Harold Jarche

Social Learning Handbook

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This post is an excerpt from Jane Hart’s recently published  Social Learning Handbook 2014.

social learning handbook 2014It’s all about people.

Today’s digitally connected workplace demands a completely new set of skills. Our increasing interconnectedness is illuminating the complexity of our work environments. More connections create more possibilities, as well as more potential problems.

On the negative side, we are seeing that simple work keeps getting automated, like automatic bank machines. Complicated work, for which standardized processes can be developed, usually gets outsourced to the lowest cost of labor.

On the positive side, complex work can provide unique business advantages and creative work can help to identify new business opportunities. However, complex work is difficult to copy and creative work constantly changes.

But both complex and creative work require greater implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge, unlike explicit knowledge, is difficult to codify and standardize. It is also difficult to transfer.

Implicit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships. It requires trust before people willingly share their know-how. Social networks can enable better and faster knowledge feedback for people who trust each and share their knowledge. But hierarchies and work control structures constrain conversations. Few people want to share their ignorance with the boss who controls their pay cheque. But if we agree that complex and creative work are where long-term business value lies, then learning amongst ourselves is the real work in organizations today. In this emerging network era, social learning is how work gets done.

Becoming a successful social organization will require more than just the implementation of enterprise social technologies. Developing, supporting, and encouraging people to use a range of new social workplace skills will be just as important. Individual skills, in addition to new organizational support structures, are both required.

Personal knowledge management (PKM) skills can help to make sense of, and learn from, the constant stream of information that workers encounter from social channels both inside and outside the organization. Keeping track of digital information flows and separating the signal from the noise is difficult. There is little time to make sense of it all. We may feel like we are just not able to stay current and make informed decisions. PKM gives a framework to develop a network of people and sources of information that one can draw from on a daily basis. PKM is a process of filtering, creating, and discerning, and it also helps manage individual professional development through continuous learning.

Collaboration skills can help workers to share knowledge so that people work and learn cooperatively in teams, communities of practice, and social networks. In order to support collaborative working and learning in the organization, it is important to experience what it means to work and learn collaboratively, and understand the new community and collaboration skills that are involved. “You can’t train someone to be social, only show them how to be social.” Practice is necessary.

The power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every existing business model. Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter in the future workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust. The 21st century connected enterprise is a new world of work and learning.

For example, traditional training structures, based on institutions, programs, courses and classes, are changing. Probably the biggest change we are seeing is that the content delivery model is being replaced by more social and collaborative frameworks. This is due to almost universal Internet connectivity, especially with mobile devices, as well as a growing familiarity with online social networks.

Work is changing and so organizational learning must change. There is an urgent need for organizational support functions (HR, OD, KM, Training) to move beyond offering training services and toward supporting learning as it is happening in the digitally connected workplace. The connected enterprise will not wait for the training department to catch up.

Networked monkeys

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friday2@flowchainsensei – “Even when companies don’t pay peanuts, seems like they still mostly want monkeys. If I’m gonna be a monkey, at least it’ll be a Chaos Monkey.”

@hreingold – “In 5th grade, I tried to drop out. My teacher regarded me as a problem and I hated school. My parents moved me to a new school … On the first day of my new school, the new teacher praised my writing and asked me to interview the principal for the class newspaper … Is that why I became a writer? I don’t know. Obviously, it made an impression on me. The right word and the right time can go a long way.”

@eekim – The Real Importance of Networks: Understanding Power

Networks are not a rejection of hierarchy. Networks are a rejection of rigidity. A hierarchy is an efficient form of decision-making, as long as it’s the “right” hierarchy. Powerful networks allow the right hierarchies to emerge at the right time.

@smartco – Complexify yourself – and others

An obvious way to expand our range of responses is to develop our skills and capabilities, and to connect with others whose knowledge complements our own – as well as connecting to inspire and trigger-off new ideas together.

And this was Stafford Beer’s influence on me. He developed W. Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. He uses variety as another word for complexity. And Ashby said that “only variety absorbs variety.”

This is what I mean by complexify yourself and others. It’s about making sure that your skills and capabilities are up to the job of dealing with complex and uncertain situations. They need to be equal to the context – complex situations need diverse, agile, collective and creative thinking.

