Complexity

Complexity

Managing in Complexity

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As our markets and technologies get more complex, we need new models to get work done. For instance, we know that creative work can yield more innovation, yet our workplaces usually stifle creativity. Many of our practices are still premised on work being simple or complicated. Simple systems are easily knowable, whereas complicated systems, while not simple, are still knowable through analysis. These can be easily managed. However, complex systems are not fully knowable, though they can be partially understood through interaction with them. This is antithetical to many workplace control protocols.

Every day, jobs and work are getting automated and outsourced. If companies want to remain competitive in the global market, they need to focus on complex and creative work. Much of complex work is in exception-handling and when exceptions are the rule, rigid rules must become the exception.

We have to understand complex adaptive systems and develop work structures that let us focus our efforts on learning as we work in order to continuously develop next practices. In a knowledge-intensive and creative workplace the role of leadership becomes supportive and inspirational rather than directive. Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag projects, and companies, down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

A new mindset toward work is required. Frameworks like hyper-connected pattern-seeking or networked unmanagement can promote new perspectives on what valued work really should be. This can be fostered in a culture of perpetual Beta. Perpetual Beta means we accept never getting to the final release of our work, and that our learning will never stop. Organizations need to realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new.

In additional to a new mindset, workers need autonomy. But many are not ready for it. We are trained early in life to look to authority for direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer or an expert with the right answer begins in our schools. Too often, the message from the workplace continues to be that good employees wait for their managers to tell them what to do. This is counter-productive in dealing with complexity and working in perpetual Beta. It also destroys creativity. When we move away from a linear “design it first, then build it” mindset, we can then engage everyone in critical and systems thinking. Workers must be passionate, adaptive, innovative, and collaborative. Autonomy is the just beginning.

Fostering autonomy starts by looking at work differently. For example, dropping the notion of being paid for time is one way to start this change. An hourly wage implies that people are interchangeable. But no two minds are the same. Being paid for time fosters neither autonomy nor agility. There are many other human resource practices should be questioned and dropped, such as job competencies, or one-size-fits all training programs.

The new networked workplace requires both collaboration and cooperation. Complex problems cannot be solved alone. Tacit knowledge flows in networks through social learning. Learner autonomy is a foundation for effective social learning. It is the lubricant for a more agile organization. Agility becomes a necessity as we deal with increasing complexity. In order to develop the necessary emergent practices to handle complexity we therefore need to cultivate the diversity and autonomy of each worker. We also must foster richer and deeper connections which can be built through meaningful conversations. This is social learning in the workplace.

Change and complexity are becoming the norm in our work. We already see this with increasing numbers of freelancers and contractors. Any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value. Embracing complexity, and even chaos, is where the future of work lies.

As traditional core activities get automated or outsourced, almost all high value work will be done at the outer edge of organizations. At the fuzzy edge of the organization life is complex and even chaotic. On this periphery, where things are less homogenous, there is more diversity and more opportunities for innovation. Individuals, project teams and organizations have to move operations to the edge to continue learning and developing. In this century a greater percentage of workers will be moving to the edge. The core will be managed by very few internal staff. What does this mean for management? No matter what model one prefers, it will have to be more open, networked and cooperative. Are you ready to move to the edge?

edges_gapingvoid

Less is more

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If you were to sum up the psychology of learning in three words, it would be ‘less is more’. – Donald Clark

In FrogDesign’s presentation on Design is Hacking How we Learn, slide #27 clearly shows where the emphasis of our learning efforts should be, and where organizations should place the most support and resources: practice.

how we learn

For theory (e.g. classroom), less is more; just as the 70:20:10 framework encourages managers to place less emphasis on formal instruction and more on supporting experiential (on the job) learning. In supporting workplace learning we should take Dan Pink’s advice and find “the one percent that gives life to the other ninety-nine“.

The future for Learning & Development, if it has one at all, is to find the 1%, by thinking like designers do. Remove everything that is extraneous and find the essence of a topic, subject, or field. Society and business are changing. Old businesses are collapsing and new ones are being created, some collapsing even quicker than the old ones did. Why would the training and education world be immune from these changes?

