
A great little book which I’ve been working my way through lately is Improv Wisdom .
There are some great wisdoms for life in this book, like the following four:
- “Say Yes”
- “Be Average”
- “Make Mistakes, Please”
- “Take Care of Each Other”
From an organisational perspective I often wonder about the “Say Yes” maxim. It seems to me that there is a culture in some organisations where the person who actually does practice the ‘say yes’ maxim is somehow considered inferior or weak, a walk over. I remember one of my first jobs working as a systems administrator. Saying “No” seemed to be a lesson in self-preservation, a protective mechanism against drowning in the overwhelming demands from everyone important in the company. Like the book suggests, however, it is often when we “Say Yes” that we find ourselves in the most interesting, unexplored and unchartered territory.
I wonder what culture change might occur in an organisation which considered and took seriously the above 4 maxims….?
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| 13/09/05 | | Advanced dotmocracy |
Jason Diceman just made a comment on the dotmocracy post pointing us to the Advanced Dotmocracy approach. There is even a comparison of both techniques on his website. Looks very well described and supported with handouts. I’ll have to give it a go to see how it works.
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| 11/09/05 | | Johnnie Moore's weblog and Margaret Wheatley's Essay |
I love it when a friend sends me a link to a new weblog suggesting I might like it. Andrew Rixon just sent me a link to Johnnie Moore’s blog and from the first few posts I’ve read, I love it. A post from yesterday alerts us to a new essay by Margaret Wheatley on disturbance being our friend in a complex world. Margaret has a lovely turn of phrase. How may times have you heard people say the world is getting more complexity and the pace is quickening. While I know it is an important point I tend to yawn when this is the first paragraph—I’m sure I’ve done it myself. Anyway, here is how Margaret put us in the context—and it’s not her first para:
But everything has changed since those sweet, slow days when the world seemed knowable and predictable, when we actually knew what to do next. The growing complexity of our times makes certainty about any move or any position much more precarious. And in this networked world where information moves at the speed of light and "truth" mutates before our eyes, certainty changes and speeds off at equivalent velocity.
It would be great to hear what you favourite blogs that you think I might like. Just pop your ideas in the comments.
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| 8/09/05 | | Book review - Wisdom of Crowds |
Fast Company calls it an ‘idea-driven narrative’. This genre, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell, takes a simple (but important) idea and uses research, case studies, and personal experiences to enable the reader to see the world from a new perspective. Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki, is a notable addition to this enriching genre.
I enjoyed reading this book. The simple idea upon which Surowiecki builds is that, under certain conditions, groups of people make better decisions than any individual could hope to make. There are three conditions: the group must be diverse; the individuals should make their decisions independently; and the people must be decentralised, thus ensuring that decisions are based on local knowledge.
This book is essentially about the theme of complexity, and how group decision-making provides a way of tackling uncertain situations and solving apparently intractable problems. Three types of problems are examined, each with its own chapter: (i) cognitive problems: which have verifiable answers (such as calculating the weight of a bull after it has been slaughtered and dressed); (ii) coordination problems: in which people coordinate their behaviour, knowing that others are behaving similarly (such as buyers and sellers finding each other and trading goods at a fair price); and (iii) cooperation problems: which involve getting people to work together for a common good (such as paying taxes or reducing pollution), over and above their individual interests.
The first half of the book provides the theory, with chapters covering the three conditions and three types of problems. The second half presents a set of case studies that reiterate the key points—with additional factors, pitfalls, and flights of fancy thrown in for good measure. For example, Surowiecki points out that diversity and independence are important because “… the best decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus and compromise”. The author’s call for dissent in group decision-making is a recurring theme throughout the book.
It is apparent that Surowiecki has a strong interest in financial matters—as might be expected from an author who writes the popular ‘Financial Page’ for the New Yorker. Much of the research and examples in Wisdom of Crowds has an economic flavour—which would usually have put me to sleep, but which, in this book, was presented in an interesting and fast-paced style that maintains the reader’s interest.
My only criticism is that the second half of the book often takes the reader on circuitous routes. On several occasions the reader begins to wonder what this has to do with group decision-making. When the text does eventually return to the point, the connection is often somewhat tenuous. I was left with the feeling that I had put in the effort to go with the author on his various excursions, but had returned without any really clear pictures of the scenery. However, taking the book as a whole, this is a minor criticism; the fact that I zipped through the book is always a good indicator of how much I enjoyed it.
Wisdom of Crowds has had three major impacts on my thinking: first, I have always intuitively taken opportunities to use group decision-making in my workshop activities, but I now have a logical rationale for its usefulness; secondly, I can now differentiate between group decision-making and collective meaning-making; and thirdly I can understand why, as Surowiecki laments, few organisations have implemented group decision-making—because it removes power from those who have the authority and responsibility to implement the decisions. A book that gets you thinking like this deserves to be highly recommended.
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| 5/09/05 | | Collective meaning and group decision making |
I just had an interesting distinction drawn to my attention: the difference between collective meaning and group decision making. I’ve just finished Wisdom of Crowds which argues that under certain circumstances a group will make a better decision than any one individual. The author, James Surowiecki, provides many examples including finding a submarine, guessing the weight of livestock, and Google’s ability to find relevant web pages. Wisdom of crowds are all examples of group decision making.
For Nancy Dixon the intended outcome of collective meaning making “… is a new way of understanding something that is shared across the collective.” Nancy goes on to illustrate her viewpoint with an anecdote about a North American Indian tribe of hunter-gatherers originally told by Bohm (of dialogue fame).
