Complexity

Complexity

It's about networks

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Rob Paterson writes at FastForward Blog on how the UK riots show us that everyone needs to be plugged into the Web to get things done; for good and for bad:

The Police and the community are learning also in real time how to help each other – by also using social media. Citizens are using Twitter and Facebook to help the police have better intelligence and the police are learning this week how best to respond and to monitor.

I noted in a post on Agility & Autonomy that a culture of perpetual Beta is critical. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release and that our learning will never stop. Agile organizations realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new. Networks are in perpetual Beta too. Unlike hierarchies, they continuously change shape, size and composition. Our thinking needs to continuously change as well.

Euan Semple talks about the power the Web gives us:

This is why I am so passionate about the web and the ability it gives us, to quote David Weinberger, to “write ourselves into existence”, to see the world as made up of connected individuals with the ability to shape their shared future rather than as a mass or ideologically driven herd.

This is also why I feel so motivated to work with the large corporations and institutions that so dominate our modern world. If I can help any of the individuals who make up those organisations to feel a little bit more self aware, a little bit more capable, and a little bit more able to think for themselves and speak for themselves, and to do so as part of networks of others doing the same – then I will have done my job.

I’ve observed that one of the biggest hurdles facing organizations, and people working in them, is to stop thinking of hierarchies and start thinking of networks. Asking, “What do you do for a living?” shows hierarchical thinking, as does “What is your job title?”.  Network-centric questions would be, “What is happening?” or “What are you learning?” or “Who are you learning from?”. No wonder Twitter asks, What’s happening?; Socialcast asks you to share something; Google+ prompts you to share what’s new and Yammer asks, What are you thinking about?

Both Rob and Euan posted their thoughts online today and I have woven them together with my own perspectives. My thinking is a product of my networks. Understanding networks, weaving networks and contributing to networks (the integration of learning & work) are now critical skills in all organizations. Like Euan, I am making progress one person at a time, and there has been progress. I hope it’s fast enough to deal with the increasing complexity and violence.

It’s about networks, stupid, or, as Searls & Weinberger conclude in World of Ends, “We have nothing to lose but our stupidity.

building tolerance for ambiguity

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High tolerance for ambiguity is becoming an important leadership trait in increasingly complex, networked environments, explains Riitta Raesmaa in Systems Intelligence, Serendipity and Listening for the Better Decisions. Three factors that can increase this tolerance are:

  1. Systems Intelligence Theory of Esa Saarinen,
  2. Value and Importance of Serendipity (the weak links and the edges),
  3. Value and Importance of Listening.

I had not heard of Esa Saarinen, but here is how it was described (2007):

By Systems Intelligence1 we mean intelligent behaviour in the context of complex systems involving interaction and feedback. A subject acting with Systems Intelligence engages successfully and productively with the holistic feedback mechanisms of her environment. She experiences herself as part of a whole, the influence of the whole upon herself as well as her own influence upon the whole. By experiencing her own interdependence in the feedback intensive, interconnected and holistically encountered environment, she is able to act intelligently … The Systems Intelligence approach is basically about taking [Peter] Senge’s discipline of Personal Mastery and the systems perspective as fundamental, and considering systems thinking only secondary. —Systems Intelligence: A Key Competence in Human Action and Organizational Life

Riitta’s three associations align with our initial work on core skills for our 21st century leadership project.

An example of “intelligent behaviour in complex systems”, is understanding when using a Probe — Sense — Respond approach would be appropriate, as per the Cynefin framework:

Complex, 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 and we can sense emergent practice.

In Solving Tough Problems, Adam Kahane explains what his colleague at Shell, Alain Wouters, told him about complex situations:

There is not “a” problem out there that we can react to and fix. There is a “problem situation” of which each of us is a part, the way an organ is part of a body. We can’t see the situation objectively: we can just appreciate it subjectively. We affect the situation and it affects us. The best we can do is to engage with it from multiple perspectives, and try, in action-learning mode, to improve it. It’s more like unfolding a marriage than it is like fixing a car.”

Enhanced serendipity can be an emergent property of personal knowledge mastery. PKM increases the chances of serendipitous learning or as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favours the prepared mind”. Steven Johnson says that “Chance favours the connected mind.”  According to Ross Dawson: “You cannot control serendipity. However you can certainly enhance it, act to increase the likelihood of happy and unexpected discoveries and connections. That’s what many of us do day by day, contributing to others like us by sharing what we find interesting.”

