Context & Connection

At KMWorld 2008, Dave Pollard presented an updated slideshare of a previous presentation. It highlights the themes of "Context" and "Connectivity." These two themes characterize an emerging group of capabilities that address Complex decision making contexts, a deficiency in traditional analytically-oriented KM tools, concepts, and frameworks.

The title of his presentation is “From Content to Context and from Collection to Connection.”

• Content-to-Context – traditional KM focuses on the capture, creation, and provisioning of content as a formal artifact. Pollard’s summary is “acquire > add value (& store) > disseminate”, and “Know-what, Collection, Content, Just-in-case.” This implies that the key challenge is the identification, specification, design, capture, and management of relatively generic chunks of content for future consumption by a decision maker. These chunks are assumed to be relevant to a wide range of decision contexts; thereby justifying the investment in formally capturing them and provisioning them for future consumption. And, the (often tacit) assumption is that there is a low barrier to entry for most consumers of these chunks. Anyone who’s tried to design content for future consumption knows that (a) creating content that is really used across a wide range of contexts is surprisingly difficult, and (b) locating, filtering, and fitting pre-provisioned content to a decision context is a lot more work for the decision maker than the casual observer might think.The new focus is on the consumption context. This implies that the key challenge is primarily how the decision maker locates and incorporates relevant content into a decision context. A key emerging aspect of this is to (a) provision content for findability and mashability, and (b) provide services that allow the decision maker to easily match content to context (and vice versa).
• Collection-to-Connection – as mentioned above, traditional KM focused on the collection of content. Shifting the focus to “Connection” emphasizes connecting the decision maker to resources that are relevant to the decision context. Pollard’s summary is “scan > make sense (& connect/canvas) > publish”, and “Know-who, Connection, Context, Just-in-time.” It’s not a bad summary, but his diagrams of scanning and canvassing have a strangely Content/Collection flavor to them…or maybe Dave Snowden has just made me allergic to anything that looks like categorization/analysis in a Complex context…:-)

Anyway, if you’re looking for a perspective on Ordered vs. Complex contexts that’s less academic than Snowden, this slideshare’s worth a look.

Distrust 2.0

Maybe I’m projecting, but there seem to be some parallels between the current liquidity crisis and Web 2.0. The financial engineering associated with bundling millions of mortgages and securitizing them seems similar in some ways to the Web 2.0 vision of a composable CONOPs and an enterprise IT capability that’s 90% in the cloud. Here’s a few points of commonality:

• In both cases, entities (loans, services, content) are being engineered for interoperability. Although the details differ, the basic purpose is to allow something heterogeneous (specific to a context) to be made homogeneous so that it can be combined/recombined to create new value
• There is a dramatic reduction in transparency in both areas. This is seen in part by the discussions of governance in both areas. For mortgages, the talk is about increasing governance (and reducing some existing governance that incentivized risk taking). For Web 2.0, the talk is about the governance needed to provide predictability (e.g., SLA’s), and to enable the required agility and adaptability.
• Both areas highlight an issue that often overlooked: trust. The fundamental importance of this issue cannot be overemphasized. In a stovepiped world, mortgages and IT depend on the stovepipe to ensure trust. Superficially, stovepipes enforce trust via the fortifications surrounding specific stovepipe entry/exit points. At a more fundamental level, stovepipes are trustworthy because they’re transparent and static. Composability in a cloud dramatically reduces transparency, and in doing so, dramatically increases the need for more robust trust mechanisms.
  
  The exploding alphabet soup of security related services, protocols, and frameworks in Web 2.0 indicates that the need for formal management of trust is clearly understood. However, I’m not sure I’m seeing a clear appreciation for the fact that formal mechanisms may severely constrain the very adaptability and agility that Web 2.0 promises. Informal mechanisms (e.g., emergent trust networks) are being explored, but I suspect that both the IT and financial industries will eventually have to come to grips with the tension between increasing mashability and maintaining a desired level of trust.
• Distrust is discontinuous; trust is continuous. Trust is built slowly and incrementally over time. Distrust often emerges instantaneously when a single incident reveals that fundamental predictions about how someone or something will act are dangerously mistaken. We’ve seen the fallout in the credit markets; a similar fallout in Web 2.0 would seem inevitable.

Finally, since this is not a sociological or anthropological blog, I’ll just mention that the type of cultural ecosystem your enterprise inhabits (i.e., low-trust vs. high-trust) may be the most fundamental driver of all.