“From time to time the whole tribe would come together in a circle and talk. No one appeared to have called the meeting nor led it; the group made no decisions and seemingly had no agenda. Yet when the meeting ended people what to do because they know understood each other. The might then get together in small groups and make plans or decide to do something.” (pp. 58)
My work at Anecdote is primarily about collective meaning making. We use narratives collected from an organisation to help people have conversations that they wouldn’t normally have. That said, most companies are unwilling to spend time just talking, especially in the outcome focussed culture of Australia. Consequently, we follow meaning making with intervention design.
Dixon, Nancy. 1999. The Organizational Learning Cycle: How We Can Learn Collectively. 2nd ed: Gower Publishing Company.
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| 17/08/05 | | The smackdown model for learning makes sense |
Kathy Sierra's smackdown model for learning made me smile AND nod—what a great idea. I agree, we should be presenting multiple views rather than insisting there is one way forward. As Kathy argues, when we present two conflicting views people are encouraged to think and make up their own minds: learning occurs.
While the smackdown metaphor of two wrestlers in the ring, one trying to knock the other down, might be a little over the top, the idea of entertaining/exploring multiple perspectives is particular important when dealing with complex issues. As you might remember from previous posts (here, here and here), complex issues have many connected parts, are characterised by small things triggering large events and vice versa and are constantly in flux—like most organisations we know. In a complex system we can’t rely on what worked in the past because the landscape has changed. We need to try new ideas—experiment. Smackdowns should be in our kit bag.
The next time you here someone ‘telling you how it is,’ challenge them to argue the other perspective or ask someone else to help the group explore some of the other possibilities. This can only increase the level of interest in the discussion and people will hear more than just ‘blah, blah, blah.’ You never know, people might learn something too.
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| 30/07/05 | | Cultural attractors - Dan Sperber on the Edge |
If you love reading essays by some of the world’s top thinkers, then get onto the Edge mailing list (www.edge.org). This month’s set of essays included one by the French anthropologist, Dan Sperber who is known for his work on a naturalistic approach to culture.
While Dan’s essay on culture was short (I would have loved to read more), he made me stop and think a number of times and I kept on say, “man, that makes a lot of sense.” For example, we are probably all guilty of thinking of culture as if it floated in the background affecting our every decision. Here is what Dan said:
“I find it unrealistic to think of culture as something hovering somehow above individuals — culture goes through them, and through their minds and their bodies and that is, in good part, where culture is being made.”
Most of Dan’s essay argued against memes as a mechanisms for cultural evolution. The meme mechanism relies on people imitating one another and attempting to replicate content. Dan believes we don’t do this at all, rather we listen to what people say as an indicator (evidence) of their meaning and then we construct our own meaning. The process is about meaning construction, not replication.
“understanding involves a lot of construction, and not just reconstruction, and very little by way of simple replication”
The construction view has a massive impact on how we attempt to create communications in organisations. This view suggests that communicators should move away from a focus ensuring people understood (and replicated) the meaning of the communication and move to creating an environment where a beneficial meaning might be constructed. This might explain why so many communication efforts are failures.
“… words don't encode the speaker meaning, they just give you evidence of the speaker's meaning.”
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| 8/07/05 | | Barriers and attractors - the practicalities of words |
I’ve had the good fortune to work with Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kurtz at IBM while we were developing approaches to designing interventions using barriers and attractors. In fact, at the time Dave and I had both developed separate, yet similar, approaches to intervention design: Dave’s was called ABIDE (Attractors, Barriers, Identity, Diversity/Dissent and Environment) and mine was FABRIC (Feedback, Attractors, Boundaries, Rationale, Interaction and Context). Here is a description of Dave’s approach as captured by the AOK moderator Jerry Ash.
I’ve now conducted 5 or so intervention design workshops using ABIDE and I have discovered that the term ‘barrier’ is problematic. With ABIDE a ‘barrier’ is anything which impedes action. An obvious barrier is the physical layout of an office but there are many non-physical barriers such as the organisation’s structure (the silos), people’s professional status and access to resources (who gets funded). ‘Barriers’ define the containers which impede action.
The problem faced in a workshop setting is that the term ‘barrier’ is loaded. No matter how carefully you explain what you mean by a barrier participants translate the definition to mean, “a barrier is a problem.” Here is a typical workshop participant’s train of thought in this matter: “Oh yes, culture is a barrier and so is our lack of leadership. But the biggest barrier we face is getting people to commit to the project.” Quickly the conversation moves away from identifying the bounds which contain the action, to a list of problems that should be tackled. It becomes confusing for everyone.
While the term ‘boundary’ doesn’t strongly suggest something that inhibits action, I have found it to be a more useful term in the intervention design workshop setting. As you can see, while the term barrier might be the most accurate it is less than practical in getting the desired outcome—ie. a useful complexity based intervention. Words are powerful things.
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| 22/06/05 | | Complex systems at wikipedia |
A great description of complex systems is emerging on wikipedia.
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| 14/05/05 | | Adaptive tension: a prerequiste for communities of practice? |
In the early 1900s a French physicist named Bénard conducted an experiment which is widely quoted in complexity literature due to its neat demonstration of self-organisation and emergence. The experiment is simple. Heat some liquid from below. At first convection currents form keeping the system in equilibrium. As the heat increases these convection currents morph into clearly recognisable hexagonal cells. These cells appear to be efficient at dissipating the energy from the liquid.
Prigogine, a complexity science pioneer, called this type of phenomena, ‘adaptive tension’.
I think adaptive tension is required for self organisation, such as the formation communities of practice. But what does this mean in an organisational context? Well 3M created an adaptive tension by mandating 30% of revenues must derive from products introduced in the last four years. GE created adaptive tension when Jack Welch made it clear that each division must be 1st or 2nd in the marketplace of it will be fixed, sold or closed down.