If there’s one lesson L&D needs to take from the failure of HMV [music retailer] and the others it is to fully grasp the speed and nature of the changes that are sweeping through most organisations – increased expectations of speed, relevance, and solutions that are just-in-time and not a minute late. Not only that, but also the increased expectation that L&D departments will deliver high value solutions to organisational challenges and help drive performance and productivity. – Charles Jennings

To deal with complexity, the solution is not to add more complication but to reduce your perspective to the simplest one possible. Like mathematicians dealing with complex math, they look for the elegant solution, as it is usually the most useful and most accurate.

The proof of a mathematical theorem exhibits mathematical elegance if it is surprisingly simple yet effective and constructive; similarly, a computer program or algorithm is elegant if it uses a small amount of code to great effect. – Wikipedia

Greater task variety means no more standardized work

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The resurrection of American manufacturing will require more than simply bringing back production to America. Global manufacturing is at the cusp of a massive transformation as the new economics of energy and labor plays out and a set of new technologies—robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and nanotechnology—are advancing rapidly. Together these developments will spark a radical transformation of manufacturing around the world over the next decade. The winners in the rapidly changing world of manufacturing will be those firms that have mastered the agility needed to generate rapid and continuous customer-based innovation. – Steve Denning

I have often said that anything that is simple enough to be automated will be, and that any work that is merely complicated will be outsourced to the lowest cost of labour. But a funny thing is happening with manufacturing in the 21st century. It is becoming complex. Manufacturing today requires interdependent workers with initiative, creativity and passion. The new manufacturing workplace has higher task variety, which is based on a greater percentage of tacit knowledge and requires more informal and social learning. This is not Ford’s assembly line, nor is it based on F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management.
standardized work
The new manufacturing, like new businesses everywhere, will have fewer people. Computers and software are replacing people, especially information processing jobs. This is the new reality. There will be more work variety (for what used to be called jobs) because there will be more task variety. That means there will be fewer plug-and-play jobs. We will have to create our roles in the 21st century workplace. They will not be created for us. This is liberating but scary for generations who have tried to fit in to the existing job structure. Younger people seem to get it. Generations caught in the middle may find it difficult.

Community and organizational leaders will need to figure out how to adapt to the transition period, which will continue to see high employment while conversely witnessing instant millionaires who create the next mobile app. Times are changing, and we will need new methods to manage and organize work. Even those who understand this cannot see how much things will change. We are like the early generations that witnessed the power of the printing press, without understanding that it would lead to years of religious wars.

As Steve Denning concludes in his Forbes article:

Success in this new world of manufacturing will require a radically different kind of management from the hierarchical bureaucracy focused on shareholder value that is now prevalent in large firms. It will require a different goal (delighting the customer), a different role for managers (enabling self-organizing teams), a different way of coordinating work (dynamic linking), different values (continuous improvement and radical transparency) and different communications (horizontal conversations). Merely shifting the locus of production is not enough. Companies need systemic change—a new management paradigm.

It will require even more.

the next middle class

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Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget, wrote:

“The people who are perhaps the most screwed by open culture are the middle classes of intellectual and cultural creation.  The freelance studio musician, the stringer selling reports to newspapers from warzones are both crucial contributors to culture. Each pays dues and devotes years to honing a craft. They used to live off the trickle down effects of the old system, and like the middle class at large, they are precious. They get nothing from the new system.”

In Heads You Win … (2010) I asked; if you are not one of the recognized leaders in your field, can you make a living online or are you just part of the long tail, valuable only to aggregators and their advertising revenues? As a content creator are you providing the fodder that lets Google, Facebook and YouTube earn huge market valuations? Will there be a middle class in the network creative economy, or only heads & tails?

I think it will be possible to make a living in this digital economy and have what used to be a middle class life style but it will not be like the old middle class. First of all, it will be jobless, as described by Rob Paterson, in You don’t need a Job. It will also have to be creative, in that you will have to create your own way of making a living. There will be few jobs to fill, instead there will be opportunities you will have to see. Finally, we will realize that the only way to survive will be by working together in communities of practice and interest, and understanding networks. “We” can take on the faceless “them”, if we work together and share.

