Complexity

Complexity

Understanding what you do

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I came across this most thought-proving post by Seb Paquet on Google Plus, that looks at how new ideas and especially new business models can be understood. Seb notes that:

  • There is a small group of people who understand why you are doing it;
  • A larger group of people who get how you are doing it;
  • An even larger group of people who get what you are doing; and finally
  • The largest group of people who don’t get it at all.

Phil Jones adds this insight in the comments:

  • Inner circle : comrades (or arch enemies)
  • 2nd circle : potential collaborators (dependent on deals you can make) (or potential competitors)
  • 3rd circle : supporters (or opponents)
  • outer rim: passive obstacles

What could this mean for a startup or new business?

Accept that most people do not understand why you are doing this in the first place and some of those who do will be working at cross purposes to subvert you. Try to turn potential competitors into collaborators. Be active in professional networks with your supporters and be co-operative in spirit, for these people may help to convert your opponents. Finally, ignore the passive obstacles and find ways to route around them.

Seb is already working on version .2 of this, so stay tuned on G+.

Enabling Innovation – Book

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I had the pleasure of writing an article for the book, Enabling Innovation: Innovative Capability – German and International Views as a follow-up to some work I did with the EU’s International Monitoring Organisation. An interesting aspect of this book is that major articles are written by German researchers and then shorter comments or additions are presented from an international perspective. My article was in response to a weighty paper by Sibylle Peters, entitled, New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management – Dynamic and Open.

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Abstract
The increasing structuring of work and organizational processes by forming project involves new challenges to the handling of knowledge work and expands the scope to generate innovations. The classic project management alone is less and less able to manage complex, uncertain, knowledge-based processes. Through alternative approaches social, actor-oriented topics of management will be adressed.

If all you want to read is my short article, then let me save you the $189.00 list price for this book.

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Managing in Complexity

In New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management – Dynamic and Open a key theme discussed is the lack of flexibility of traditional project management methods in dealing with complexity.

With increasing requirements for complex and creative work we need new models to get things done. Many of our practices are still premised on work being simple or complicated. Simple systems are easily knowable, whereas complicated systems, while not 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 of the control protocols of traditional project management.

In the developed world, simple work is constantly getting automated (e.g. automatic bank tellers) while complicated work is outsourced to the cheapest labour market (e.g. off-shore call centres). 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.

While agile methods for project management are discussed in New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management, an overall agile mindset is also required. This can be fostered in a culture of perpetual Beta. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release of our work and that our learning will never stop. Agile organisations 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 mindset of agility, workers need a skillset of autonomy. However, 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 supervisor to tell them what to do. This is counter-productive in dealing with complexity and working in perpetual Beta. It destroys creativity.

When we move away from a “design it first, then build it” mindset, we can then engage everyone in critical and systems thinking. Workers in agile workplaces must be passionate, adaptive, innovative, and collaborative. Autonomy is the beginning.

Fostering autonomy and agility means that we talk about 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.

The new networked workplace requires 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 an agile organisation. Agility becomes a necessity as we deal with increasing complexity. In order to develop the necessary emergent practices to deal with 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.

Even in project management, learning is the work.

One example of encouraging social learning is the government of British Columbia, Canada which developed an interactive intranet in order to foster collaboration and communication.

The success of a social intranet ultimately has less to do with technology than with planning, governing and managing change. Walsh [B.C.’s Manager of Creative Strategies] had these lessons to share.

Ditch perfectionism [perpetual Beta]

Communicate! Communicate! Communicate! [social learning]

Trust your team [Autonomy]

Not your government’s voice

As traditional core activities get automated or outsourced, almost all high value work will be done at the outer edge of organisations. At the fuzzy edge of the organisation 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 organisations have to move operations to the edge to continue learning and developing. In agile organisations, a greater percentage of workers will be on the edge. The core will be managed by very few internal staff. What does this mean for project management? No matter what model one prefers, it will have to be more open, networked and cooperative.

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 chaos is where the future of work lies.

MSF Lessons Learned

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Medecins sans frontières [MSF], or Doctors Without Borders, is marking its 40th anniversary with a collection of stories exposing what it’s like to confront those difficult decisions. The book is called Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience and it comes out later this month.

CBC’s program The Current covers the uncomfortable compromises that humanitarian aid workers regularly face. As The Guardian reports:

Marie Noelle Rodrigue, operations director of MSF in Paris, said: “The time has come to explain the fragile equilibrium between the price it is necessary for an organisation to pay so that you are helping the victims.

