Complexity

Complexity

hold space for complex problems

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Professor Lynda Gratton at the London Business School outlines five forces in The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here, that will shape the future patterns of work.

“Technology (think 5 billion people, digitized knowledge, ubiquitous cloud).
Globalisation (think continued bubbles and crashes, a regional underclass, the world becoming urban, frugal innovation).
Longevity and demography (think Gen Y, increasing longevity, aging boomers growing old poor, global migration).
Society (think growing distrust of institutions, the decline of happiness, rearranged families)
Energy resources (think rising energy prices, environmental catastrophes displacing people, a culture of sustainability emerging).”

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democracy at work

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“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” – Winston Churchill

Our society has tried many ways to organize work over the years, yet real democracy is a form that few have attempted. The need to control people runs deep in our work cultures. Managers have ‘direct reports’ and humans are regarded as ‘resources’. The need for command and control stems from inadequate means to effectively communicate. But in the past decade we finally have the circumstances where almost anyone can communicate with almost everyone. Hyperlinks have truly subverted hierarchy, even though institutional and market hierarchies are doing their utmost to prevent or control this. Oligopolies control most of our communications media, even democratic states run surveillance operations on their citizens, and many workplaces monitor all mediated communications. These are reactionary attempts to stop what has the potential to be the inevitable spread of democracy.

Why do we need democracy? It is the only way humans will be able to organize in order to deal with the complex problems facing us. Our intangible marketplaces, like the app economy, will continue to be highly volatile. Climate change and environmental degradation cannot be addressed by any existing institution. New approaches to solving wicked problems are required if humanity is to thrive or even survive into the next century.

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adapting to perpetual beta

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  • There is no such thing as a social business strategy.
  • There are only business strategies that understand networks.
  • Cooperative and distributed work is becoming the norm in the network era.
  • Social learning is how work gets done in networks.
  • Sharing power, enabling conversations, and ensuring transparency are some of the values of networked business.
  • Trust emerges when these principles are put in practice.
  • Learning is part of work, not separate from it.

What follows is a summary of what I believe are some of the most important issues facing organizational design today.

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Networked Knowing

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I spoke at the UNL Extension conference in Nebraska last week. The theme was on the changing nature of work as we enter the network era and how learning is becoming integral to individual and organizational success. I noted how the period of 1900 to 1920 saw a significant shift in the American economy, with manufacturing replacing farming as the dominant economic activity. The resulting demographic shift was millions of men leaving farms and moving to factories.  The Cooperative Extension program was created in 1914 while this shift was taking place. One hundred years later and we are witnessing a similar shift, from the industrial economy to the network era and a creative economy. For a deeper look at this phenomenon, see Nine Shift.

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Visualization for Understanding

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The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17
The Blue Marble

When NASA released the photograph of the earth as seen from space, known as the blue marble, it gave new impetus to the environmental movement, showing our planet as a small dot in a black void. Seeing is believing. Visualization can be a very powerful tool in sharing complex knowledge. The visualization of social network analysis (SNA) can give us significant new perspectives, not available from looking at a series of data points. For instance, Valdis Krebs examined data on the trust levels of various news sources around the world and how these were perceived by ideological groups.

The data table originally provided by PEW Research Center tell part of the story, but the SNA conducted by Valdis clearly shows how conservative media are completely separate from all other media. A similar study of pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian news outlets showed that only one was trusted by both sides, but Haaretz.com is getting squeezed by taking a moderate position. Seeing this polarization may help to understand it.

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Learning quicker by failing safely

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I attended the Community Forests International planning session yesterday. This organization, located in our small town of Sackville, is working on two continents and recently received €1.2 million from the European Union for its work on the island of Pemba in Tanzania. The day included participation from many community groups, such as Renaissance Sackville, which I represented. It finished with a wine & cheese at Cranewood (a must-see for any visitor to town) which drew even more people from the community. I’d like to highlight what Jeff Schnurr, the founder had to say, as it reflects the advice I give to many organizations (my paraphrasing here).

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Cooking out loud

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The simple structure of the company, with its solidly embedded organizational chart restricting knowledge flow, cannot deal with the complexity of the networked economy. It takes too long to make decisions or try new things out. Looser hierarchies and stronger networks are required, but how do you go about this?

Working and learning out loud are essential practices that can change the nature of work. They help make transparent what is happening in the organization and democratize knowledge creation. First of all, everyone must be engaged in observing their environment. Then groups of people can work on problems together and learn as they work. The results of working and learning out loud can then be codified as network knowledge, which is always open for modification, as knowledge flow becomes knowledge stock. PKM – Seek > Sense > Share – is a core part of enabling knowledge to flow, unrestricted by hierarchies.

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Create space for sense-making

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Listening to a story about exploitation in the ivory tower on CBC Sunday Edition this morning made me realize how much we are prisoners of our current reality. The poorly paid contract teaching staff saw no way out of their plight and the professor-turned-administrator went from questioning the current system to promoting its inequalities as the only viable way to keep universities afloat. It seems that as soon as you identify with a system, whether it is good for you or not, then it becomes the only frame of reference. There was no discussion on what systemic changes could humanize the life of sessional instructors. Everyone sounded so powerless.

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Small thoughts, loosely joined

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With a hyper-connected society, enabled by over 2 billion connected people and an expected 50 billion devices in the near future, the environment any organization is facing is much more complex than it was a couple of decades ago. But this was when most executives were learning how to do their jobs. Many are ill-equipped for the cognitive overload they face, as traditional jobs –  from typing, to customer service, to legal research –  are constantly automated by software. Software enabled teams like AirBNB, Netflix, and Uber, are able to directly compete with industry incumbents, and can do so with significantly fewer employees.

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Error reduction interferes with gaining insights

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Is your organization  focused on merely reducing errors or is it also promoting ways to improve insight?

Fifty-eight of the top Fortune 200 companies bought into Six Sigma, attesting to the appeal of eliminating errors. The results of this “experiment” were striking: 91 per cent of the Six Sigma companies failed to keep up with the S&P 500 because Six Sigma got in the way of innovation. It interfered with insights. – Gary Klein

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