Listening, to others and ourselves, often gets lost in the deadline-driven organizational environment. We really need to listen to the environment. My friend Graham Watt shows that when you rely solely on technology in adapting to complex environments, the result can be death:

In Roland Huntford’s book, SCOTT AND AMUNDSEN, a full account is given of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott’s epic competition to reach the South Pole first. Both parties relied on technologies. However, with the arrogance of so-called civilized societies of the time, Scott believed the Inuit to be savages with nothing to teach, and relied on current technologies as well as the British sentimentality towards animals. They wore Burberry cloth clothing, used gasoline tractors as well as ponies, and forsook dog teams for manly man-hauling of sleds. Amundsen, on the other hand, was a lifelong student of Inuit technologies. His sleds were lighter, he and his team dressed in various phases of Inuit clothing. Amundsen used dogs, a proven source of power in the Arctic, able to curl up and snooze at 50 below, and readily edible. A harsh use of them, but no worse than ponies freezing to death in their own sweat.

In the end, the Inuit-based technologies won, and the Amundsen team returned so comfortably they actually gained weight, and at one point, re-climbed a 1000 foot descent from the glacier in order to have another ski run. Meanwhile, Scott and his party, with admittedly bad weather, perished, Scott’s remaining moments spent penning poignant notes to his and his team’s loved ones. Scott emerged as the perceived romantic hero of the whole affair, instead of signaling the death of imperial arrogance. Ironically, Amundsen, the unbiased user of available technologies suited to the task, was dismissed in British circles as perhaps lacking in feeling.

Thus did glory and icy death trump Aquavit and a thousand years of winter experience.

Roald Amundsen portrait wearing fur skins
Roald Amundsen c. 1923

The community dance hall

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In Diversity, Complexity & Chaos I highlighted several articles by others that discussed these themes and I finished with this graphic:

Karen Jeannette (@kjeannette) noted that her challenge is to “foster movement between the bubbles” and I responded that my own experience and with my clients has been that negotiating these boundaries is an art form and is highly contextual and quite fluid. To which Karen responded, “which is why I’m glad I had dance lessons when I was young …. always dancing, negotiating the next step”. This is an important metaphor. Supporting communities of practice is a lot like dancing, there’s constant give and take.

Another useful metaphor is to think of social media as languages. Learning to use one is like learning a new language, and as anyone who works with adults learning new languages has observed, most grown-ups do not want to look stupid, so they are inhibited in embracing the new language and making mistakes as they go along. Younger children don’t have this aversion.

So here we are, speaking new languages, where some people are fluent and others less so and then put on the dance floor learning new routines, while in fleeting but pervasive contact with partners of varying skills, abilities and mannerisms.

Instead of trying to find the perfect recipe for supporting communities of practice in the organization, think more like a social convener of a community dance hall. Many people have come, some will dance well, some poorly with gusto, and others will watch. Your aim is not to make it perfect for everyone but to make sure that people come to the next dance. That means changing the tempo of the music or perhaps introducing new dance partners or maybe taking a break. It takes keen observation, pattern recognition and a suite of subtle tools (a gentle hand) to help guide the flow.

The community hall is where those who work together can be more social while meeting some new folks from out of town. It’s a constantly negotiated space, dependent on who shows up, who plays, and who dances.  It depends on getting introduced to interesting people; some to dance with and others to talk to.

Becoming personal knowledge managers

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Nick Milton highlights an overview of knowledge management (KM) from Susan Camarena, CKO at the Federal Transit Authority, which includes:

How do we implement KM?

We already are doing it!

Everyone has their own KM program! Like:

  • Saving numbers of the “right” person to call on an old, wrinkled and well used piece of paper.
  • Reusing a memo that was approved as your template for the next memo to ensure it gets through.”
  • Getting a movie recommendation – you trust their opinion and ensure you don’t waste your time!

However, an ad-hoc approach is not efficient

You don’t learn from what I (and others) know!!!

This is the root of personal knowledge management (PKM). With digital information overload, an ad hoc method is definitely not efficient but neither is a standardized method for everyone in the organization. I’ve described my own framework as well as those of others. Setting filters is a good first step, as Five Forms of Filtering by Tim Kastelle explains.

Some of us are naive in our filtering, just going with what we think is best. Others rely on experts but that is more and more inadequate in our increasingly complex world of expertise. We need to develop networks of expertise and regularly check them for diversity and signal vs noise. Relying on a single set of algorithms can be dangerous so we need to establish heuristics that foster more critical thinking. The way we become better knowledge managers ourselves is through practice because information is not enough, we need to learn from experience. PKM is a process to capture  some of those experiences and learn through more structured sense-making and sharing.

The only knowledge that can be managed is our own.