“Often that means making a compromise to a degree where you are helping the authorities. This is a question that no-one has wanted to examine and it is good that MSF have looked into it and I think we are happy that we’ve done it honestly.”

MSF is keenly focused on learning from its mistakes and this book is part of that process. Some of those lessons:

Everything is political and influences medical assistance.

Gut feeling is very important to assess complex situations.

Finding common ground between parties in conflict is very difficult and too often simple, but ineffective, solutions are chosen.

The situation is always changing and there is a need for constant reflection, as individuals and at an organizational level.

Impartiality [trust] is the “red line” that cannot be crossed.

Every action is a compromise.

Conflicts are messy & dirty – therefore the humanitarian assistance is messy & dirty.

Learning through constant discussions is critical for all members of the organization.

MSF has a culture of debate and exposing the truth and this lets the organization move forward.

MSF follows the principles of narration and transparency to ensure it stays a viable organization facing complex, messy situations. Many organizations who are trying to adapt to the network era could learn from MSF.

Confused or Strong Beliefs?

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Much of my work is in helping organizations prepare for increasingly creative and complex work because this is where the business value is, whether in offering differentiated services in a competitive market or in advancing scientific R&D. I have found that Dave Snowden’s Cynefyn framework has been helpful in my sense-making around this and Dave has recently advanced this model with a Work in Progress (WIP).

Complex, as defined by Cynefyn is a state in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance. The approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond in order to sense emergent practice.This is essentially the notion of perpetual Beta; constantly making probes of the environment, sensing what happens and developing next practices in view of the evidence. One cannot understand the environment until one probes it. Analysis is not enough.

Dave identifies  two danger areas in the complex domain, both of which I have seen in organizations: SB & Co:

Strong belief [SB] – Low/Medium convergence, low coherence

I’m not sure of the name here, but this is the domain of different factions with similar power resulted in a fractured and disjoined position. This is one of the issues that techniques such as SNS are designed to resolve; by allowing different groups to work in parallel with interaction, conflict can be resolved through action not dialogue.

Confused [Co] – Low convergence, low/medium coherence

We’ve got some structure in the need but we don’t even have factions fighting between the options. Individuals have needs but there is no clumping or links between those individuals. It’s a mess with few patterns or structures that we can do anything with.

When I was talking to HR Executives last year, the consensus around social media was that they knew their companies had to change but they did not know where to start: Confused. Many seemed to be waiting for a list of Best Practices, but we know from Cynefin that these are only suitable for the Simple domain.

Conversely I have seen requests for proposals developed by one or two departments in an organization, usually Purchasing & IT, for a workplace collaboration product/service that is highly detailed and constrained but does not reflect the real needs of the workers. Just ask an L&D department if they are satisfied with the technology that was ‘given’ to them to do their jobs: Strong Belief.

So how could you balance convergence and coherence in the complex domain in order to make decisions?

Adopting three principles for working smarter in networked organizations might be a start:

  1. Transparency
  2. Narration of Work
  3. Distribution of Power

I have found Value Network Analysis a good exercise to break down beliefs in the embedded hierarchy and visualize how value actually flows. This helps with transparency, as people can see the organization through a new lens.

The narration of work can bridge beliefs by exposing people daily to what other people are doing. It’s like walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, but  only 140 characters at a time.

Finally, if power is held by one group, let’s say Purchasing & IT, for all software acquisitions, then the end-users won’t even try to get involved in the process. I have seen many such departments resigned to the fact they will have to deal with another enterprise software implementation having had no say in the matter. Understanding the environment and building consensus are the real work of leaders in networks.

Modelling, not shaping

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In social networks we can learn from each other; modelling behaviours, telling stories, and sharing what we know. This may not be highly efficient, but it it can be very effective. You will know you’re in a real community of practice if it changes your practices.

Education and training are shaping technologies. They reward successive approximations of the desired behaviour. Modelling, on the other hand, is the foundation of social learning:

Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory posits that people learn from one another, via observation, imitation, and modeling. The theory has often been called a bridge between behaviorist and cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation.