My experience with communities of practice suggests adaptive tension focussed on learning, professionalism, innovation is necessary for their success.
The examples above, however, are all negative. Does adaptive tension need to be negative in an organisational setting? If not, what would be examples of positive adaptive tensions?
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| 28/04/05 | | An example of an intervention |
In a previous post I’ve described the difference between interventions and projects. On the radio this morning (ABC 774) I heard about what I would classify as a classic intervention. The Victorian government has announced a series of changes to how they will combat domestic violence. One of the interventions will be the ability for social workers to issue accommodation vouchers to men who have been violent. The “voucher system would encourage men to leave the family home - instead of the woman” providing a cooling off period while enabling time for legal advice to be sought.
This is an intervention because it is discrete, relatively simple to implement but at the same time the designers cannot be sure how it will affect the overall objective of reducing domestic violence. Now that the intervention is enacted those responsible for the programme must carefully monitor to detect the new patterns which will emerge.
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| 25/04/05 | | Part of McMaster's book, The Praxis Equation, is online |
Denham Grey points us to what appears to be a very interesting book: Michael McMaster’s The praxis equation. Design principles for intelligent organisation. I Googled the title and found that a couple of chapters are published online.
I found one of the design principles quoted by Denham a little curious:
Without a starting hypothesis discovering which part of that space of possibility will offer us our greatest rewards [is] left to chance.
I would have thought that the problem with a starting hypothesis is that it creates a danger you will look in the wrong part of the possibility space and conclude the phenomena had either ceased or didn’t exist when in fact it could have just happened somewhere else. I’ve suggested an alternative approach based on multiple monitoring strategies. I’m now keen to understand Michael’s point and look forward to finding the rest of his chapters.
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| 22/04/05 | | How to identify a wicked (read complex) problem |
Bill Godfrey has found, what I think is, a good list to help know whether you are dealing with a wicked (ie. complex) problem:
- The problem definition seems vague or keeps changing.
- The proposed solution creates a new, related problem.
- There are lots of meetings on the project but not much progress.
- There are a lot of "cooks" in the kitchen.
- The number of stakeholders keep increasing.
- Your career is at stake.
- You can't easily see the solution at the outset.
- There are multiple solutions, but no consensus and no convergence.
- The constraints on the solution keep changing.
- There are lots of political or "organizational" issues.
- The decision was already made, but it's not being followed (i.e. it's not a real decision).
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| 28/03/05 | | Internal blogs, taboo and organised dissent |
Dennis Hamilton has written a short piece describing his experience blogging inside the firewall—he works for an architectural and engineering firm. Dennis mentions three issues which differentiate an internal and external blog: losing support for your blog (your ideas) can be career limiting; mentioning taboo subjects can be career limiting; and criticising your organisation can be career limiting. I can see Dennis’ point. Within an organisation you are blogging for a single culture (and depending on the size of the organisation there might be many sub-cultures) and expressing your thoughts on a taboo subject might very well spell your imminent demise. Internal blogs speak to a mono-culture. A head-on assault will only result in the blogger being the first, and perhaps, only casualty.
While recognising the fraught nature of surfacing taboos, innovative organisation will have a capability for detecting what can’t be said. Internal bloggers might play an important role by probing the company, post by post, and reporting the response. Paul Graham’s excellent essay, ‘What You Can’t Say’, points out that heresies and taboos are either true or could be true, in which case shining a light on them could serve to either dispel myths or confirm the previously unthinkable and then act as a turning point for new ideas and directions.
Power and vulnerability will be at the heart of taboos so high level cover will be required for dissenters. We shouldn’t be running from dissent. Rather dissent should be built into the culture and supported within boundaries. Sure, we can’t have an organisation full of dissenting views; progress would be impossible. Organised dissent, however, should be fostered.
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| 28/03/05 | | Cynefin and emergency management |
Thanks to Larry Irons on the AOK forum for pointing this reference out.
In a paper entitled, ‘Believe in the Model: Mishandle the Emergency’, Simon French and Carmen Niculae apply the Cynefin framework to three emergencies: Three Mile Island, Chenobyl and mad cow disease. You can access the paper online (http://www.bepress.com/jhsem) by completing the guest reader form.
French, Simon, and Carmen Niculae. 2005. Believe in the Model: Mishandle the Emergency. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 2 (1).
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| 18/03/05 | | Hearing, or not hearing, what you expect |
My friend Michelle turned 30 a couple of weeks ago and we all went to her house for a BBQ. I got talking to her sister who told me she was learning Chinese. She was amused to find that if she attempted to speak the language to her Chinese-speaking (mandarin) friends they had no idea what she was saying until she said something like: Ni hui shuo zhongwen ma? (Can you speak Chinese?)
It’s difficult to hear or see patterns we’re not expecting. This is a big problem for consultants, or anyone else for that matter, who rely on interviews to assess a situation. While an outsider, such as a consultant, can provide new perspectives, they also are constrained by what Umberto Eco calls their background books. We only hear what is in the realm of our possibility. So how do we see and hear the new patterns?
New patterns are only revealed by adopting new perspectives. New perspectives appear when we apply a fresh set of eyes, adopt new frameworks of understanding, create new experiences, propose new questions, adopt new scales or viewpoints, or adopt a new identity. For example, in the process of a project, a fresh perspective may be created by looking at the high-level purpose; this may reveal patterns which were previously hidden at the detail level. We do this naturally in some circumstances while doggedly sticking to ‘the way we do things around here’ for the majority of situations.