We are seeing experiments in new forms of work all over the place. These range from co-working spaces, to shareable communities, to our non-traditional consultancy, Internet Time Alliance, which is still a work in progress. The trickle-down effects, that Lanier mentions, no longer share enough wealth for a viable middle class. We need to create our own network effects, but (this is important) it has to be within our own networks, not inside someone else’s walled garden. Google Ads or Facebook likes will not help you take control of your work destiny. We have to do it together, using new frameworks and models for the network era. The BIG kicker, is that there is no template or rule book. We have to embrace life in perpetual Beta and get started. The good news is that there are many others like us. Let’s write the new rules together.

network-era-economy

Coherence in complexity

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Many of our older business models are not working any more. Anecdote reports that John Kotter, leadership guru, is accepting that methods like his 8-step process for leading change may not be effective in the face of complexity.

“The majority of the [HBR Paywall] article is focussed on a ‘new’ concept Kotter calls ‘Strategic Accelerators’. In effect, he is talking about using Communities of Practice/collaborative networks to tap into the power and agility of the informal capabilities of an organisation. The network of strategic accelerators complements the formal systems; it does not replace them. Collaborative networks are not a new concept, but Kotter’s application of them to the arena of strategy is very insightful.”

I have been discussing the potential of communities of practice in fostering innovation for some time here. In my last post I wrote that in an increasingly complex workplace, many of the old models are no longer useful, referring more specifically to workplace learning. The same is happening to our models for management and ‘change management’, as if we could manage change in the first place. Complexity, driven by global networked communications, is the main factor.

High value work today is in addressing complexity, whether it be in the market, society, or the environment. This requires learning, sharing, innovating and engaging. Organizations that promote awareness, transparency and openness through appropriate ways to coordinate, collaborate and cooperate have a better chance of understanding complexity. Joachim Stroh describes this in his fractal image below.
fractal

The coherent organization is our way of creating a framework to look at organizational performance. It is based on the fact that governance, work, and learning models are moving from centralized control to network-centric foundations. For instance, coalition governments are increasing in frequency, businesses are organizing in value networks, and collaborative & connected learning is becoming widespread. A coherent organization framework ensures that collaboration (working for a common objective) and cooperation (sharing freely) flow both ways. Systems, such as enterprise social network tools, can assist ‘net work’ practices like the narration of work and personal knowledge mastery.
communities of practice

So while change cannot be managed, per se, organizations can be structured in ways to be more resilient to change. Kotter suggests a second operating system:

“The existing structures and processes that together form an organization’s operating system need an additional element to address the challenges produced by mounting complexity and rapid change. The solution is a second operating system, devoted to the design and implementation of strategy, that uses an agile, networklike structure and a very different set of processes. The new operating system continually assesses the business, the industry, and the organization, and reacts with greater agility, speed, and creativity than the existing one. It complements rather than overburdens the traditional hierarchy, thus freeing the latter to do what it’s optimized to do. It actually makes enterprises easier to run and accelerates strategic change. This is not an “either or” idea. It’s “both and.” I’m proposing two systems that operate in concert.”

I would strongly suggest instead that organizations need to get the first operating system correct so that they do not need a second one. A coherent organization is structured to take advantage of the complexity and noisiness of social networks, allowing information to flow as freely as possible, and affording workers the space to make sense of it and share their experiences and knowledge. The underlying concept of a coherent organization is that organizations and their people are members of many different types of networks, for example, communities of practice, the company social network, and close-knit collaborative work teams. A coherent organization requires a single unifying framework, not two operating systems.

The training world is changing

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From the Citrix GoTo Blog:

Open online courses, talent management, social collaboration: The training world is changing. Traditional training structures, based on institutions, programs, courses and classes, are under pressure. One of the biggest changes we are seeing in online training is that the content-delivery model is being replaced by social and collaborative frameworks.

