2.0topia?

Andrew McAfee is one of my favorite bloggers and is always worth reading. However, his latest post seems a bit on the utopian end of the spectrum. Below is the comment I submitted:

Andrew,

I think you're right as far as you go. And, I basically agree with your suggestions. However, they do have a bit of a utopian whiff.

The Web/Enterprise 2.0 hype reminds me a bit of the "information for free" buzz that surrounded books like Kauffman's "Origins of Order" in the mid-90's. It's a nice dream, but I think less likely than we might wish.

Enterprises have goals that require individuals to act in a coherent fashion. To achieve those goals, they must Execute certain activities in a reliable fashion (e.g., core processes). At the same time, they need to Explore new opportunities that emerge from a shifting technological, memetic, economic, etc. landscape. Exploration work incrementally improves Execution capabilities and potentially modifies the organizations goals by uncovering disruptive opportunities.

Web/Enterprise 2.0 holds the promise of a quantum leap forward in an organization's capability to Explore/Innovate. The key is to integrate Exploration with Execution in a way that increases agility & adaptability without sacrificing the coherence required to maintain the organization's health (e.g., profitability). As others have mentioned, the primary challenge is probably at the DNA level of the organization (identity, values, narrative fragments, mental models, etc.) I suspect that much of the DNA-level change will be largely an emergent phenomena, and Web/Enterprise 2.0 has a key role to play in catalyzing that change.

Note: Others (e.g., Tushman, Christensen, Hagel & Seely Brown) have drawn contrasts similar to what I've characterized as Execution-Exploration. After stumbling across the basic contrast about 1.5 years ago while analyzing technological change vs. organization change I found these writers (among others) had already discussed it. The fact that this contrast continues to appear in various flavors is perhaps one indicator that it is important.

Monetizing Social Media

Discussions of how to make social media succeed tend to split into two threads: (a) the Internet, and (b) the enterprise.

Enterprises, among other things, (a) can't generate the sheer volume of data (e.g., social graphs) that the Internet can, and (b) are focused on specific Exploitation & Exploration goals (the Internet's telos, to the degree it exists, is emergent). Both of these factors imply that an enterprise will probably not be able to catalyze the use of social media internally in the same way it is catalyzed on the Internet.

However, enterprises have a significant vested interest in a more diverse & robust monetization ecosystem for social media on the Internet. To the degree that social media ROI increases (and its sources also become more diverse), tools/memes/etc. will become available that enterprises can adapt to improve Execution and catalyze Exploitation.

This post from ReadWriteWeb is a nice discussion of monetizing social media on the Internet.

A Fundamental Framework

Three years ago this month I first encountered Kurtz & Snowden's 2003 IBM Systems Journal paper "The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sensemaking in a Complex and Complicated World".

Few things have so fundamentally influenced the way I view the cause-effect structure of reality, and I've tried since then (with limited success) to encourage systems engineers to add Cynefin to their tool box.

After 10 years of reading complexity-oriented literature (an ontological perspective) and 5+ years of reading sensemaking literature (an epistemological perspective), I was immediately struck by the way the Cynefin framework mapped the intersection of ontology & epistemology.

After 3 years of reading Dave's papers & blog, and listening to his podcasts, I think I've begun to grasp some of the primary points he tries to illuminate.

If you are a systems person and are unfamiliar with Cynefin, here's my list of basic resources (as of this date):

1. The original paper - Kurtz & Snowden
2. "Bramble Bushes in a Thicket (paste "http://www.cognitive-edge.com/ceresources/articles/52_Bramble_Bushes_in_a_Thicket.pdf" into browser): Narrative and the intangibles of learning networks" - Another Kurtz & Snowden article. One of the few articles I've seen exploring how identity and sensemaking are intertwined...though I'm likely to be a fan of any article that has a section entitled "Silos as organisational identities."
3. Various recent presentations (paste "http://www.cognitive-edge.com/presentations.php" into browser) - Since Dave can't cover more than a slice of Cynefin in a given presentation, it's best to browse through several of the recent presentations on this page.
4. And, related podcasts (paste "http://www.cognitive-edge.com/podcasts.php" into browser) - I'd start with the three April/May 2008 podcasts. Many of the previous podcasts have gaps in them and must be pieced together.

UPDATE:
5. The latest publication from Dave is in the Nov 2007 Harvard Business Review, "A Leader's Framework for Decision Making". This is probably the best single article on Cynefin at this time.