If we look at how organizational training & development has functioned, it has been separate from the work being done and focused on shaping behaviours. There is strong evidence that we need to integrate learning into our work in order to deal with the increasing complexity of knowledge work. The valued work in the enterprise is increasing in variety and decreasing in standardization. I have suggested that communities of practice are the bridge between work teams and open social networks, with narration of work an enabler of knowledge-sharing, and of course, modelling behaviour.

The way that Triple Creek [I have no relationship with this company] positions its Open Mentoring platform is a current example of a tool that could enhance social learning (modelling) in the bridging area that communities of practice can offer.

As long as this type of tool is not tied to any team, project or supervisor, it could help connect members of a community of practice. The challenge would be in finding a balance between intrinsic and extrinsic goals. Too much shaping and not enough modelling could turn this into one more thing that has to be done (like annual performance reviews).

Communities are more like dance halls than factories. Platforms that have too much control will not be adopted on a community level. As a consultant, I would like to be able to recommend a variety of these platforms, that can inter-operate on some level, so that enterprise communities can choose the most suitable ones for their stage of development. All communities of practice are unique and will grow, mature and often die over time. No single platform will meet all community needs, but if it supports one of these principles for working smarter – Transparency, Narration of Work or Distribution of Power – it would be worth checking out.

democratization of the workplace

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There was a most interesting thread on Twitter today. Bert van Lamoen (@transarchitect) in a series of tweets, said [paraphrasing several]: “Senge’s five disciplines provided instant utility for learning to organizations in 1990, yet learning organizations remain rare to this day. Hierarchy kills all learning. Our social systems are not designed to cope with complexity. Organizational learning is fundamental change. Today’s organization is not fit for organizational learning. Therefore, we need total redesign. Social and transformational architecture encompasses complexity and emergent change.”

In wither the learning organization, I linked to a paper on Why aren’t we all working for Learning Organisations? The authors, John Seddon and Brendan O’Donovan, open with a reference to W. Edwards Deming’s commentary on Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline (1990).

“Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers – a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars – and on up through the university.

On the job people, teams, and divisions are ranked, rewarded for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.”

After explaining how double-loop learning gets managers to focus on the system and away from controlling people, the authors conclude:

Our argument is that Deming’s statements in his 1990 review of Senge’s work continue to hold true: it is the dominance of the command and control management thinking which, 20 years on, still prevails and prevents the development of more generative learning. It is only by studying an organisation as a system and creating double-loop learning that we might finally see Senge’s ‘learning organizations’ stop being the exceptional and instead become the norm.

Double-loop learning requires an understanding, and a constant questioning, of the governing variables and of course this is where learning abruptly comes up against command & control. Flattening the organization is one way to open communications and delegate responsibility, but asking employees to engage in real critical thinking [double-loop learning], and accepting the resulting actions, will not work unless there is a multi-way flow of power and authority. Critical thinking is not just thinking more deeply but also asking difficult and discomfiting questions. Without power and authority, these become meaningless.

The BetaCodex Network advocates first reducing hierarchy, and then making work independent of the formal structure, in order to increase the value creation structure. This makes sense, but who other than an enlightened CEO is going to make these changes? People like Semler are still outliers in the business world — “On his first day as CEO, Ricardo Semler fired sixty percent of all top managers.”
coping strategies
According to Charles Green this is how large-scale change happens:

Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest—that’s when things really get set in concrete.

We have the ideas (and some examples) on the great work that needs to be done at the beginning of this century – create new organizational models that reflect (and actually capitalize on) our humanity. We also have technologies that enable and support collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and connecting on a human level. The major obstacles seem to be that there are not enough good examples and that these organizations are not influential enough to change the dominant business ideologies.

To spread these ideas may require more than just mavens, connectors and salespeople to reach a tipping point. We may also need to identify the ‘Doers’ inside more organizations and find ways to help them become double-loop learners. We should engage the trustworthy, those people with strong intimacy skills who get things done.

Perhaps we have been focused at the wrong level. I know that my most successful consulting engagements have not been at the very top, but with people who are doing the work. If we can create a mid-level groundswell, without giving up on finding enlightened executives, we may get somewhere.

Unless the dominant command & control management ideology is replaced, then most organizational change initiatives will just be tinkering at the edges. I can see why some people could become jaded over time with every successive new management system that still does not produce real change. The democratization of the workplace has been my guiding mission for the past decade. Democracy is the foundation upon which the likes of  Enterprise 2.0 or the Social Business need to build, in order to foster double-loop learning organizations that can thrive in complexity.