Here are just some of things happening now that trainers should be prepared to tackle in the new year:

Increasing Complexity

Helping people be more creative and solve complex problems is now a priority. While workers still need to be trained and educated, that alone will not prepare them for a networked workplace that requires continuous learning on the job. Training departments need to add more thought and resources to enable people to learn socially, share cooperatively and work collaboratively …

An Expanded Role for Training and Development

Training professionals will need to help create and support social learning networks, moving out of the classroom to where the work is being done. They will also need to promote continuous knowledge sharing by modeling how it is done and setting the example. Trainers will have to become expert learners …

Learning as a Business Imperative

As work becomes more networked and complex, the social aspects of knowledge sharing and collaboration are becoming more important. Learning amongst ourselves is getting to be the real work in many organizations. Training development professionals should be part of that change.

For a more in-depth list of near-term trends that should be taken into consideration during the next year, download [read] the white paper: https://www.slideshare.net/GoToTraining/whats-working-and-whats-not-in-online-training

"I am what I create, share and others build on”

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The Entrepreneurial Learner:

Takeaways. (1) in a world of constantly changing contexts, best practices don’t travel very well. (2) As contexts change, we need to move past stories (which explain a specific event) to narratives (which create a framework for moving us to action, perhaps in a new direction). (3) there are important shifts occurring: knowing what has moved to knowing what and where; making things moves to making things and contexts (e.g., remix); (4) in sense-making, we move from playing to reframing; in media, we move from storytelling to transmedia (e.g., how a story jumps from one medium to another — this has huge implications for corporate branding). (5) Identity Shift is the biggest shift of all. We’re moving from a sense of “I am what I wear/own/control” to “I am what I create, share and others build on.” How do I put something into play so others build on it? When you figure this out, you understand agency and impact. —John Seely Brown

fractal
A “built-upon” image by Joachim Stroh

We are moving to the edge, not just in our work but for a greater part of our interconnected lives.

On Trojan Mice

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In Organizations don’t tweet, people do, Euan Semple talks about Trojan mice, an idea he got from Peter Fryer at trojanmice.com. These are small change initiatives, that do not require the coordinated effort of something like a Trojan horse:

Trojan mice, on the other hand, are small, well focused changes, which are introduced on an ongoing basis in an inconspicuous way. They are small enough to be understood and owned by all concerned but their effects can be far-reaching. Collectively a few Trojan mice will change more than one Trojan horse ever could.

There is an art to spotting a Trojan mouse — you need to develop a critically trained eye. Seeing things differently, and seeing different things, is a powerful experience. And once you do, you can set your Trojan mice free to create the results your business needs.

The idea is simple to grasp and perhaps easier than the Probe-Sense-Respond of the Cynefin framework regarding complexity.

Sometimes a better metaphor makes an idea easier to pass on. Here’s my image of how to use Trojan mice. Deploy several at a time, then observe what happens. Cajole and nudge them (as Euan advises) and then add or remove as needed. Many attempts will fail so there’s little use in reinforcing these. Then take another look at the entire field (company or ecosystem), and see where else you might deploy more mice. Repeat.


Send forth your mice!

Update —

Trojan Mice in 900 Seconds

Image: @whatsthepont

Principles of Networked Unmanagement

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Cooperation

Collaboration is working together for a common objective, while cooperation is openly sharing, without any quid pro quo. Cooperation is a necessary behaviour to be open to serendipity and to encourage experimentation. In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration. Collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. Cooperation is a driver of creativity.

As we shift to a networked economy, our organizational frameworks have to change. While collaboration inside the company and with partners may have worked in a market economy, cooperation amongst a greater variety of network actors is now necessary. We are seeing this with customers getting involved in product design and marketing becoming more “social”. Shifting our emphasis from collaboration, which still is required to get some work done, to cooperation, in order to thrive in a networked ecosystem, means reassessing some of our assumptions about work.

Cooperation in our work is needed so that we can continuously develop emergent practices demanded by increased complexity. What worked yesterday won’t work today. No one has the definitive answer any more but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results. Cooperation is a foundational behaviour for effectively working in networks, and it’s in networks where most of us, and our children, will be working.  Cooperation is the future, which is already here, albeit unevenly distributed.