Automattic’s (not so) secrets: 1. allow experimentation 2. hire the right people 3. permit autonomy + measure output – via @folletto

Matt Mullenweg (of Automattic):

This is where open source gets really interesting: it’s not just about the legal wonkery around software licensing, but what effect open sourced software has on people using it. In the proprietary world, those people are typically called “users,” a strange term that connotes dependence and addiction. In the open source world, they’re more rightly called a community.

As a final note, here’s an image representing the impact of openness on innovation in society:

ideas to innovation

 

From the observed to the observers

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The other day, in our Change Agents Worldwide community forum, Susan Scrupski mentioned that she was taking an online course.

It floors me that the learned teachings of academia have come to the same conclusions on some of these matters involving networks of people that we have by actually doing it (vs. studying it).  The first series of videos talks about the “Tragedy of the Commons.” Reciprocity, the spirit of cooperation, and Trust are major themes.

Richard Martin responded with an experience of his.

I had a similar experience a few years ago when I started a course on information rights. As day-to-day practitioners, the students were at the cutting edge and knew far more than the theory-constrained academics. I dropped out after one semester as I was learning far more on the job and getting the opportunity to put that new knowledge into action.

The nature of social science research may be shifting away from academia, who are losing the initiative as the rest of us become participating members and simultaneously researchers/observers in an enormous petri dish of over 2 billion connected world citizens. Like the scribes of old, replaced by a literate citizenry, today’s social scientists may soon be out of work. We are all social scientists now. A recently retired sociology professor, with whom I shared this idea, agreed.

I noted a similar case with a research dissertation that developed a theoretical model for PKM which was a fairly extensive literature review and corroborated what many practitioners already know. In addition, the dissertation was frozen in time by the nature of academic publishing, and while it cited my frameworks, it did not use my latest work at the time. In the creative economy, knowledge distribution in business is moving from academia to professional networks.

work is changing

Maybe it is not just business schools that will have their knowledge dissemination model disrupted but the social sciences as well. A networked citizenry no longer has to play only the role of the observed, but now can become the observer in education, sociology, and many other fields of human behaviour.

knowledge dissemination

Moving to the edges

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Innovation comes from the edge, almost never from the centre. Sometimes it’s cool to live on the edge but for the most part it’s hard work. Things keep breaking. The business models are not proven. The procedures aren’t fixed. The models and metaphors are not understood by everyone. It’s difficult to connect with the mainstream. This is life on the edges.

I have been living on the edges for over a decade and it has given me a unique perspective. Twenty years ago I saw the power of the internet and that it could have as great an impact on society and business as the printing press did. My graduate thesis discussed this and I have since examined in depth the world as it has changed into the global village that Marshall McLuhan saw. I chose to move to the edges of business and technology to explore the emerging network era, giving up mainstream employment in order to do so. I figured that to be a good teacher I would first need to be a good learner.

In the near future, the edges will be where almost all high-value work will be done in organizations. Change and complexity will be the norm in this work. Most people will work the edges, or not at all. Core activities will be increasingly automated or outsourced. This core will be managed by very few internal staff.

This is a sea change in organizational design. Some companies are already playing with new designs, tweaking their existing models. A few, mostly start-ups, are trying completely new models. Any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value. Freelancers and contractors, already increasing in number, will be needed to address continuously evolving markets. The future of work will be in understanding complexity and dealing with chaos.

A core organizational design challenge in this shift will be addressing our inherent tribal nature. People have a strong need to belong to something identifiable. But this need for a sense of belonging can detract from critical thinking and questioning the inherent assumptions of our existing structures. However, this questioning will be essential as organizations test out new work models. Unfortunately, anthropology does not scale as easily as technology does. While some organizations may have the software networks in place, most lack pervasive network thinking and social skills.

As organizations become more technologically networked, they also face skilled, motivated and intelligent workers who can now see systemic dysfunctions. But those who talk about these problems are often branded as rebels. Pitting tribes of rebels against tribes of incumbent power-holders only detracts from the serious organizational redesign that needs to be done. In addition, traditional external consultants will be of little help because trying to solve this challenge from the outside will only result in the problems being changed from the inside. Organizations will have to solve their own problems, and this takes time.