Finally, here's one blogger's coverage of a recent Snowden presentation...a good summary, but there's lots of thought-provoking "one-liners" in any given podcast that will likely go over your head unless you're fairly familiar with his thinking.

While I remain a big fan of academicians like Weick and Klein, Cynefin is probably a more efficient/effective gateway to sensemaking for the average systems engineer.

Systems engineering seems to be shifting its center of gravity from technology, systems, and products to how those things can catalyze business/mission success via agility/adaptability. As that shift takes hold, frameworks like Cynefin will gain a central place in the engineering toolbox.

An Event Taxonomy

Forrester has a new report out that proposes a taxonomy of events.

It's not a bad jumping-off place...but I'm not all that enthusiastic about their list. Maybe if it was a bit more aligned with Cynefin. But, it may be good enough to move the conversation forward...which is all that's necessary.

Dis-integrating conversations

There's been some interesting dialog recently on the topic of walled garden conversations (e.g., a blog) vs. open conversations (e.g., FriendFeed).

This blog entry and the Scoble entries it references are fascinating reading. The explosion of conversation-oriented capabilities on Web 2.0, especially those with a social networking twist, is generating a lot of Exploratory activity.

My impression is that we're in the early stages of groping for the syntax...semantics are not really on the horizon yet.

Juggling Contextual Identities

I ran across a social network blog by a Forrester analyst. This entry on the future of social networks is worth reading.

However, I suspect that a key need (not really addressed by the author (Charlene Li)) is the ability to nimbly juggle the intersection of multiple identities and contexts.

In everyday interactions (both local and remote) we constantly tailor our identity to match the context. This kind of thing can literally change from second to second when we're juggling multiple contexts.

The real power of being hyperconnected will not really emerge until we have a robust identity infrastructure that can be nimbly governed by a subject. That probably means things like (a) the ability to create & manage multiple identities simultaneously, (b) a certain amount of automated governance (e.g., dynamic activation & enforcement of boundaries/attractors), and(c) a certain amount of just-in-time "operator-on-the-loop" predictive modeling.

We're a long way from anything like that...especially given that there seems to be a lack of understanding of the importance of the dynamic management of multiple contextual identities.

Composable CONOPs

A few years ago at a Network Centric Warfare conference I remember a veteran of Fallujah state emphatically that the key capabilities they used there were NOT systems created by the normal procurement waterfall.  Instead, those capabilities reflected a cobbling together of components to compose a CONOPs tailored to that specific context.

This Forrester report proposes a similar concept and calls it "dynamic business applications."  It's nice to see the business world converging on concepts similar to those proposed by Network Centric theorists a few years back. 

Composability (at the business level) is one of the key questions, and this report has some interesting ideas on how to better manage the growing challenge of balancing Exploitation and Exploration.

Rules, Processes, Data

This Forrester report about the convergence of Business Rules, BPM, and BI is an interesting take on how rules, processes, and data are intertwined.  

SOA and other decentralizing technologies are raising interesting possibilities in the creation and evolution of agile and adaptive capabilities.   I'm not sure the "rules, processes, data" taxonomy is exactly right, but this report is one of the better overviews I've seen of where we are now.

More Context

This post provides more evidence of an emerging awareness that knowledge is more about context than aggregated information.

It's nice to see the term "contextual user interfaces."  I'll know we've gained a good understanding of the questions associated with decentralizing technologies when "contextual [your favorite KM noun here]" becomes passe.   And, maybe we'll eventually see a time when "[KM noun]" is assumed to be contextual unless it's preceded by the qualifier "generic."

The Knowledge Package Paradigm

Although I'm a big fan of using technology to catalyze sensemaking, I think this post at Headshift identifies a serious challenge impeding a fundamental business/societal shift in that direction. I've seen this issue arise repeatedly over the past few years, so it's nice to see someone else writing about it.

I won't try to cover everything in the post, but a key thread is that our tools tend to be what I call a "knowledge chunk" that are (a) relatively static, and (b) relatively decoupled from the contexts in which we use them. This is true of high information density tools (e.g., Word) and low information density tools (e.g., a hammer).

There are at least two reasons for this: (a) it's much easier to monetize these tools (Google, eBay, etc. being a few notable exceptions), and (b) our mental models/frames/fragments are based on this paradigm (and it may be that our cognitive ability to basically do only compare/contrast means that we'll never find it easy to adopt any other paradigm).

As I've noted previously, it's unclear how we use the new decentralizing technologies to catalyze Exploration & improve Exploitation simultaneously...amazing opportunities, but the organizational and cognitive challenges seem to rarely receive the attention they deserve.

