the coherent organization

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Several years ago, the team at Innovisor asked — Why Do Organizations Led by Women Perform Better?

The new study puzzled Innovisor. Why do organizations led by women perform better?

Since we already established that the women on an individual level were not collaborating more than men, we decided to look somewhere else in our data.
Also because Innovisor had previously established that there was a correlation between organizational coherence and performance.

We decided to look into if organizations led by women were more coherent.

And they were! —Innovisor 2018-07-18

I have noticed similar other indicators, such as the observation that we collectively understand that what are considered ‘feminine’ traits are what leaders need today, as shown in this 2013 Inc. magazine study.

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DYOR

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For over two years we have increasingly seen this term in social and mainstream media — Do Your Own Research (DYOR).

“The words imply a fundamental distrust in authority, and thus a shift to complete self-reliance. In the case of crypto, where there may be rewards but there are definitely massive risks, you should want to rely on your own judgment rather than someone else’s, who might be paid for their endorsement or simply be a fool.” —Ross Dawson 2021-05-31

Ross warns us that that not trusting experts could lead to massive trust issues in society and, “How this plays out will be a fundamental factor in shaping our future society”. I agree.

For the most part, the lack of trust has been brought on by the institutions and those within their hierarchies. Let’s just look at this pandemic and the medical guidance put forth by experts. This has been my sensemaking experience and my journey of doing my own research.

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whataboutism

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

B of E: The route back to 2% inflation − speech by Michael Saunders

“The share of the 16-64 population who are outside the workforce and do not want a job because of long-term sickness is a record high, with an especially sharp rise among women. I suspect much of this rise in inactivity due to long-term sickness reflects side effects of the pandemic, for example Long Covid and the rise in NHS waiting lists.”

“There’s a saying: ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’. There’s not one that says: ‘Adequate, properly scheduled time is the mother of invention’. I know. I looked.” —@SimonHeath1

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management must move first

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This morning I gave a presentation at the IOM Summit on digital work. My topic was — Digital Work is all about human connections. The key messages are ones that have been presented here.

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ninety percent of everything is crap

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A friend recently shared an article and the title immediately caught my eye — Personal knowledge management is bullshit [dead link]. Of course I had to read it. The first line immediately stood out, “Personal Knowledge Management (“PKM”) is a trendy new term for techniques and applications designed to manage information.” I was first introduced to PKM in 2004 by Lilia Efimova and later by Denham Gray and Dave Pollard, all of whom had been writing about it for several years at that point. So I am not sure what the definition of “trendy new term” is in this case.

I shifted to the term personal knowledge mastery in 2014 in order to clarify that PKM for me is removed from traditional Knowledge Management (KM) and that it is a discipline to be mastered through practice. My PKM is not connected to any given technology though I have used several over the years.

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passivity makes no sense

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Last year I wrote that this pandemic has become a crisis in network leadership because understanding what domain of complexity we are dealing with is now an essential requirement for decision-makers. At its outbreak the pandemic was chaotic and required immediate action. Developing vaccines went from complex to complicated. Dealing with people and how various groups reacted to the pandemic oscillated between ordered and unordered domains but has been mostly complex. Clear and simple communications can help to avoid confusion, though they have seldom been delivered.

I created a framework for learning in the complex domain, including examples of organizations that are designed to handle complexity and chaos. The image below takes the basic PKM model — with teams in blue, communities in red, and networks in green, along two axes — high & low structure, and low & high abstraction. These are split in half — one for the Complex domain, and the other for the ordered domains (Complicated & Clear). The Chaotic domain has unique conditions and requires a different approach.

There are — at least — two modes for each form required to work and learn.

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an understanding of my confusion

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Not only is there a lot of junk online — Sturgeon’s Law states that 90% of everything is crap — but there are active measures against our democracies to promote propaganda and disinformation. It’s not just the Russian troll factories either, but organizations like those funded by the Koch brothers in the USA.

• Hillsdale [College] is a conservative Christian institution with ties to the Trump administration. And the scholars behind the academy — Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff — are connected to right-wing dark money attacking public health measures.

• in March 2021, the dark money fund DonorsTrust spent nearly $800,000 to spread the narrative that the pandemic’s toll was actually due to government interventions

• In June, Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank at George Mason University heavily funded by the Koch network, began funding a database run by Emily Oster, an economist who has argued that the drawbacks of school closures outweigh the risks of COVID-19 exposure.

• the Foundation for Economic Education, another Koch-funded nonprofit, claimed that “naive government interventions” were responsible for a rise in global malaria cases and a spike in worldwide poverty.

• Such anti-public health intervention narratives have had a lasting impact.

How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On COVID

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alignment

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” —The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge … I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.” —Ivan Illich

Why do we call them [public health] “restrictions”, anyway? Do you look at a life-jacket and think “there’s my drowning restriction”? —@HalifaxEditor

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dare to un-lead

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In Dare to Un-lead: The art of relational leadership in a fragmented world Céline Schillinger shares her personal experiences in several work environments and connects this to a framework of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. For example, Céline discusses her time as the Head of Quality Innovation & Engagement at Sanofi Pasteur and the creation of the Break Dengue global community to fight dengue fever. The book refers to a wide variety of management theorists and organizational development professionals who advocate for more freedom in the workplace.

A movement toward more liberty, equality, and fraternity at work starts, as we have seen, with an individual distancing themselves from a dominant model — one inherited from the past, which has become restrictive and counterproductive — with others eventually electing to do the same. At the beginning, there is personal risk-taking and a sense of both refusal and encouragement, even if this sense only takes the form of a voice in the change-agent’s head telling them “no”, partly in disgust at what is, partly in disbelief at what might be, partly in recognition of the rules and norms that constrain them. In The Rebel, an examination of the development of revolutionary thought, Albert Camus wrote, “I rebel, therefore we exist.” That phrase could sum up the essence of this book.

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the power of story

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Stories are powerful ways of sharing knowledge

In 2006 while the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry was fighting in Afghanistan, Professor Anne Irwin observed how soldiers decompressed and learned through storytelling.

When they are out in the field and return from a patrol, the exhausted soldiers relax together in small, tightly-knit groups – Irwin calls them “nesting circles” – and recount the events of the day or the mission.

Each soldier contributes a story, an anecdote or even a joke, adding stock and spice into what becomes a collective stew of experiences, she said. They also playfully insult each other.

The storytelling not only helps forge the individual identity of each soldier, it builds interpersonal relationships that can have a bearing on how well the unit performs on the battlefield.

“Joking is a big part of it, and teasing,” she said. “It is not abuse. If you have been teased harshly it lets you know that you are part of the group.”

—John Cotter, Canadian Press, July 03, 2006

Even though these soldiers had all been formally trained and had worked and fought together, there was still a need to make sense of their continuing experiences. Informal and social learning can be the glue that helps keep them together during tough times.

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