Organisations need to build their toolbox of techniques. Obviously I see narrative as an important tool and closely related is the use of metaphor. But there are a myriad of other approaches we will need to become familiar with which will feel uncomfortable at first but will be essential in helping us fully harness the complexity we currently inhabit. We need to get ready to get out of our comfort zone.
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| 9/03/05 | | Character traits |
When extracting archetypes from a body of narrative, I have found it useful to give the workshop participants a large list of character traits to increase the richness of the process. Here is the poster I use.
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| 25/02/05 | | What is an attractor? |
Managers can apply complexity science as a metaphor to better understand their organisation. Like all metaphors, they are only a partial description and will always break down. For example, you might describe a colleague as a veritable tiger to illustrate his ferociousness, agility and willingness to attack, but he is unlikely to have a long tail and stripy fur coat.
When managers apply complexity ideas they invariably encounter the concept of ‘attractors’. Unfortunately there is considerable confusion about what is meant by an ‘attractor’ and therefore is usefulness can be diminished.
The confusion arises from the meaning the term ‘attractor’ has for a complexity scientist and its colloquial meaning. For example, if you ask anyone without a background in complexity science, ‘what is an attractor?’ their likely response is: ‘anything that attracts.’ A complexity scientist, however, might say: “an attractor is the pattern which forms from the interaction of many connected entities.” The attractor for a complexity scientist is the result not the cause.
Cohen and Stewart (1995) provide a useful description that illustrates the complexity science view of attractors. Imagine a beach. At one end is a pier and the other is a rocky point. Two ice cream vendors arrive to sell their wares and decide to locate themselves so they are equidistant from the pier, the point and one another. By pure chance, vendor A gets the first group of customers. So as not to miss out on business, vendor B moves a bit closer to vendor A. Now vendor B has customers, so vendor A decides to move closer to vendor B. Over time they creep toward each other until they are both side by side. The resulting cluster is called the attractor. They are not attracted to a particular grain of sand in the middle of the beach. Rather, their interaction results in the attractor pattern forming.
From a management practice perspective both views of an attractor are useful and we should avoid being dogmatic about which is right or wrong. Perhaps a way to explain attractors to those people wishing to use this concept is to describe two types of attractor: those that attract a behaviour, such as people, events, rituals and communities (this is how Cynefin describes attractors); and those that emerge from the behaviours of people interacting.
The key point to remember is, regardless of how we define attractors they are simply a metaphor to help us better understand how organisations work. Our next challenge is to understand the other often quoted complexity concept: strange attractors.
Any ideas?
Cohen, Jack, and Ian Stewart. 1995. The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World: Penguin.
Technorati tags: attractor
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| 11/02/05 | | Assumptions about monitoring |
Hi Michael, thanks for you kind comments about my blog. As you've probably gathered, my thoughts on monitoring are developing so I appreciate your questions. Take the following comment you make:
One question that comes to mind immediately is an extension of his base assumption that there’s an optimum level and pace of monitoring given a particular context. This suggests in turn that overmonitoring can be as much of a problem as undermonitoring.
Getting the balance right is tricky and I guess this is why I titled the post 'The Art of Monitoring'. I don't think there is an optimum level and there would be no way to really tell. In the complex domain you are looking for 'good enough'.
You suggest, by omission, that monitoring doesn't make sense in the complex domain: "Monitoring certainly makes sense in the known and knowable domains of the Cynefin model, when an organization’s context and activities are reasonably reduced to linear and causal models of behavior." I hold the view that monitoring is essential in the complex domain for the simple reason that each intervention only makes sense in hindsight and therefore you have to have a look to see what happened. Of course just by having that look you are changing the system.
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| 10/02/05 | | Melbourne emergence meeting |
This group is now 4 months old. If you are Melbourne and would like to join our monthly meetings to discuss organisational complexity, just sign up as a member here
Technorati tags: emergence
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| 9/02/05 | | The Art of Monitoring |
Organisations that operate in complexity need a monitoring regime. Combining the following three approaches to monitoring will improve an organisation’s ability to adapt in uncertain circumstances. The three approaches are:
- monitoring at intervals
- monitoring at events
- creating signposts
Monitoring at intervals
Some things change quickly while others move at glacial speed. Consequently, when monitoring a business environment, it is important to look for indicators which represent the spectrum of change speeds. For example, we might track staff blogs regularly for daily perturbations, while only reviewing competitors’ annual reports each year for slow moving trends. Monitoring at intervals means examining the world around us at set, regular periods. These intervals match the rate of change of the phenomena of interest. A monitoring regime, therefore, might schedule daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly visits to information sources.
A problem with relying solely on this type of environmental scanning is that it assumes that the world about us is predictable and that a phenomena moving at, say, a weekly cycle, does not rapidly change to a daily cycle. Many of us witnessed this speeding up and slowing down of cycles in the dot com boom and bust. The difficulty is knowing when to speed up or slow down the rate of monitoring.
There are two ways to approach the problem of unpredictability in monitoring: implement interventions and monitor the results (monitoring at events); and devise scenarios in order to identify warning signs that indicate that monitoring should accelerate (creating signposts).
Monitoring at events
When implementing an intervention, it is impossible to predict the outcome in detail. Monitoring to detect the patterns that emerge from the intervention enables corrections to be made. An explicit programme of monitoring reinforces the view that interventions in a complex system can never be set and forgotten and increases the mindfulness of the decision-takers and planners—a key requirement in handling complex and unpredictable environments (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001).
Creating signposts
Scenario planning assists the monitoring programme by helping decision-takers and planners identify warning signs. If an intervention takes the organisation close to one of these signposts, the rate of monitoring can be increased and corrective measures taken.The principal difficulty with scenario planning is that the breadth of possibilities is limited by the imagination of those involved in developing the scenarios. It is important, therefore, that the monitoring-of-events approach also helps identify signposts. While it is impossible to cover the entire space of possibility within a complex environment, a systematic method combining these three approaches considerably enhances an organisation’s ability to adapt.