From my perspective on the edge, a new type of business relationship is needed. Change management has to be seen as a way of working, not a separate process, and not an event. It needs to involve all tribes. On the edges the answers may not be clear, but  they are less obscured than in the centre. A new business partnership is needed, between current management on the inside, workers moving to the edges, and others living beyond the organizational edges. Organizational development and change management need to move to the edges, and quickly.

This post is a follow-up to Rebels on the Edges.

live_on_the_edgesImage: @gapingvoid

Six roles of network management

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If helping the network make better decisions is a primary role of management in the emerging economy, how does one get there? I highlighted the six roles of management in the network era in my last post and I would like to build on these and show how this is being practiced at Change Agents Worldwide.

help network make better decisionsFirst of all, the founders set a good example of transparency and working out loud. Subsequent members have joined and continue to narrate their work. Also, the network does not have a marketing department, as everyone is responsible for connecting with our markets. Everyone must set an example because there is no one to defer work to. In this environment everyone is learning and everyone is teaching by example. As a result, work gets done very quickly, such as our first ebook, that would have taken months to complete by a central marketing department.

We are all knowledge managers at CAWW, sharing as we work transparently. Some, like myself, share blog posts at appropriate moments. Others share tools, techniques, and experiences. The organizational knowledge base, much of it captured in a large wiki, constantly grows. There is no central management for our knowledge.

It is important to know why we are creating this not-for-profit “collaborative sharing economy model for consulting services”. We constantly discuss the Why of our work, and ensure we stay focused and do not chase every new opportunity. Our Why is to change how work gets done in large organizations. As a result, we have a very diverse group of change agents, from various disciplines, countries, and industries.

It is interesting to see how our discussions focus on improving insights and we are not overly focused on merely improving internal processes and procedures. We leave that to people doing the work, as change agents are independent and can choose their own tools and techniques, like true knowledge artisans.

With hundreds of years of experience, an open discussion environment, and people who have worked as internal and external consultants, there is no shortage of learning opportunities. Change agents can freely join project teams and try something new. CAWW is one big learning experience for everyone, and the speed of learning is amazing.

These ‘management’ roles apply to all members, for in a network, everyone is a manager, and everyone can play a leadership role. The principles of openness, transparency, and diversity provide a solid foundation for these roles to be practiced. I think this model will help to create a new way of approaching workplace change. Large, hierarchical consultancies are no longer sufficient to help organizations adapt to the network era. As Donald Clark says, “Dinosaurs don’t give birth to gazelles.”

Helping the network make better decisions is the primary job of every change agent. It should be the job of every person in every organization. Perhaps some day it will be.

Management in Networks

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In networks, cooperation is more important than collaboration. Collaboration is working together toward a common objective. This is what most workplaces are focused on. It is also what most managers focus on. Implicit in many workplaces is that if you are not focused on the objective at hand, you are not doing any real work. This emphasis on collaboration blinds managers. They cannot see the potential of social networks for enabling sense-making and knowledge-sharing. Many managers do not understand the value of cooperation, or sharing freely without direct reciprocity. Cooperation sounds too much like wasting time on Facebook or Twitter. Most management practices today still focus on 20th century models, such as Henri Fayol’s six functions of management [look familiar?].

  1. forecasting
  2. planning
  3. organizing
  4. commanding
  5. coordinating
  6. controlling

I heard these same functions discussed by a workplace issues consultant on the radio as recently as yesterday morning. Notice that there is no function for enhancing serendipity, or increasing innovation, or inspiring people. The core of management practice today has not changed since the days of Fayol, who died ninety years ago.

But the new reality is that networks are the new companies. The company no longer offers the stability it once did as innovative disruption comes from all corners. Economic value is getting redistributed to creative workers and then diffused through networks. Knowledge networks differ from company hierarchies. One major difference is that cooperation, not collaboration, is the optimal behaviour in a knowledge network. In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration.

So what are the functions of management in the network era?

managing network era

Improve insights – Too often, management only focuses on reducing errors, but it is insight that drives innovation. Managers must loosen the filters through which information and knowledge pass in the organization and increase the organizational willpower to act on these insights.

Provide Learning Experiences – As Charles Jennings notes, managers are vital for workers’ performance improvement, but only if they provide opportunities for experiential learning with constructive feedback, new projects, and new skills.