Since cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate, people in the network cannot be told what to do, only influenced. If they don’t like you, they won’t connect. That’s like being on Twitter with no followers and never getting “retweeted”. You will be a lone node and of little value to the network. In a hierarchy you only have to please your boss. In a network you have to be perceived as having some value by many others.

Teamwork

Most of us have seen those fancy teamwork motivational posters on workplace walls, and almost every job description includes teamwork as a critical competency. Teamwork is over-rated, as it can be a smoke screen for office bullies to coerce fellow workers. A big economic stick often hangs over the team; “be a team player or lose your job”.

Teams promote unity of purpose, not openness, transparency and diversity of ideas, essential for building trust in networks. Think of a football team, a common business metaphor in North America. There is only one coach and everybody has a specific job to do while “keeping their eye on the ball”. In today’s workplace, there’s more than one ball and the coach cannot see the entire field. The team, as a work vehicle, is outdated.

As much as organizations advertise for “team players”, what would be better are workers who can collaborate and cooperate by connecting to each other in a balanced manner. There are other ways of organizing work. Orchestras are not teams; neither are jazz ensembles. There may be teamwork on a theatre production but the cast is not a team. It is more like a social network. Teams are what we get when we use the blunt stick of economic consequences as the prime motivator. In a complex world, unity can be counter-productive.

Jobs

The high-value work today is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems that have already been solved and for which a formulaic or standardized response has been developed. Most workers are paid to do only one thing – solve problems. When dealing with work problems we can categorize them as either known or new. Known problems require access to the right information to solve them. This information can be mapped, and frameworks such as knowledge management help us to map it. We can also create tools, especially electronic performance support systems (EPSS) to do work and not have to learn all the background knowledge in order to accomplish the task. This is how simple and complicated knowledge gets automated.

Complex, new problems need tacit (implicit) knowledge to solve them. Furthermore, as more work becomes automated & outsourced, exception-handling becomes more important in the networked workplace. The system handles the routine stuff and people, usually working together, deal with the exceptions. As new exceptions get addressed, some or all of the solution gets automated, and so the process evolves. The 21st century workplace, with its growing complexity due to our interconnectivity, requires that we focus work on new problems and exception-handing. This increases the need for collaboration, working together on a problem; as well as cooperation, sharing without any specific objective.

One challenge for organizations will be getting people to realize that what they actually know, as detailed in a job description, has decreasing value. How to solve problems together is becoming the real business imperative. Sharing and using knowledge in new ways is where business value lies. With computer systems that can handle more and more of our known knowledge, the 21st century worker has to move to the complex and chaotic edge to get the valued and paid work done. There are many people who will need help with this challenge.

Networks

Workplace leaders everywhere need to help the current and upcoming workforce enter the 21st century network economy. Another change to manage will be getting people to work more transparently. Transparency is necessity for effective networks. For instance, a major benefit of using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge. However, if the information is not shared by people, it will not be found. With greater transparency, information can flow horizontally as well as vertically. New patterns and dynamics can then emerge from interconnected people and interlinked information flows, and these will bypass established structures and services. Working transparently and cooperatively is much less controllable than many managers will be comfortable with. But in this network era that we are entering, the increase in complex work, and rise of networks as the primary organizing framework, will create an even greater need for cooperation.

“In the long term, +N [network] dynamics should enable government, business, and civil-society leaders to create new mechanisms for mutual consultation, coordination, and cooperation spanning all levels of governance. Aging contentions that “the government” or “the market” is the solution to particular public-policy issues will eventually give way to new ideas that “the network” is the optimal solution.” — Ronfeldt

We, collectively, are the solution to our problems. We just have not figured out how to get optimally organized. Network theory can provide many of the answers. The first step is seeing that we have a problem and that our current work models are inadequate. Doing the same things better will not help. Looking outward, beyond our organizations, can enable cooperative behaviour. Casting off old management models, like jobs and organization charts, is another step. Shifting to a networked economy is going to take cooperation, and that only happens when we let go of control, just the opposite of Taylor’s principles of scientific management* which have informed us for the past century. Here are my introductory Principles of Networked Unmanagement:

It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions, and willing cooperation that more productive work can be assured. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers, including management.