Weick, K. E. & Sutcliffe, K. M. 2001. Managing the Unexpected. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Acknowledgements: I’ve recently become re-aware of the need for monitoring after talking with Dave Snowden who pointed out the interval monitoring problem of missing catastrophic change. My conversations with Bruce McKenzie helped my understand the role scenarios might play in creating signposts.
Technorati tags: monitoring, scenario, intervention
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| 30/01/05 | | Tool for Thought |
Steven Johnson writes an essay in the New York Times pondering the future of writing with the availability of tools like DEVONThink. It helps you locate those ideas you managed to type into your computer and then promptly forgot by feeding the system a sentence of two, such as a paragraph from the new book you are writing. Steven tells us about the interesting new trains of though which have emerged using this approach.
If navigating complexity requires us to detect new and emerging patterns, tools which alert us to new connections and provide new perspectives will be valuable aids. As Johnson suggests, we are beginning to see our multiple intelligences augmented by a silicon one.
Techorati tags: perspectives:software: StevenJohnson
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| 30/01/05 | | The act of setting boundaries |
Complex systems lack explicit boundaries. Any boundaries which exist are imposed by people who are attempting to constrain and simplify the system for a particular purpose and therefore these boundaries are artefacts affected by the designer’s biases, interests and vision. This is not bad situation, we just need to remain aware of how boundaries were set. Boundaries are essential because without them we are forced to consider an infinite number of connections—everything is connected to everything else—which is hopeless. Designers, therefore, need ways to define system boundaries which delineates the system in ways which are both relevant and manageable.
Typically, boundary definitions are set without thought. Designers rely on their intuition and make decisions like: “the culture change programme will focus on the call centre and we will concentrate on the managers’ viewpoints.” This decision leaves out other stakeholders such as the call centre operators and the human resources department in headquarters. Whenever boundaries are set people are left out. The question for designers is simply: “are we leaving people out for the right reason?” Boundary setting is the first important step in designing interventions for a complex system. A practical approach to boundary setting is a fundamental tool for complexity-base designers.
Weiner Ulrich (1983; 1996) provides a practical boundary-setting approach based on considering four types of stakeholder and asking three questions from the perspective of each. The four stakeholders are:
- clients—the people or groups who benefit from the interventions;
- decision-takers—those people who allocate the budget to implement the interventions; and
- planners—the people responsible for designing the interventions;
- bystanders—people affected by the decisions but not involved in the process (Ulrich called this type, the witness).
Ulrich suggests the questions be asked from two perspectives: what ought to be the answer and what is the answer. These questions can be summarised as having the following dimensions:
- client—1) sense of purpose; 2) clash of purposes;
- decision taker—3) control of resources; 4) lack of control (environmental conditions);
- planners—5) types of expertise; 6) likelihood of success; and
- bystanders—7) voice of the affected; 8) clash of worldviews.
Designers can run a simple workshop format with representatives from each stakeholder type. I have used a challenge-and-respond format combined with mixing people throughout the workshop to ensure we expose the maximum variety of viewpoints.
Setting boundaries in this way ensures the system is defined so that it is both relevant and manageable. Perhaps more importantly, it specifically includes a broad set of stakeholders in the improvement process. Complex problems never have a right or wrong answer. In fact it’s impossible to objectively measure whether a complex problem has been ‘fixed’. Rather, the stakeholder must believe that improvements are being made and this requires their active involvement in the intervention design and monitoring.
Ulrich, W. 1983. Critical Heuristics of Social Planning: A New Approach to Practical Philosophy. Bern: Haupt.
Ulrich, W. 1996. A Primer to Critical Systems Heuristics for Action Researchers. Hull: Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull.
Thanks to Bruce McKenzie for putting me on to Ulrich’s work.
Technorati tags: boundaries, ulrich, techniques
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| 25/01/05 | | Similarity between characteristics of a complex adaptive system and a wicked problem |
I’ve just been reading about wicked problems and I’m struck by the similarities between the characteristics of a complex system and how Rittel and Webber defined a wicked problem back in 1973. Jeff Conklin nicely summarises wicked problems as follows:
- You don’t understand the problem until you have developed a solution. Indeed, there is no definitive statement of "The Problem." The problem is ill-structured, an evolving set of interlocking issues and constraints. Rittel said, "One cannot understand the problem with knowing about its context; one cannot meaningfully search for information without the orientation of a solution concept; one cannot first understand, then solve." Moreover, what "the Problem" is depends on who you ask – different stakeholders have different views about what the problem is and what constitutes an acceptable solution.
- Wicked problems have no stopping rule. Since there is no definitive "The Problem", there is also no definitive "The Solution." The problem solving process ends when you run out of resources, such as time, money, or energy, not when some optimal or "final and correct" solution emerges. Herb Simon, Nobel laureate in economics, called this "satisficing" -- stopping when you have a solution that is "good enough" (Simon 1969)
- Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong , simply "better," "worse," "good enough," or "not good enough." With wicked problems, the determination of solution quality is not objective and cannot be derived from following a formula. Solutions are assessed in a social context in which "many parties are equally equipped, interested, and/or entitled to judge [them]," and these judgements are likely to vary widely and depend on the stakeholders independent values and goals.