Focus on the “Why” of Work – Current compensation systems ignore the data on human motivation. Extrinsic rewards only work for simple physical tasks and increased monetary rewards can actually be detrimental to performance, especially with knowledge work. The keys to motivation at work are for each person to have a sense of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. This is a network management responsibility.

Help the Network Make Better Decisions – Managers should see themselves as servant leaders. Managers must actively listen, continuously question the changing work context, help to see patterns and make sense of them, and then suggest new practices and build consensus with networked workers.

Be Knowledge Managers – Managers need to practice and encourage personal knowledge management throughout the network.

Be an Example – Social networks shine a spotlight on dysfunctional managers. Cooperative behaviours require an example and that example must come from those in management positions. While there may be a role for good managers in networks, there likely will not be much of a future for bosses.

Riding the Current by Finding the Right Crew

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In Riding the Current: How to deal with the daily deluge of data, Madelyn Blair provides an excellent manual for knowledge workers, managers, and executives. The advice and insight in this book is the closest that I have seen that aligns with my PKM Seek > Sense > Share framework. There is a lot in the book, which is filled with anecdotes, concepts, frameworks, and exercises. It covers both knowledge seeking from a formal and an informal perspective, and I would recommend it for any organization.

Madelyn, who sent me the book after we had a few of conversations over the past couple of months, uses a journey metaphor of Setting Out; Selecting the Vessel; Finding the Right Crew; Stocking Supplies; Equipping for the Dive; Deciding to Dive Deep; and Taking Charge. In Finding the Right Crew, there are three key roles:

Accompanier: Facilitates accomplishment of the task by providing information and/or contacts.

Practice Partner: Creates a learning environment of conversation, listening, and questioning, all with an appreciative attitude.

Fellow Seeker: Is a seeker just like the primary seeker, willing to engage in conversation and think critically and appreciatively.

Finding people to fill these roles can greatly assist our own sense-making. We should find Accompaniers who are more knowledgeable or experienced than we are in our journey. They are like mavens. A practice partner can connect us to the work to be done and help keep us focused. They understand our work or life context. Fellow seekers are the most open to our sharing and are often not judgemental as they are trying to make sense themselves.

PKM Finding the Right CrewHere is what Madelyn has found that others have said about finding the right crew:

  • Seek out those who are expert in your areas of need or simply practice in them
  • Seek out and join new communities of practice
  • Create a community of practice
  • Attend conferences and listen carefully
  • Keep looking for ideas, not just perfecting skills
  • Call in peers to assist you in the next challenge
  • Make it a habit to regularly ask the question, “What am I assuming about this?”
  • Find a ‘thinking partner’ and learn together how to be each other’s thinking partner – Nancy Kline: Time to Think

I would highly recommend this book if you are in any way interested in personal knowledge management.

PKM Roles

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I like to frame personal knowledge management as a combination of seeking knowledge, making sense of it, and sharing it with others. This simple model has worked well in explaining the main concepts of PKM and helping others to individually construct a set of processes to make sense of the world and work more effectively. Two key factors are sense-making and sharing, which I have shown on the image below.

PKM quadrantsWhile the upper right quadrant is where we might think we should put our efforts, it stands to reason that not all of us can work there for all the facets of our lives. Sometimes we are merely seeking something very quickly, at other times we may share without much thought, and there are times we want to keep our sense-making private, as we mull over new ideas. We are also limited to the amount of time we have to put a lot of thought into everything we do. Sometimes it is best to leave that to others.

Over 10 years ago Patrick Lambe wrote a very good guide on the various roles one can have in PKM.

Most people treat PKM as if it’s a full suite of skills that everybody now needs to have: skills like identifying sources of knowledge, searching, navigating, analyzing, organizing, linking, mapping, converting back and forth between tacit (head) knowledge and explicit (written down) knowledge, relationship building skills, communication, presentation, knowledge packaging, and so on. But in fact, like most things, different people have different personality types, and different personality profiles in relation to their personal knowledge affinities and capabilities. – PKM: A DIY Guide to Knowledge Management

Lambe identified six roles: Consumers, Communicators, Collectors, Connectors, Critics, and Creators. I have taken these and placed them on the same sharing & sense-making quadrant I used above. If you read the DIY guide, there are a series of questions to help identify your own tendencies in PKM. This is a good guide for work groups to find out how knowledge is co-created and shared. An effective team would have people engaged in all roles and provide some load-sharing for creation and criticism, both of which take significant effort. You could look at PKM by area of specialization as well, having a few people responsible as Creators, while others are nominated Critics. Those not as knowledgeable in a field can still play a role as a Connector, Collector, or Communicator.