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* Here are F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911)

It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.

from responsibility to creativity

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I originally wrote new work, new attitude in 2008, but would like to revisit and add to it.

2008

Nine Shift has a few posts on the changing nature of work and how the idea of responsibility usurped morals during the industrial age (See Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3).

“In the Industrial Age of the 20th century, you didn’t have to be of good moral character to work in the factory. But you did have to be responsible.  And so teachers in the 20th century schoolhouse and college taught (still teach) responsibility.   And by that  teachers mean specific behaviors.

Those behaviors are now obsolete. They made sense in the factory …  But not in the virtual office.”

As we moved from morality to responsibility one hundred years ago, are we now shifting from responsibility to creativity? If we are, then most of our organizational tools and measurements about productivity may have to get thrown out.

2012

“The word ‘responsible’ is one of those code-words that hides a whole range of preferred behaviours, from respecting copyright to keeping the language clean to refraining from bullying and hurtful behaviour to staying on topic, sitting up, and paying attention.” —Stephen Downes

From morality to responsibility to creativity

The past 100 years have been the first time that we have had a large middle class in many parts of the world (though this is quickly shrinking in places). The Corporation was an experiment to deal with large scale capitalism, and we had no real models to base it on, other than the military or the church. Therefore we got hierarchies. But perhaps this period was not a blip and really just the first phase of dealing with the new electric communications medium? Now that we are ~150 years post-telegraph, we are finally realizing that things have radically changed. It’s like the early 1600’s in Europe, 150 years after the printing press, and all hell is breaking loose. For a more detailed perspective on communication shifts and literacies, I would recommend “Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. and Ms. Smith Can’t Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in tumultuous times” by Mark Federman.

An IBM poll of CEOs (2010) found they deemed creativity to be “the NUMBER ONE leadership competency of the successful enterprise of the future”. Today, being responsible is not good enough. Ross Dawson says that, “in a connected world, unless your skills are world-class, you are a commodity.” He suggests that there are three skill sets necessary to transcend commoditization — Expertise, Relationships, and Innovation. Creativity is needed to choose the right area of expertise, develop diverse professional networks, and be innovative. In our education systems, creativity is a fringe subject and is not nurtured or lauded.

Barbara Ormsby recently commented that, “Responsibility and creativity are two rather different qualities. This helps understand why the transition from clear responsibilities to practised creativity is such a huge challenge in organizations today.” So how can we improve creativity in organizations? We should learn from the creatives!

Make space for conversations

Creativity is a conversation – a tension – between individuals working on individual problems and the professional communities they belong to. —David Williamson Shaffer

Provide breathing room

Creativity shouldn’t–can’t–be a luxury, though. It can’t be something that we bring to a problem only when we have the space and time for it, because more often than not, we will be in situations where we lack both. We need to find ways to build it into the DNA of our working lives so that it becomes a part of who we are, not something we do only when the circumstances are “right.” This is our only security in a world that shifts constantly, demanding of us new ideas and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. —Michele Martin 

 Abandon ‘jobs’

The core assumption of the job, that it can be ‘filled’ [just like the minds of learners], needs to change. This is the key constraining concept for the creative economy. It presumes common skills and the mechanistic view that workers can be replaced without disruption. But who could replace Van Gogh, Picasso or even Steve Jobs? Complex work requires more creativity, and confining individual creativity within the bounds of a mere job description is debilitating. Structured jobs can suck individual creativity and create an organizational framework that discourages entrepreneurial zeal.

Develop improv skills

Improv comedy can help people deal with uncertainty. They have to make difficult decisions on the spot and think quickly without scripts or plots.

In a business world that’s more uncertain than ever it pays to be able to think on your feet. That’s why some business schools are using improvisation classes to teach skills such as creativity and leadership … As well as teaching people to react and adapt, he [Robert Kulhan] said improvisation can teach creativity, innovation, communication, teamwork and leadership. —CNN Route to the Top