- Every wicked problem is essentially unique and novel. There are so many factors and conditions, all embedded in a dynamic social context, that no two wicked problems are alike, and the solutions to them will always be custom designed and fitted. Rittel: "The condition in a city constructing a subway may look similar to the conditions in San Francisco, say, … but differences in commuter habits or residential patterns may far outweigh similarities in subway layout, downtown layout, and the rest." Over time one acquires wisdom and experience about the approach to wicked problems, but one is always a beginner in the specifics of a new wicked problem.
- Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation," every attempt has consequences. As Rittel says, "One cannot build a freeway to see how it works." This is the "Catch 22" about wicked problems: you can’t learn about the problem without trying solutions, but every solution you try is expensive and has lasting unintended consequences which are likely to spawn new wicked problems.
- Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions. There may be no solutions, or there may be a host of potential solutions that are devised, and another host that are never even thought of. Thus, it is a matter of creativity to devise potential solutions, and a matter of judgement to determine which are valid, which should be pursued and implemented.
And here is how I’ve roughly paraphrased Paul Cilliers description of complex systems:
- Complex systems have a large number of elements.
- The elements must interact.
- The interaction is fairly rich, i.e. any element in the system influences, and is influenced by quite a few other ones.
- The interactions are non-linear.
- Interactions have a short range, i.e. info is received primarily from immediate neighbours.
- There are loops in the interactions: positive and negative.
- Complex systems are usually open, i.e. they interact with their environment. Actually it is difficult to define the borders of a complex system. Therefore the scope is defined by the purpose and therefore influenced by the observer position.
- They operate far from equilibrium. Equilibrium equals death.
- They have histories. The past influences current behaviour. Must take account of time.
Each element is ignorant of the behaviour of the system as a whole, it responds to information available locally.
It is interesting that these two perspectives don’t make much reference to each other. While there is mention of social complexity in Jeff’s work, there is little said about complex systems from a complexity science perspective. On the other side I’ve never seen wicked problems or Rittel and Webber mentioned in the complex adaptive systems literature.
Rittel, H. & Webber, M. 1973. Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences, 4: 155-169.
Cilliers, P. 1998. Complexity & Postmodernism. London: Routledge.
Conklin, J.; Wicked Problems and Social Complexity; http://cognexus.org/wpf/wickedproblems.pdf; 25 January 2005.
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| 20/01/05 | | Gareth Morgan's 15% concept |
In our work to design complexity-based interventions our aim has been to create small initiatives, which in themselves are designed to address specific issues, that when taken together over time have a widespread effect on the broader system (organisation, division, team). Today I discovered Gareth Morgan’s description of essentially the same approach which he calls the 15% concept. Here are a couple of quotes:
Most people have about 15-percent control over their work situations. The other 85 percent rests in the broader context, shaped by the general structures, systems, events and culture in which they operate.
The challenge rests in finding ways of creating transformational change incrementally: By encouraging people to mobilize small but significant "15-percent initiatives" that can snowball in their effects. When guided by a sense of shared vision, the process can tap into the self-organizing capacities of everyone involved.
Gareth illustrates the approach with an example of education reform and the evolving relationship between teachers and parents within a school.
The key point is to get people identifying the 15% initiatives where they can make a difference and the broadscale transformation will emerge.
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| 19/01/05 | | A metaphor for attractors and strange attractors |
The concepts of an attractor and strange attractor from complexity science can be difficult ideas to grasp, but I came across this metaphor by Bill McKelvey which you might find useful.
“As a metaphor, think of a point attractor as a rabbit on an elastic tether—the rabbit moves in all directions but as it tires it is drawn toward the middle where it lies down to rest. Think of a strange attractor as a rabbit in a pen with a dog on the outside—the rabbit keeps running to the side of the pen opposite from the dog but as it tires it comes to rest in the middle of the pen. The rabbit ends up in the ‘middle’ in either case. With the tether the cause is the pull of the elastic. In the pen the cause is repulsion from the dog unsystematically attacking from all sides.” (McKelvey,2004: 43)
McKelvey, B. 2004. “‘Simple rules’ for improving corporate IQ: basic lessons from complexity science.” Pp. 39-52 in Complexity Theory and the Management of Networks, edited by P. Abdriani and G. Passiante. University of Lecce, Italy: Imperial College Press.
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| 16/01/05 | | The role of free will in social complexity--does it exist? |
Dave Snowden frequently says: “Humans are not ants. We have ‘free will’ and can impose order on an otherwise complex system.” This sounded like a sound statement to me and I happened to mention the idea to Sue Blackmore while at a meeting of complexity scientists (and a ring-in like myself) in Canberra—we were considering how the theories of complexity and memetics might be combined. Sue scoffed at the idea and questioned whether human actually possess free will. BTW this link to Sue’s short statement on ‘free will’ is in response to a question by the Edge: “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” Some of the world’s great minds have made contributions (eg. Richard Dawkins, Stuart Kauffman, Daniel C. Dennett, Paul Davies, Howard Gardiner—120 in all). Sue has also address the topic in her latest book on consciousness .
Regard ‘free will’, I’m still not in a position to decide one way or the other, but the following thought rattles around in my head. Gary Klein has shown that many of our decisions are made without weighing the options (Sources of Power). Rather, when faced with a decision we match the situation with patterns from our experience, do a quick mental test to see whether they action might work, and if it makes sense, we take action. This doesn’t sound like free will.
Do you think we have free will?
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| 10/01/05 | | The practitioner’s landscape by Glenda H. Eoyang |
Papers which provide practical advice on the design of complexity-based interventions for organisational issues are rare. E:CO (a new complexity journal) is attending to this shortcoming by including a practitioner’s section in its journal. In the latest volume, Glenda Eoyang presents her practitioner’s landscape based on more than 15 years of applying complexity science to organisational development and management practice.