Process & People

A traditional approach to organizational engineering is to document business processes and functions. Although this approach can be traced (in modern times) back to Taylor, it received renewed attention in the 80's & 90's with the popularization of Michael Porter's Value Chain concept.

As an engineer there's a lot about this I find appealing. It neatly bounds the problem and supports the kind of analytical slicing and dicing that we techies live for.

However, as a framework, I suspect it may be a better fit for incremental innovation than for disruptive innovation.

These thoughts were triggered by a discussion of Value Nets on a journalism blog. Two diagrams (showing value nets for news) focus on roles and the value that each role provides to other roles.

My snap reaction was that the focus on People and the relationships among them would probably catalyze more innovation than a focus on Process. At the very least, it's a nice complement to the traditional Process-centric approach.

Complex System Engineering

As a systems engineer with almost 20 years of sporadic reading in the areas of chaos theory and complexity theory, I tend to overestimate how much the typical system engineer understands about these topics.

When the topic comes up, I usually get a response that amounts to "I've heard about that." Among older engineers, I occasionally hear a reference to some variation of cybernetics or system dynamics. And, in reviewing more recent system engineering literature, I'm most likely to see a reference to "wicked problems."

There are a number of fields of study and concepts that are related to these topics. My favorite "big picture" is this diagram from the International Institute for General Systems Studies.

Regardless, most system engineers don't appear to see these topics as anything more than intellectually intriguing. Since very few of us build systems that actually exhibit complex or chaotic behavior, I suppose that's understandable.

However, as decentralizing & hyperconnecting technologies become commoditized, the capabilities we create are increasingly being tightly coupled to complex decision contexts. So, I'm starting to see a few references to system engineering for contexts that are primarily complex.

This presentation by Christof Fetzer discusses how complexity comes to dominate many Systems of Systems as they grow in size, and how system engineering must change to effectively address a complex context. And, George Rebovich of Mitre gave an interesting presentation on "Systems Thinking for the Enterprise" at the 2006 International Conference on Complex Systems. It it, he covers much of the same terrain as Fetzer, although from a different perspective. A more in-depth discussion by Rebovich is found here.

And, there's been some recent activity by INCOSE in this area. However, after reviewing a bit of what's being written recently about complexity by system engineers, I better understand why I got such blank looks when I raised the topic (from the perspective of social psychology) with some INCOSE leaders at a local chapter meeting about a decade ago. Even today, most of what's written tends to one of two extremes: (a) a deterministic approach wrapped in a complex sheepskin, or (b) some kind of "emergence magic."

Much of the recent material is helpful for giving traditional system engineers a better understanding of some of the key issues. And, some of it draws some important distinctions. But, I'll continue to look to Snowden's Cynefin, Klein's data-frame, and Weick's social psychology when I'm pondering basic concepts that illuminate how to design deterministic capabilities that mesh cleanly with complex decision contexts.

Postscript: Here's a critique (by George McConnel) from a traditional engineering perspective that has some good points. And, a summary (by Sarah Sheard) that covers much of the waterfront (also from a traditional perspective). Both are from a recent Symposium on Complex Systems Engineering.

Is the Edge a Separate Organization?

In a fascinating paper given at the 13th ICCRTS, Frank Barrett and Mark Nissen assert that the answer to this question is “yes.” In this paper, they discuss the agile and adaptable organizational pattern sometimes called an “edge organization.”

The authors assert that the key barriers to creating this organization are found in two basic features of hierarchical organizations:

• They are grounded in a “rational-cognitive framework” that is dominated by analytically- oriented processes focused on planning, organizing, and controlling.
• They are guided by “teleological action” that assumes clear and relatively static purposes and goals.

A purist might argue from an epistemological perspective that there’s no escaping some amount of reason-cognition and telos. However, I think the authors are using these terms to refer what dominates the organizational culture, not an organization that is either all reason-cognition/telos or no reason-cognition/telos.

The edge organization breaks both assumptions:

• Its decision context is too ambiguous and dynamic to be analyzed and planned.
• Its decision context is too ambiguous and dynamic to support the creation and/or sharing of a formal and detailed description of purposes and goals

If you’re familiar with Cynefin, this sounds like the contrast between Unordered and Ordered domains. Or, Tushman’s Exploration-Exploitation contrast.

Regardless, the authors focus on how organizational identity is formed and how that identity constrains organizational sensemaking. Their conclusion is that hierarchical and edge identities are so different that it’s not feasible to try to morph a hierarchy into an edge.