Social Networks a Feature?

This post asserts that Google's "Friend Connect" is the opening wedge of a shift of social networks from a destination (e.g., Facebook) to a feature.

Sounds plausible to me...at least for networking that is decision-oriented. Decisions are contextual, so it's usually easier to bring the network to the context than to bring the context to the network.

Governing Other's Services

Joe McKendrick makes an obvious, but rarely discussed, point in this post. Your users will be using external services...which means you'll need to find some way of governing them.
I suppose it's the legacy stovepipe enterprise mentality that leads us to not appreciate the importance and difficulty of governing services we don't own.

Predicting Network Structures

In the late 80's I became aware of the Santa Fe Institute and followed their research activities through the mid-90's. Around the time I slogged through Kauffman's "Origins of Order", they gradually fell off my radar (but that's another story).
They remain one of the leaders in complexity-related thought and research.
Today, there's a post referencing some fascinating new research from SFI. They assert that they can predict the structure of a network, given a partial map of it. When researchers find structures that seem to appear across a wide range of domains, there's usually a bit of over-hyping...but this does seem worthy of some attention.

Amazon's Cloud

If you haven't been following AWS, you need to read Wired's article on the cloud that Amazon's building.

"Pulling" Discovery

I suppose the push/pull, exploit/explore, execute/discover contrast is well known to those who live at the intersection of technology and decision making.

If you don't, Dion Hinchcliffe has a fairly painless summary.  I'd point you to Tushman (at HBS) also.

Clouds + SOA = CEP?

If you haven't thought much about SOA, you may not have realized that some sort to Complex Event Processing (CEP) fabric would seem to fit nicely.\

Dana Gardner has a short post discussing this topic re: TIBCO...at the intersection of cloud computing and SOA.

HBR & Complexity

I suppose mainstream applied social science journals like Harvard Business Review feel they must stay grounded in a definition of science that emphasizes the "logic of the facts" (though, my opinion is that social sciences are more logic than facts....i.e., the inferences often run way ahead of the data).

However, real-world needs are usually beyond what a thick-data/thin-logic approach (e.g., Brahe's data + Kepler's equations) will yield...so, there's a tension between social science that's narrow enough to be relatively "hard", and social science that's useful to the practitioner applying it to a real world decision context.

These thoughts were triggered by HBR publishing two complexity-centric articles (at least) in the last few months (the Cynefin article in Nov 2007, and "Strategy as a Wicked Problem" this month (May 2008)).

I suspect part of the reason is highlighted in the second paragraph: "[Companies] can't develop models of the increasingly complex environment in which they operate."  Those of us who have been looking at the changing IT landscape (e.g., SOA, Web 2.0, etc.) over the past few years would second this statement.  It's as true for innovation and adaptability/agility in operations as it is for strategy. 

The problem is that management science has been epistemologically grounded in a reductionist approach to knowledge since it began to be formalized by Taylor in the early 1900's.  Modeling (ideally via math or simulation) has been a basic analytical tool since those early days.  Anyone who deals with complexity knows the limits of modeling...and an understanding of those limits seems to be dawning on the business world.

Like Snowden, the author recognizes that wicked problems are not simply bigger...they're ontologically  ("being-ness") different.

The author defines 5 characteristics of wicked problems in strategy formulation:

• Involves many stakeholders with different values & priorities
• Roots are complex & tangled
• Difficult to grasp; changes when addressed
• Unprecedented
• No "right" answer

And, the author's suggestions are consistent w/ Snowden's discussion of the Complex domain:

• Lots of collaboration (Cynefin: Probe-sense-respond (vs. sense-analyze-respond))
• Define corporate identity (Snowden & Weick have both written at length on this aspect of complexity.  Known/Knowable work does not stress corporate DNA in the same way Complex/Chaotic work does.  This is especially "wicked" when you consider that identity not only helps us shape our environments, but our environment also helps shape our identity)
• Focus on action (again, Probe-sense-respond...and use boundaries & attractors (along with weak signal detection) to shape a complex context).  In the PPG example, Pareto analysis & scenario analysis are used as probes...though I'm not sure Snowden would be very enthusiastic about these two approaches to probing (at least in decision-rich contexts).
• Adopt a "feed-forward" orientation (again, boundaries & attractors...and, the author even says "scan the environment for weak signals")

Overall, a good article on an infrequently discussed topic.  I hope the trend of occasionally addressing the topic continues.