PKM 6CAnother way to look at these roles is as an individual. When researching a field of practice, you could identify not just the Creators but also the good Critics. Critics can provide balance, something that TED Talks could learn from. The role of critic can even be formalized in an organization, as the US Army has done at its “Red Team University”.

The school is the hub of an effort to train professional military “devil’s advocates” — field operatives who bring critical thinking to the battlefield and help commanding officers avoid the perils of overconfidence, strategic brittleness, and groupthink. The goal is to respectfully help leaders in complex situations unearth untested assumptions, consider alternative interpretations and “think like the other” without sapping unit cohesion or morale, and while retaining their values.

More than 300 of these professional skeptics have since graduated from the program, and have fanned out through the Army’s ranks. Their effects have been transformational — not only shaping a broad array of decisions and tactics, but also spreading a form of cultural change appropriate for both the institution and the complex times in which it now both fights and keeps the peace.
– Andrew Zolli: HBR 26 Sept 2012

Connectors are also quite helpful. You may want to differentiate them from the mere Communicators, who do not add much value to what they share. However, finding Collectors can also be useful, as they may have information few others do. Of course, they’re harder to find because they don’t share.

PKM creator criticThe roles of Creator and Critic are the most important in sense-making, but there is valuable work for others in disseminating information. So what roles do you engage in? Do you know how to find knowledgeable people in a field? If you are working with others, what role can you play in your group or network? Is everyone conscious of the sense-making and knowledge-sharing activities and practices in the network? If not, how can you identify any gaps in the knowledge flows? Perhaps these frameworks can help.

A few points of view

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Friday’s Finds:

friday2“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.” – Marshall McLuhan – via @gcouros

“Information is shared within the murder so that group decisions can be made” Crow Brains Reveal Secrets of Their Intelligence

“political equality that is required by democracy is always under threat from economic inequality” Cardiff de Alejo Garcia – via @toughloveforx

If democracy becomes plutocracy, those who are not rich are effectively disenfranchised. Justice Louis Brandeis famously argued that the United States could have either democracy or wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but not both. The political equality that is required by democracy is always under threat from economic inequality, and the more extreme the economic inequality, the greater the threat to democracy. – Angus Deaton

@euan – Why blogging still matters in business – and always will.

It’s not about marketing, or SEO, or “going viral”. It is not about internal “enterprise social” or external “social media” It is not even about the platforms or tools on which you choose to write. It is much simpler and much more powerful. It is about developing our awareness, our communication skills, and our collective intelligence. It is about thinking harder and writing better. Blogging is a means by which to rediscover your voice, to learn to share your thoughts with others, and by doing so to help us all get smarter faster.

PEW: Social era challenges: trust, focus, coordination, loyalty, managing complexity; institutional memory.

The new social operating system is affecting the world of work as well. It’s not about being in one small bounded group in a hierarchy. Many people are now doing simultaneous work on multiple projects,  in multiple, distributed teams and with multiple “bosses” and heavily reliant on technology for communication and coordination. Rainie characterized this as moving from a traditional ‘fishbowl’ of shopfloor or cubicle cities to a networked switchboard model – where the individual is the orchestrator of things.

The Leadership Paradox – Leadership is … an activity or behavior that can arise anywhere in a human system.

The overall conclusion of this research was that the leaders of successful organisations did play a key role in radical transformations of those organisations, but not by specifying it or directing it but by creating the conditions which allowed for the emergence of such change.

Understanding complexity

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As I have suggested, it was the most-regulated in the financial system that were in fact the most disaster-prone: big banks on both sides of the Atlantic, not hedge funds. It is more than a little convenient for America’s political class to have the crisis blamed on deregulation and the resulting excesses of bankers. Not only does that neatly pass the buck it also creates a justification for more regulation. But the old Latin question is apposite here: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who regulates the regulators? – Niall Ferguson: The Great Degeneration

Thinking of complex adaptive systems as merely complicated entities that can be regulated like machines can lead to disaster, as Niall Ferguson shows in his recent book. He cites the USA’s Dodd-Frank Act which is aimed at promoting stability in the financial sector but “requires that regulators create 243 rules, conduct 67 studies and issue 22 periodic reports“. Simple principles, such as transparency, would work much better in the complex, and emotion-driven, world of finance. After all, money is a common human fiction that requires us to believe in it. Human systems are complex.