The adaptive organisation

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Continuing from the post: Adapting …

The adaptive organisation is the second-last chapter of Adapt: Why success always starts with failure, followed by Adapting and you. In the final chapters, Tim Harford examines how groups and individuals can strive to adapt, and here are some highlights.

“So let’s first acknowledge a crucial difference: individuals, unlike populations, can succeed without adapting.” This statement explains a lot about what happens in organizations ;)

Case study of Timpson:

The first thing Timpson does when it buys another business is to rip out the electronic point-of-sale machines (there are always EPOS machines) and replace them with old-fashioned cash registers. ‘EPOS lets people at head office run the business’, explains John Timpson. ‘I don’t want them to run the business.’ EPOS machines empower head offices but they make it harder to be flexible and give customers what they need.

… how senior executives must feel when their cutting-edge, market-leading business finds itself being disrupted by a foolish-looking new technology:

A sufficiently disruptive innovation bypasses almost everybody who matters at a company: the Rolodex full of key customers becomes useless; the old skills are no longer called for; decades of industry experience count for nothing. In short, everyone who counts in a company will lose status if the disruptive innovation catches on inside that company — and whether consciously or unconsciously, they will often make sure that it doesn’t.

These, then, are the three obstacles to heeding that old advice, ‘learn from your mistakes’:

  1. denial, because we cannot separate our error from sense of self-worth;
  2. self-destructive behaviour, because … we compound our losses by trying to compensate for them;
  3. rose-tinted processes … whereby we remember past mistakes as though they were triumphs, or mash together our failures with our successes.

How to overcome these obstacles:

“Honest advice from others is better.”

Perhaps there is one reason why researchers find that self-employed people tend to be happier than the employed: they receive implicit approval of what they do every time somebody pays their invoice, whereas people with regular jobs tend to receive feedback that is both less frequent and less meaningful.

“So it’s worth remembering once again why it is worth experimenting, even though many experiments will, indeed, end in failure. It’s because the process of correcting the mistakes can be more liberating than the mistakes themselves are crushing, even though at the time we so often feel that the reverse is true.”

The book covers and cites several key points from The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Future of Management, which may make it a bit tedious for those who’ve read many management books, but overall I would recommend it as a fresh perspective on some key organizational and structural issues.

 

Adapting

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I’ve just started reading Tim Harford’s book, Adapt: Why success always starts with failure.

Here are my highlights/notes from Chapter One, Adapting:

Planning vs Adapting

“Ormerod’s discovery strongly implies that effective planning is rare in the modern economy.”

“The Soviet failure revealed itself much more gradually: it was a pathological inability to experiment.”

Design Principles

Palchinsky principles’:

first, seek out new ideas and try new things;

second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable;

third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along.

[note that Palchinsky worked in the Soviet Union]

Hierarchies

“There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk.”

Next: the adaptive organization

Journey to the edge

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This past week I was involved in many stimulating conversations with some very interesting people. The theme of new organizational structures came up and it was observed that one challenge we have is in addressing our inherent tribal nature. There is a strong need to belong to something, which can detract from critical thinking and questioning the inherent assumptions of our structures. Another growing challenge is how do skilled, motivated and intelligent managers deal with dysfunctional organizations? I get asked this question quite often as many very good people just seem to be stuck in the job/mortgage/pension trap. How can we get off this treadmill?

One very important observation on organizational change is that anthropology does not scale like technology does. Trying to solve someone’s problem from the outside only results in the problem being changed from the inside. We have to solve our own problems and that takes time. For example, a polycentric approach encourages design at the local level, with certain design principles (like a pattern language) instead of answers. So how can we take action on observations like those in my last post – 21st century workplace – and start the journey to the complex and chaotic edge? My aim, with my partners at the ITA and TULSER, is to find and map some of these pathways.

 

The 21st century workplace: moving to the edge

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The evidence of simple and (merely) complicated work getting automated and outsourced is widespread. Meanwhile, the business imperative is to be innovative, creative and agile.  The current Canada Post strike is evidence of this shift, with workers reacting against a major automation initiative. The postal automation process currently has significant flaws, but who thinks these cannot be solved in some future iteration? What is the future of complicated work, such as mail sorting and delivery? Rather bleak, I would think. However, solving a customer’s unique problem of getting pieces of art to several remote locations can be complex. There will always be complex problems that cannot be solved through automation.

I’ve used this concentric model to describe the networked workplace in recent posts:

emergent workplace

Basically, valued work in the 21st century workplace is moving to the outer rings to deal with growing complexity and chaos. The high-value work is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems that have already been solved and for which a formulaic or standardized response has been developed.

