Complexity

Complexity

When “hope and history rhyme”

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When the pandemic began — it’s not over — I stopped reading dystopian fiction, some of which I had recommended in Summer science-fiction a couple of years before. The last one I had read was Station Eleven, which I am glad I did so before March 2020. My first read this Summer has been Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future — here is Bryan Alexander’s final instalment from his book club.

The Ministry for the Future can be called speculative fiction, and in this case provides a wide array of methods and processes that we might collectively use to get us through the current climate catastrophe. As fiction, it is more persuasive than any research report or white paper. It opens with a heat wave in India with temperatures above 38C and 60% humidity. Millions of people die as a result. Well, the 2022 heat wave in Pakistan and India hit 49.5C!

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managing to lead in complexity

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The military is beginning to understand that some of its leadership practices need to change as its challenges increase in complexity. Future warfare will increasingly move toward the complex domain.

“Complex contexts cannot be solved; they can only be managed. In a context with variables and relationships that are constantly shifting, leaders are unable to assess the situation and apply the appropriate solution. Instead, they must begin by intentionally probing the environment and conducting small, experimental actions to generate insights they can then analyze for patterns.” —Modern War Institute at West Point 2022-06-15

Major Heloise Goodley, UK army chief of general staff’s research fellow at Chatham House, says that new skills are needed for the modern, machine-augmented battlefield.

“The proliferation of automation and artificial intelligence has not decreased the requirement for a human component in war, but it is changing the decision making and cognitive skills required of those soldiers. The army needs soldiers who have the intellectual and psychological aptitude to work in an increasingly automated operational environment, the very computer skills Generation Z have become derided for.” —The Independent 2019-01-05

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passivity makes no sense

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

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

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

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entangled thinking

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About 500 years ago a new communications technology came along and changed the face of Europe — print. The Protestant Reformation saw the rise of religious wars, which were later followed by the scientific revolution and The Enlightenment. An age of exploration followed, which brought not just gold and silver to the coffers of Europe, but new foods such as potatoes from the Americas, to fuel the Industrial Revolution. These new foods increased the population and in turn brought about the demise of the Indigenous people of the Americas.

Did print help to enable democracy, and is that why the founders of the USA put freedom of the press into their Constitution? If print enabled democracy, will the emerging digital (electric) medium destroy it? Yuval Noah Harari thinks this may be the case, “The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century — the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place — may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.” 

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learning on the edge of chaos

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“the future of work will be based on hacking uncertainty” —Esko Kilpi

Esko Kilpi passed away in early 2020 and his work had informed my own for many years. He published a number of essays on Medium and I would like to curate some of the highlights from 2019.

“Instead of thinking about the organization let’s think about organizing as an ongoing thing. Then the managerial task, but not necessarily a manager’s task, is to make possible very easy and very fast responsive interaction and formation of interdependent individuals into value creating groups.” —2019-01-15

“We live in a time when we have compartmentalized ourselves into disciplines, using highly engineered processes in the name of efficiency and productivity. But if success is a result of learning and innovation, we need to think differently, we need to cross boundaries to create new insights.
Crossing boundaries is always about working with differences. This is why differences are potentially conflictual in nature, and this is something we should now welcome. Conflicts give rise to the possibility of innovation and the potential for finding totally new solutions.” —2019-01-21

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we have met the enemy

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A long time ago — pre-pandemic and pre-9/11 — I was flying on a commercial passenger aircraft. The flight was over-booked and as I was wearing my Army uniform, I was offered to sit in the jump seat, just behind the pilots. Yes, these things happened in the ‘before times’.

It was a short flight but I had a chance to speak with the pilots. The captain told me that many civilian pilots had a military background but their training and experience resulted in some differences. He mentioned that if there was an observed incident on take-off, most of the civilian-trained pilots would make small adjustments to the throttle speed, aware that fuel costs money for the company.  On the other hand, many of the military-trained pilots might react to an incident by slamming the throttles forward and getting out the situation and in the air as fast as possible. This of course cost more fuel, but from a military operational perspective would probably be the best default action.

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twitter enables open knowledge networks

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Twitter has kept me informed through this pandemic. I have been informed by subject matter networks of experts who share their knowledge with the public on Twitter. I was even taken to task by a troll (now off Twitter) for not blindly following local public health advice — “Twitter doctors are apparently more trusted than our medical officer of health.” But given the performance record of our CMOH, the advice from my pandemic list has kept me safer over the past two years.

Imagine if public health had taken the informed advice of Barry Hunt, an engineer specializing in airborne infection prevention. On 31 March 2020, Barry described the droplet theory of the spread of SARS-C0V-2 as — “90 year-old stale dated fake news” — yet the droplet theory was promoted by the WHO until May 2021.

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dancing in the dark

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Peter Drucker (1909-2005) was an American management consultant whose work has influenced how business is done for more than 50 years. He was a prolific writer and is often quoted, though frequently incorrectly. Some of his quotes are pertinent today, especially here in New Brunswick, Canada where we have dropped all public health measures in advance of what will likely be a sixth wave of coronavirus, as infection rates in Europe are beginning to indicate.

“… no human being can possibly predict the future, let alone control it.” —Peter Drucker

Our government and public health authorities are confident that while hospitals are near capacity, vaccine efficacy is waning, and vaccination rates in children are low to nil, any subsequent wave of viral infection will not require any precautionary measures.

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perpetual beta — our new normal

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The perpetual beta model describes how knowledge can flow between professional networks, communities of practice, and work teams. It shows that it is necessary to connect all three in order to ensure a diversity of ideas and perspectives — as well as safe places to test these — in order to support increasingly complex collaborative work tasks. An essential component of this is ensuring individuals develop the discipline of personal knowledge mastery.

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value network analysis masterclass

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Value Network — “A web of relationships that generates economic or social value through complex dynamic exchanges of both tangible and intangible benefits.” —Verna Allee

I participated in my first value network analysis (VNA) workshop in 2007. My impression at the time was that humans work in complex environments and we are by our very nature unpredictable. The result of a VNA allows us to ask better questions but it doesn’t give specific answers (it’s not a tool for bean counters). I felt that VNA was an excellent change management tool. I could see the use of VNA and the resulting concept maps enabling better communication within organizations, with clients, with funders, and throughout communities. These perceptions have not changed

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