Complexity

Complexity

the end of control

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Did print enable democracy, and is that why the founders of the USA put freedom of the press into their Constitution?

“ … just invent the printing press. Wait a couple of hundred years while literacy spreads, and presto! We can all talk to one another again, after a fashion, and the democratic revolutions begin.” —Gwynne Dyer

If print enabled democracy, will the emerging digital medium destroy it?

“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.” —Yuval Noah Harari

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learning in the flow of work

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Networked humans in a connected society:

  1. Our increasing inter-connectedness illuminates the need for cooperation.
  2. Simple work keeps getting automated, but still needs human oversight.
  3. Complicated work gets automated, outsourced, or contracted to the lowest cost of doing business.
  4. Complex work can provide a unique business advantage — but complex work is difficult to copy.
  5. Creative work can find new opportunities — but creative work is often intangible and constantly evolves.
  6. Complex and creative work require greater implicit knowledge.
  7. Implicit knowledge is difficult to share and takes time to understand.
  8. Implicit knowledge is often developed through conversations and social relationships.
  9. Social learning networks — with trusted relationships — enable better and faster knowledge feedback loops.
  10. Hierarchies constrain social interactions — so command & control management models need to change.
  11. Learning among ourselves is integral to complex and creative work.
  12. Social learning is how work gets done in a networked society.
  13. Management’s primary job is to support social learning.
  14. Work is learning, and [mostly informal] learning is the work.

This is real learning in the flow of work— connected, social, and human.

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leadership through cooperation

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One of the few areas where most nations cooperate is in infectious disease control. For nation states, cooperation is the best option in this type of ‘prisoner’s dilemma‘.

“On 31 December 2019, the World Health Organization was alerted about a cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown etiology in Wuhan, China, which prompted international concern of the potential public-health impact of an outbreak of a new virus [COVID-19] … With the now global spread of the virus, the urgency of a coordinated international response has amplified … This multi-pronged approach to curtail the outbreak, strongly supported by existing R&D, is a testament to the collaborative response of international organizations and the research and clinical communities … The initial global response to the 2019-nCoV outbreak illustrates the power of rapid communication and the importance of sustained research and collaborations that can be leveraged in future outbreaks. Sustained cooperation is essential to their resolution.” —Nature 2020-02-03

In Canada, special funds of up to $1 million per project have been allocated for rapid research into the recent outbreak of the novel corona virus [COVID-19]. Other nations, institutions, and corporations are also cooperating on molecular assays to diagnose COVID-19, including — China, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, USA. A special English-Chinese translation engine for scientific and medical use is being made freely available to researchers around the world by UK-based St. John’s Innovation Centre.

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the cooperative imperative

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Collaboration is working together for a common purpose, often directed externally by a boss or client. Cooperation is freely sharing with no expectation of direct reciprocity — quid pro quo. Nicholas Christakis’s ‘social suite’ is a blueprint of a range of traits that are common among all human societies, though not always manifested in the same way. One of these common traits is cooperation.

In our society, the market currently dominates how we organize. It is competitive. School is competitive, with individual grades. Work is competitive, with many more applicants than positions available. Individual performance reviews dominate in the workplace. We are told that we have to create our personal brands, because the world is competitive. But is this natural?

According to The Collaboration Paradox: Why Working Together Often Yields Weaker Results, some of the reasons that workplace collaboration fails is due to — overconfidence in our collective thinking, peer pressure to conform, and reliance on others to do the work. The article goes on to show that collaboration works when — we work with people with different skills, we do what each person does best, and we all contribute our own work.

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keep it simple

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It is informative to have your work reflected back by others who have interpreted it in their own ways. This feedback gets integrated into my own continuing development of my sensemaking frameworks. Making these frameworks as simple as possible, but no more, has been my work since 2003 when I decided to become a freelancer and start blogging my ideas ‘in the open’.

“One of the golden rules of sense-making is that any framework or model that can’t be drawn on a table napkin from memory has little utility. The reason for this is pretty clear, if people can use something without the need for prompts or guides then there are more likely to use it and as importantly adapt it. Models with multiple aspects, more than five aspects (its a memory limit guys live with it) or which require esoteric knowledge are inherently dependency models. They are designed to create a dependency on the model creator” —Dave Snowden (2015)

Karen Jeannette showed what PKM and Seek > Sense> Share meant to her.