As organizations get larger, their original simplicity gets harder to maintain. Organizations reach their maximum cohesiveness above 150 people, based on anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s research. Beyond this size, knowing everybody in person becomes impossible. Intermediate layers of power and delegation begin to develop with more than 150 people and companies then enter the realm of complication.

Most of today’s larger organizations have a complicated structure. To enable growth and efficiencies, more processes are put in place, just like the financial regulators have done. This is what management schools have been teaching for over half a century. New layers of control and supervision appear, silos are created, and knowledge acquisition is formalized in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization. To compensate for all of these rules, organizations put significant effort into compliance training. But this too is a myth, as some of the best trained people have been involved in disasters like the BP oil spill and the Enron collapse.

Today’s large, complicated organizations are now facing complex business environments that require agility in simultaneously learning and working. Typical strategies of optimizing existing business processes or cost reductions only marginally improve the organization’s effectiveness. Faster evolving markets challenge the organization’s ability to react to customer demand. Decision-making becomes paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of command and control; thereby decreasing agility. Training, as “the” solution to workplace learning needs, fails to deliver and then gets marginalized, often being the first department to have its budget cut.

Organizations, public and private, need to understand complexity, instead of simply increasing complication through rules, regulations, and control processes. This lack of understanding is the major barrier to success in the network era. As the image below by Yaneer Bar-Yam shows, a networked civilization requires 1) more laterally connected organizations, 2) fewer hierarchies, and 3) more diversity.

historical progressionA schematic history of human civilization reflects a growing complexity of the collective behavior of human organizations. The internal structure of organizations changed from the large branching ratio hierarchies of ancient civilizations, through decreasing branching ratios of massive hierarchical bureaucracies, to hybrid systems where lateral connections appear to be more important than the hierarchy. As the importance of lateral interactions increases, the boundaries between subsystems become porous. The increasing collective complexity also is manifest in the increasing specialization and diversity of professions. Among the possible future organizational structures are fully networked systems where hierarchical structures are unimportant. – Y. Bar-Yam, Complexity rising: From human beings to human civilization, a complexity profile, EOLSS UNESCO 2002

Dave Pollard has a very clear post on how to address complexity from an organizational perspective. He also elaborates on 16 attributes of effective ways to address complex problems. It’s a list worth keeping handy.

As we come to understand complex predicaments better, we’re learning that the best approaches to them are very different from what works best for simple or complicated problems. Because all the variables cannot be known, and because cause-and-effect relationships cannot be established in complex situations, analytical approaches (like systems flowcharts) used in complicated problem-solving simply won’t work.

The best approaches in complex situations are, well, complex. They entail the use of many different techniques, some of which we are not very good at, and some of which are quite sophisticated, novel, or nuanced. – Dave Pollard, Complexity: It’s not that simple

Once we understand that we are dealing with complexity, and that many of our analytical approaches and control processes are not optimal, then we will be able to build structures for the network era. Over-engineering for complex social work environments is counterproductive. Here is an example from our past, that could work in our future.

In the Six Nations culture, power was distributed but the roles were clear. There were specific roles for each of the member tribes, namely Wolves (Pathfinders); Turtles (Problem Formulators); Bears (Problem Solvers). According to the book Systems Thinking: Managing Complexity and Chaos, solving problems and making governance decisions went like this:

  1. Wolves – Set direction, and identified relevant issues
  2. Turtles – Defined the problems
  3. Bears – Generated alternatives and recommended solutions
  4. Turtles – Checked on the potency of the recommended solutions
  5. Wolves – Integrated the solutions, kept the records, communicated the decisions

What is interesting is that there were clear checks and balances to the dominant wolves, as only the turtles could define the problem, and it was up to the bears to recommend solutions. The wolves could only take action on those problems, with a finite set of solutions. It was simple, but it ensured 1) increased lateral connections, 2) limited hierarchies, and 3) increased diversity of ideas.