Real organizational transformation is structural

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In The 3 Structures of an Organization, the BetaCodex Network covers the weaknesses of our existing management and organizational models and shows a better way to design more network-centic businesses. For example, the authors state that the average modern organization expends about 20% of its energy on value creation, while the best may spend 50%. This still accounts for a significant amount of wasted energy. Organizations should dedicate 70% of their energies toward value creation.

These value creation structures have to be externally (market/customer) focused and are the most important parts of the business. Modern work is increasingly dealing with exceptions, which is complex and cannot afford the rigidity of centralized control systems. Informal networks have to be recognized as they provide the glue that keeps the organization together. Formal structures are the least important and only serve to support value creation, the opposite of centralized, top-down hierarchies.

Formal Structure, as can solely serve the trivial purpose of external compliance, should be subdued to or coherent with [the] Value Creation Structure, in which the work is done and where [the] organizational periphery is in charge, not bosses.

This is the kind of world without bosses I referred to in my last post.

The guiding principles make a lot of sense, and reflect what I have seen in organizations. Real change does not begin until you change the formal structure.

Eliminate Formal Structure, as much as possible, by fully aligning it with value creation and by allowing it only for external compliance. Make the work independent of formal structure.

Focus all organizational energy (e.g. with regards to learning and mastery) on the first two structures – not on formal structure, which is trivial. Approach Informal and Value Creation Structures with a systemic mind-set.

Support the positive effects of Informal Structure through high levels of transparency, investment in self-awareness of teams, radical decentralization of decision-making towards the periphery, and also through bonding rituals, and strong, shared values and principles.

This presentation is part of an ongoing discussion at BetaCodex. If you are interested in how these principles might apply to learning and development, here is an excerpt from a draft white paper (in development):

Never, ever, attempt to manage individual performance, though, as individual performance does not exist.

You cannot and need not develop people. People can do that on their own. An organization, however, can create conditions for self-development, getting out of the way by not trying to control or contain it.

Individual mastery is the only viable problem-solving mechanism in complexity … We usually tend to over-rate talent, and under-rate systematic, disciplined learning.

No training budgets, but on-demand learning resources.

I wholeheartedly agree with these recommendations!

Other BetaCodex papers can be accessed from: www.betacodex.org/papers

Network thinking

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Curtis Ogden at The Interaction Institute for Social Change provides a very good summary of the differences between network-centric and hierarchy-centric thinking, called Network Thinking:

  1. Adaptability instead of control
  2. Emergence instead of predictability
  3. Resilience and redundancy instead of rock stardom
  4. Contributions before credentials
  5. Diversity and divergence

One major challenge in helping organizations improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing is getting people to see themselves as nodes in various networks, with different types of relationships between them. Network thinking can fundamentally change our view of hierarchical relationships. For example, using value network analysis, I helped a steering group see their community of practice in a new light, mapped as a network. They immediately realized that they were pushing solutions to their community, instead of listening to what was happening. Thinking in terms of networks, networks, networks lets us see with new eyes.

1. Adaptability instead of Control

Here are some recommendations for moving to a new social contract for creative work:

  • Abolish the organization chart and replace it with a network diagram (some new tech companies have done this).
  • Move away from counting hours, to a results only work environment (with distributed work, this is becoming more common).
  • Encourage outside work that doesn’t directly interfere with paid work, as it will strengthen the network (such as Google’s 20% time for engineers).
  • Provide options for workers to come and go and give them ways to stay connected when they’re not employed (like Ericsson’s Stay Connected Facebook group). Build an ecosystem, not a monolith.

2. Emergence instead of predictability

As we learn in digital networks, stock (content) loses significance, while flow (conversation) becomes more important – the challenge becomes how to continuously weave the many bits of information and knowledge that pass by us each day. Conversations help us make sense. But we need diversity in our conversations or we become insular. We cannot predict what will emerge from continuous learning, co-creating & sharing at the individual, organizational and market level but we do know it will make for more resilient organizations.

3. Resilience and redundancy

A professional learning network, with its redundant connections, repetition of information and indirect communications, is a much more resilient system than any designed development program can be. Redundancy is also a good principal for supporting social learning diffusion. There is always more than one way to communicate or find something and just because something was blogged, tweeted or posted does not mean it will be understood and eventually internalized as actionable knowledge. The more complex or novel the idea, the more time it will take to be understood.