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working smarter

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For the past several centuries we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us and surpassed humans with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is not much more need for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute. But certain long-term skills can help us connect with our fellow humans in order to learn and innovate — curiosity, sense-making, cooperation, and novel thinking.

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

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In spite of the criticism about social media, I still learn a lot from a platform like Twitter. The passing of Esko Kilpi this week has me reviewing some of his wise words, and there were many. This is a series of his tweets from 2012.

Unlike mechanical systems, human systems thrive on variety and diversity.
An exact replication of behavior in nature would be disastrous and seen as neurotic in social life.
The Internet changes the patterns of connectivity.
The Internet transforms our understanding what “local” is, makes possible wide participation and new enriching variety in interaction.
All human systems are connected and connected systems cannot be understood in terms of isolated parts.
The unit of analysis is now communication and emergence, not entities.
The perspective of network science views knowledge as socially created and socially re-created.
Management literature typically emphasizes individuals and locates explanatory power in their personal properties.
The potential of social media cannot be realized without a very different epistemological grounding, a relational perspective.
Independently existing people and things then become viewed as co-constructed in coordinated networked action.

Esko said that in order to develop the necessary emergent practices to deal with complexity you need to first cultivate diversity and by this I would say the autonomy of each learner. You also need rich and deep connections, but these are not enough if you don’t also have meaningful conversations, which can be enabled through social learning. If you look at most training and education, including micro-learning or whatever is the latest fad, this counsel is often ignored.

The best advice from Esko — in my opinion — was to hack uncertainty and hedge risks.

“The future of work will be based on hacking uncertainty and hedging risks through post-blockchain smart contracts, learning, and social capital.

The main question is perhaps not what skills we should have in the future, but how we hedge the risks that are inbuilt in our world, our unique knowledge assets, the know-what, the know-who and know-how of our life.” —Esko Kilpi

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turmoil and experimentation

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Renee DiResta discusses the challenges brought about by the printing press — invented in Europe in 1450 —  and compares these with the current effects of digital networks in — Mediating Consent.

The printing press, invented approximately 50 years before the 95 Theses, extended Luther’s reach from the door of the cathedral to the entirety of Europe. His criticisms of the Church were the first use of mass media: critiques of Catholic doctrine in pithy, irreverent pamphlets, produced at scale and widely distributed. As a result, Luther ushered in not only Protestantism, but an entirely new media landscape: one in which traditional gatekeepers — the church, wealthy nobles — no longer held a monopoly on the information that reached the people. The Catholic Church responded, of course, with pamphlets of its own — defending Catholic doctrine, refuting the new heretics, fighting the battle for hearts, minds, and Truth. —RibbonFarm

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“diversity trumps ability”

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High tolerance for ambiguity is a critical skill as we live and work in increasingly complex, networked environments. Navigating through turbulent times requires the ability to deal with ambiguity by seeking and making sense through a diverse network of connections of people and knowledge. The broader and deeper our connections, the better we can deal with ambiguity. The ability to Seek, Sense & Share in order to handle the complexity of the networked age is not a ‘nice-to-have’ optional approach to professional learning, it is a necessity. A diversity of connections and experiences increases our ability to deal with ambiguity.

[Associate Professor Andrea] Leung found that the advantages of living abroad accrue to those who are willing to adapt themselves to the ways of their host country: “The serendipitous creative benefits resulting from multicultural experiences,” she writes, “may depend on the extent to which individuals open themselves to foreign cultures.” This openness, she adds, includes a tolerance for ambiguity and open-endedness, a lack of closure and firm answers. —Time 2014-04-29

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solving problems together

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Most situations at work can be considered from the perspective of — is this a known problem or not? If it’s known, then the answer can be looked up or the best person can be found to deal with it. The answer may even have been automated or outsourced. 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 performance support systems to do the work and not have to learn all the background knowledge in order to accomplish the task. This is how complicated knowledge continuously gets automated.

But if it’s a new problem or an exception, then the worker has to deal with it in a unique way. The main job of most knowledge workers is to solve problems and deal with exceptions. Exception-handling is becoming more important in the networked workplace. While software can handle the routine stuff, people — usually working together — are needed to deal with the exceptions. Exceptions require cooperation and collaboration to solve.

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