This question is an important one in NCW. I've assumed over the past few years that selected individuals could form up an edge organization within an existing hierarchy, and depicted this as an edge overlay on a standard hierarchy. The overlay resembles the informal social networks that allow any structured organization with formal processes to adapt to an inherently messy world.

And, I've assumed that the decentralizing technologies (SOA, Web 2.0, etc.) that are beginning to emerge would tend to catalyze this sort of transition from the bottom up since these technologies seem to have a strong edge orientation.

None of this is trivial; the agile management of roles/responsibilities/rights is a significant challenge, but I’ve always assumed that as the technology matured, edge-like communities (e.g., COIs) would be chartered and/or emerge. These authors seem to be implying that my assumptions are both naive and dangerous.

They cite several theoretical bases for their assertion. Among those are:

• Gidden’s structuration theory - this proposes that structure is created and recreated by action, and action is constrained or enabled by structure.
• Situation action theories - these focus on the dynamic interplay between the subject and the context.
• Pragmatic theories - these emphasize the interdependent nature of means and ends
• The phenomenological philosophy of Merleau-Ponty - among other things, this asserts that “embodiment is constitutive of perception and cognition.”

Merleau-Ponty’s perspective is especially provocative in that it highlights not only how our actions shape our perception of an environment and how our perception shapes our actions, but also how this recursive dynamic depends on the sensemaking locus of a body.

My summary of this dynamic would be “context elicits available embodied skills, which frame the context for action.” Or, in data-frame (Klein) terms, our repertoire of frames is largely the result of acquired embodied skills. The authors summarize this discussion by saying “Most of the time, we act spontaneously and pre-reflectively in accord with embodied skill.” For the individual this may seem obvious, but for a group, it raises interesting questions.

For example, what exactly is a group’s “perception” (or frame set) and how does that “perception” (frame set) interact with individual members’ “perceptions” (frame sets). A group’s “actions” is perhaps a bit clearer, even if the nature of group embodiment is not. In both cases, emergent behavior and understandings come from the interplay between individual actions and each individual’s perception of their own actions and other’s actions. A reductionist might approach these questions with some sort of modeling framework, but a much more appropriate and common locus seems to be that of "identity", which is perhaps the closest concept we have to individual and group "embodiment."

The authors assert that the various theoretical frameworks imply that individual and group identity is so strongly shaped by either a hierarchical culture or an edge culture that it’s not possible for a group of individuals to morph between the two cultures/identities. Instead, one must grow an edge organization outside of a hierarchical context, and the edge organization must be kept separate from the hierarchy to maintain its effectiveness.

In the second half of the paper, the authors describe five levels of competency using the perspective described above. They then assert three maxims for practice (emphasis added):

• “The doing, learning and on-the-job experience required to develop edge-like behaviors must take place in an environment that encourages and reinforces such edge-like behaviors.”
• “Edge organizations can emerge [only] from the activities, dialogs and interactions of people working together in an environment that encourages and reinforces edge-like behaviors.”
• “The people working together in an environment that encourages and reinforces edge-like behaviors must learn the kinds of activities, dialogs and interactions required for Edge organizations.”

Finally, they propose a three phase approach to building an edge organization. This approach focuses on increasing levels of organizational competence and involves (1) selecting and developing edge-oriented personnel, (2) creating edge-oriented conditions, and (3) engaging individuals and the group in edge-oriented activities.

Bottom line: In a sea of papers that are often techno-centric rehashes of existing sensemaking/NCW frameworks, this paper is a much needed reminder of the centrality of individual and group identity/skill formation and development in creating an ability to thrive at the edge.

Why Blogging Will be Rare In Enterprise 2.0

Merlin Mann has an interesting list of criteria for “What Makes a Good Blog?” I suppose you could say his criteria don’t apply to blogging within an enterprise, but I suspect that any blog that doesn’t meet most of them won’t be widely read.

Anyway, the item that really popped out for me was “Good blogs reflect obsessions.” Within even a large enterprise, I suspect there are very few people that (a) are obsessed about a work-related topic, (b) have the time and ability to create something distinctive and engaging, and (c) are willing to actually invest the required effort.

I think I meet the obsession criterion on the topic of sensemaking and its relationship to information technologies and organizational behavior. However, since workplace blogging is on my own time, I definitely struggle with investing the required time/effort. There’s only so many minutes in a lifetime, and we all have multiple roles/responsibilities to juggle.

Even if an enterprise had a process for identifying employees with work-related obsessions and believed the ROI was good enough to justify funding their blogging, I suspect good blogs would remain rare within the enterprise…they’re rare enough even in the much wider domain of the Internet.