4. Contributions before credentials

Programmers might call this, ‘you are only as good as your code’. Credentials and certifications often act as blinders and stop us from recognizing the complexity of a situation. As Henry Mencken wrote, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

5. Diversity and Divergence

My approach to working smarter starts by organizing to embrace diversity and manage complexity.  Diversity is a key factor in innovation and I’ve yet to find an organization that does not want to improve innovation.

exception handling is complex work

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How is work different in a networked economy? We know that a lot of traditional work is constantly getting automated, from bank tellers, to lawyers to stock brokers. We also know that any work that can be outsourced will go to the place of cheapest labour, wherever that may be. The main reason behind this is the inter-connectivity of the Internet. I can easily find freelancers or software as a service to take care of my more routine tasks. Organizations do this all the time.

Known Problems

Let’s look at a knowledge worker and how things can get done in such an interconnected environment. Any situation can first be looked at from the perspective of, is this a known problem or not? If it’s known, then the answer can be looked up or the correct person found to deal with it. That answer may have been automated or even outsourced.

Known problems require access to the right information to solve them. This information can be mapped, and frameworks such as knowledge management (KM) 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 continuously gets automated.

Exceptions

But if it’s a new problem or an exception, then the knowledge worker has to deal with it in a unique way. This is why we hire knowledge workers, to deal with exceptions. Complex, new problems need tacit knowledge to solve them. Exception-handling is becoming more important in the networked workplace. While the system handles the routine stuff, people, usually working together, deal with the exceptions. Exceptions require collaborative approaches to solve.

Once an exception is dealt with, it is no longer new. It is now known. As exceptions get addressed, some or all of the solution can get automated, and so the process evolves.

The challenge for organizational design is to make it easy to move new problems into the knowable space. This is where three principles of net work come into play:

  1. Transparency
  2. Narration of Work [AKA working out loud]
  3. Distribution of power

We cannot know what is known unless the organization, and the entire business ecosystem are transparent. We need to be able find things fast, which is the main benefit of using social media: increasing speed of access to knowledge. Social media enable us to be transparent in our work but transparency is not enough. Each knowledge worker must also narrate his or her own work. For example, just adding finished reports to a knowledge base does not help others understand how that report was developed. This is where activity streams and micro-blogging have helped organizational learning. We see the flow of sense-making in small bits that over time become a flow and later patterns emerge. We humans are very good at pattern recognition.

Exception handling is complex work, which requires passion, creativity and initiative. These cannot be commoditized. This is where the main value of the networked business is created. It’s a constantly moving sweet spot. Today’s complex work is tomorrow’s merely complicated or even simple work. But with complex work, failure has to be tolerated, as there are no best practices for exceptions (that’s why they’re called exceptions). Narrating work also means taking ownership of mistakes. Transparency helps the organization learn from mistakes.

Finally, power in the organization must be distributed. Distributed power enables faster reaction time so those closest to the situation can take action. In complex situations there is no time to write a detailed assessment. Those best able to address the situation have marinated in it for some time. They couldn’t sufficiently explain it to someone removed from the problem if they wanted to anyway. This shared power is enabled by trust. Power in knowledge-based organizations must be distributed in order to nurture trust. “One of the big challenges for companies is that unlike information or data flows, knowledge does not flow easily – as it relies on long-term trust-based relationships.” —John Hagel

Power-sharing and transparency enable work to move out to the edges and away from the comfortable, complicated work that has been the corporate mainstay for decades.  There’s nothing left in the safe inner rings anyway, as it’s being automated and outsourced.

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. One challenge for organizations is getting people to realize that what they already know has increasingly diminishing value. How to solve problems together is becoming the real business advantage.
new known

CSTD 2011

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Here are my notes from the session this afternoon at CSTD 2011 in Toronto. If you need other links or information, just add a comment.

I’m glad we had a chance to field test a variation of the improv icebreak activity of equilateral triangles. It seems to have got things going a bit.

My slide presentation is available for viewing or download here:

Integrating learning and work CSTD 2011

I also showed two videos, the trailer to Networked Society: On the Brink as well as Dave Snowden’s How to Organise a Children’s Party.

Update: some people asked about selling social learning in their organizations, so these posts may be useful:

Social Learning for Business – 10 phrase elevator pitch

Why do we need social business? – many links to other resources & posts

Also: my social bookmarks on social media policies in a wide variety of organizations