The practitioner’s landscape is a matrix for categorising complexity-based tools and techniques. Its two dimensions are: 1) the conspicuousness of the issue of interest, which Eoyang calls the ‘phenomena’; and 2) the type of complexity-based techniques and tools in relation to its level of abstractness.
Phenomena—issue of interest
The dimension labelled ‘phenomena’ has three categories:
- surface structures which represent issues which are evident to anyone in the organisation such as interpersonal conflict, lagging sales and client dissatisfaction;
- evident deep structures which initially reveal themselves as a sense of disquiet or an uneasy feeling by people in the organisation that something is wrong but they are unable to detect the cause. With exploration, however, these patterns can be revealed and upon discovery make sense to the organisation;
- subtle deep structures where neither the instincts nor first order investigations yield explainable patterns. Here Eoyang (2004: 56) suggests more analysis is required: “The complexity of these situations transcends the capacity of one level of complexity tool and demands more subtle and/or complicated methods and models.”
Tool type
There are four tool types starting from the least abstract (practice) and moving to the most abstract (mathematics):
- practice is the act of implementing an intervention and discovering the outcome without predicting, in fine detail, the outcome at the outset;
- descriptive metaphors use the rich language of complexity science, such as ‘attractors’, the butterfly effect and fitness landscapes, to help people see problems from new perspectives. These metaphors are simply ‘descriptive’ as they don’t attempt to accurately describe the human process in motion using complexity science.
- dynamic metaphors focus on the similarities between the underlying dynamics of the human system and other non-linear dynamical systems. It is interesting to note that like other authors writing on the application of complexity science to management practice (notably Ralph Stacey) Eoyang primarily views complexity science as a metaphor for human systems.
- mathematics which represents the many different mathematical models, such as agent based modelling, which simulate complex systems.
Eoyang wrote this paper specifically for practitioners to help them identify a range of different types of complex issues they might face in an organisation and assist them in selecting an appropriate tool.
Most importantly it provides a useful language for discussing organisational issues in a new way which will create quite different conversations. Solution designers will be asking questions to discern the depth and conspicuousness of the structures in operation and in doing so a greater awareness of the complex nature of many issues will be developed by decision makers. Hopefully this will lead to organisations investigating and applying techniques other than those which assume a rational, linear world.
This paper, however, subtly suggests that answers will come with the right amount and depth of analysis, applying the right technique. Here we must show caution. Complex systems are unpredictable, especially in the long-term. In many cases, the only option available to us is to act and see what happens. Eoyang describes this approach in the ‘practice’ toolset yet seems to contradict the principle in the ‘mathematics’ category where models are thought to be able to discover the subtle structures mostly hidden in the complex human system. Mathematical models are exception of discovering counter-intuitive phenomena which help understand a system but should only be viewed as simulations rather than predictors.
While it is important to introduce new and vibrant language in order to conceive new solutions based on complexity science, complexity based management practice will continue to be held back if we over complicate what we say. For example, rather than say, “These descriptions are based on apparent isomorphisms between chaotic or complex adaptive patterns in physical systems and emergent behaviour in human systems.”, say the descriptions are based on apparent similarities. Simple language will help the discipline being labelled a fad by the hard-nosed, battle-weary, managers who we must convince of its usefulness.
It will be interesting whether practitioners embrace this framework and begin to populate the matrix with examples of techniques and tools. It seems to me that many of the Cynefin techniques fit in the ‘practice’ and ‘descriptive metaphor’ categories and probably have been mostly applied to the ‘subtle deep structures’ issues such as understanding tax payer behaviour, occupational health and safety and the role of trust.
I believe this will be a useful framework which I will use to discuss issues with my clients.
Eoyang, G.H. 2004. "The practitioner's landscape." E:CO 6(1-2):55-60.
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| 5/01/05 | | E:CO - New Complexity Journal |
E:CO is a new journal exploring the theory and practice of applying complexity science concepts to organisational issues. The entire content of the current issue is available online. Interestingly it includes a section called 'classic papers' featuring Ross Ashby's (Ashby's law a requisite variety) 1962 paper, Principles of Self-organizing Systems.
I think the following papers are some of the modern classics in this field.
Kauffman, S.A.and W. Macready. 1995. "Technological Evolution and Adaptive Organizations." Complexity 1(2):26-43.
Kurtz, C.and D. Snowden. 2003. "The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-making in a Complex-Complicated World." IBM Systems Journal 42(3):462-483.
Stacey, R.D. 1995. "The Science of Complexity - an Alternative Perspective for Strategic Change Processes." Strategic Management Journal 16(6):477-495.
What would you regard as ‘classic’ references in the field of organisational complexity?
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| 3/01/05 | | Updated view on complex system intention |
Thanks for your comment Matt. I agree, the diagram does suggest that 'known' is a subset of 'knowable' etc., and this wasn't my intent. Here is a new version of the diagram.
The space between the boundaries indicates the breadth of possibilities. The wider the space, the greater the possibilities. In the complex domain it is impossible to explore the entire possibility space. There are just too many interrelated, potential outcomes. I have kept the angle of the complex boundary acute to depict the point that while the possibilities are large their is still a desired purpose in an organisational system.
Of course the question now is what do you do with this conception of the Cynefin framework. I think the most important outcome is how one designs projects/interventions depending on the nature of the problem one is facing. If the issue is 'known' then search for a best practice and apply it. If the problem is 'knowable' then investigate, analyse, search for good practices, and apply them.