Dave Jonassen has said that as adults, most people are paid to do only one thing – solve problems. When dealing with work problems we can categorize the response 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 (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 gets automated.

new known

Complex, new problems need tacit knowledge to solve them. Exception-handling is becoming more important in the networked workplace. The system handles the routine stuff and people, usually working together, deal with the exceptions. As these exceptions get addressed, some or all of the solution can get automated, and so the process evolves.

The 21st century workplace, with its growing complexity due to our inter-connectivity, requires that we focus on new problems and exception-handing. This increases the need for collaboration (working together on a problem) and cooperation (sharing without any specific objective).

One challenge for organizations is getting people to realize that what they know has little value. How to solve problems together is becoming the real business imperative. Sharing and using knowledge 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 real (valued & paid) work done. In 50 years, this may not be an issue, but right now there are many people who need help with this challenge. This is the important work of leaders everywhere: enabling the current workforce to enter the 21st century.

Get outside the disciplinary box

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A most interesting post by Nick Milton at Knoco got me thinking again about complexity. I like the 2 X 2 diagram showing how increasing complexity makes us dependent on creative individuals and increasing collectivity makes us dependent on more processes. The former case is reflected in my own observations that complex work requires creativity and is where the value of the post-industrial organization lies. The latter case is where we are – with industrial processes and procedures for everything, but none able to deal with increasing complexity and hence the need to change our focus to things like barely repeatable processes.

According to the diagram, in a highly complex and collective environment, like most organizations in our interconnected world, we should be focused on knowledge management. If this means some form of KM 2.0, then I might agree. If it means enterprise KM and perhaps even the semantic web, with all its undelivered promises, then I doubt that it will be adequate to simultaneously support creative individuals and develop flexible procedures and processes.

Venkatesh Rao has a good critique of KM, from a generational perspective, and how it is so different in approach from social media. I think we need some form of “social KM”; a way to facilitate social learning, improve knowledge-sharing and overall enable collaboration and innovation. I don’t think that exists yet, though many are experimenting with frameworks like Social Business or Enterprise 2.0.

Much has been learned in the KM field and there is much to learn from emergent social media practices as well. However, real innovative approaches will be found at the edges. Frans Johansson showed with several cases in The Medici Effect how exponential innovations can occur when examining one field through the lens of another field. That is the opportunity: change lenses.

Nick concludes:

We need to be innovative, we need to be agile, we need to learn very fast, and we need to pool and build on what knowledge we have. That’s why Knowledge management is a crucial tool for survival in a Level 3, Collective world; whether you are in the Nuclear industry, the sales and marketing business, government, or any other sector. Knowledge is in short supply, so we need to make the most of what little knowledge we have, and be prepared to think and learn and innovate on our feet, collectively.

I agree, though knowledge management is too narrow a perspective. We need to think bigger and get outside our disciplinary boxes.

Update: This video on the tension between expertise and creativity gives more food for thought on the balance we need to foster in the complex, collective workplace.

Job automation

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I’ve said it so often now that you may be bored with the notion, but many people do not understand it at all. Simple work is getting automated and complicated work is getting outsourced — Automated & Outsourced.

On top of that, what was complicated yesterday is merely simple today and hence will be automated. Daniel Lemire has an interesting take on what automation will do to not just business but also politics:

In fact, most jobs require little general intelligence:

  • Jobs are highly specialized. You can sum up 80% of what most people do with 4 or 5 different specific tasks. In most organizations, it is a major faux pas to ask the wrong person: there is a one-to-one matching between people and tasks.
  • Jobs don’t require that you to understand much of what is going on. You only need to fake some understanding of the context the same way a spam filter fakes an understanding of your emails. Do you think that the salesman at the appliance store knows why some dishwashers have a shredder and some don’t, and why it matters? Do you think that the professors know what the job market is like for their graduates?

A key part of the problem is the job. Politicians want “job creation” and people want jobs to be able to feed their families and pay the bills. But the job is nothing more than a social construct. I think it’s outlived its usefulness, as I found out last year. The construct of the job, with its defined skills, effort, responsibilities and working conditions, is a key limiting organizational factor for the conceptual economy. We need to get beyond it.

In order to realize the creative potential of individuals we have to cast off old notions of how work gets done. There is no such thing as a generic  job description into which we just drop some “qualified” candidate. Job competencies are a myth. People are individuals. The role of an effective HR department would be to know each person individually. The fact is that everyone can be creative, including the janitor.

Understanding and incorporating humanity back into our work will liberate us from the industrial, scientific management models that inform too much of our work. It will also help us deal with all those complex problems that are really keeping us up at night.