The complex domain requires quite a different approach. As I have mentioned in a previous post, it is important to design small interventions and then monitor the results, which are largely unpredictable. It is like navigating a sailing boat across a rough sea. You set a course and then take stock of your current location, which is never quite where you expect it to be, before setting your next course. If your course is heading in the same direction as you roughly intend, then it is a succesful intervention. If, however, the intervention results in a course which heads in the wrong direction then you must quickly intervene to correct the error. Here is another diagram to illustrate this idea.
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| 23/12/04 | | Intention in a complex system |
For the past four years I’ve used the Cynefin framework to help managers to understand the varied nature of the issues they face and to appreciate that some of these issues are better understood as complex adaptive systems. The beauty of the Cynefin framework is that it accepts the validity of rational, linear, and mechanistic explanations, but it does not regard these as universally applicable for all problems.
Using the Cynefin framework typically consists of groups of people working together to develop a consensus on the nature of the issues being considered—known, knowable, complex, and chaotic. In applying this framework, it becomes apparent that the range of possible outcomes increases as one moves through the domains from known to knowable to complex to chaotic. As the diagram illustrates, an issue in the known domain has a single and clear outcome—a best practice. An issue in the knowable domain has a limited range of possible outcomes—a set of good practices. Complex issues pose a more difficult conceptual challenge. To understand this, it is necessary to explore the idea of ‘intention’.
A natural complex adaptive system—as distinct from an intentional system—evolves without purpose. Over an extended time, it is impossible to predict the outcome of, for example, the evolution of a species—because the direction of the natural system results from a complex co-evolution among the agents and their environment. Some agents thrive as the environment and agents change, whereas others perish. A recent example in Australia is the ‘Mangrove Monitor’—a reptile, which, until recently, has thrived in Australia’s north. The monitor is now under threat as poisonous cane toads migrate west from Queensland. The lizard’s previously successful strategy of eating frogs is now wreaking havoc on the monitor population as it eats cane toads instead of frogs.
In contrast, businesses have intention or a purpose. As Charles Handy points out, an organisation’s basic purpose is simply to exist and, through its existence, to achieve things that individuals cannot achieve. More specifically, however, organisations exist to achieve something which might be stated in their business strategy or, as suggested by Henry Mintzberg, their strategy has emerged and recognised in hindsight. Either way, a business has a purpose. When applying the Cynefin framework to organisational issues, any issue that is defined as ‘complex’ should at least be heading in a direction that is not in conflict with the purpose of the business. For this reason, in the diagram, I have drawn the range of possible outcomes for complex issues as being finite, but wide.
It is important to remember that each ‘complex’ issue is unpredictable. Therefore, whenever an intervention is implemented it is critical that monitoring is undertaken to observe the patterns that emerge. Unwanted patterns (those contrary to the organisation’s intentions) must then be disrupted, and beneficial outcomes must be nurtured. In dealing with complex issues, no end point is ever reached.
Finally, a chaotic issue can, and will, head in any direction. Because patterns are indiscernible, it is impossible to monitor and intervene as we would in the complex domain. The possibilities are limitless.
Is this a useful way to conceptualise the Cynefin domains?
| 21/12/04 | | A New Kind of Science online |
Stephen Wolfram has made the full text of A New Kind of Science available online. Worth a look.
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| 17/12/04 | | Intervention design for complex issues |
The Cynefin framework can be used to identify complex issues. In this situation, the term ‘complex’ does not necessarily mean that things are ‘complicated’; rather the term means that these issues are more than the sum of their parts. In other words, it means that a group’s behaviour cannot be understood or predicted by looking at the behaviour of individuals. There is thus a difference between ‘complicated’ and ‘complex’.
Most modern businesses assume that their issues are complicated, and that problems can be solved through the application of analytical tools—such as trend analysis, fishbone analysis (determining cause-and-effect relationships), and psychometric testing. This Newtonian, linear, and mechanistic way of thinking dominates our working lives. Although it might be valid for the parts of a business that are ordered and regimented (such as well-defined business processes), this thinking is inappropriate for complex issues (such as culture, trust, innovation, and so on) in which many people are interacting and from which group behaviour emerges.
A Cynefin intervention design method called ABIDE (attractors, barriers, identity, dissent, and environment) recognises the difference between complicated and complex issues. ABIDE helps organisations to identify leverage points at which a small action can have a big difference. More importantly, it recognises that a business must relinquish control and direction if it is to harness complexity. It must focus on changing the barriers that encapsulates a group’s behaviour, and then monitor what happens at the group level. This is a new way of thinking about the management of organisational issues.
Using this approach, small interventions (rather than projects) are required to change the attractors and barriers. We call them ‘interventions’ because they are designed to intervene in the ‘natural’ way of things. They are undertaken to create a ‘disturbance’—thus allowing new patterns to form. This approach is different from a project in which a clear end-result is envisaged from the outset. A project approach assumes an ordered world. In contrast, interventions are small ‘probes’ that are designed to create new possibilities.
Interventions do not therefore constitute a ‘set-and-forget’ strategy. They must be monitored. Monitoring might take the form of collecting narrative at intervals to identify the new patterns that are forming. It might involve managers walking the floor and listening to people (especially the murmurers). It can involve observing behaviours, identifying the information brokers in the organisation’s social network, and listening to their views. It could involve seeking out the sceptics, seeking views from outside the organisation, and learning to ask non-direct and creative questions that reveal the early signs of new attitudes and beliefs being formed.
Every exercise in monitoring is like taking a snapshot that effectively ‘freezes’ time. This provides managers with the time they need to make decisions. As the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann has suggested, harnessing complex issues requires the taking of ‘coarse-grained’ images. Our natural tendency is to take fine-grained pictures so we can see each grain of sand on the beach. Understanding complexity requires coarse-grained images at a resolution that shows the overall pattern of the beach and the pattern of the bathers on it.