Why Social Media is Counter-Enterprise

I admit it's impossible for me to really put myself in the shoes of an engineer or manager who is grounded in traditional frameworks and processes. Having been trained traditionally (CompSci undergrad, and MBA with an emphasis in Accounting), I understand the traditional perspectives.

However, since I've spent 20+ years exploring non-traditional perspectives to knowledge creation and management, I tend to see things as much (or more) from a Complex perspective as a Complicated perspective.

So, I often find I've grossly overestimated how much someone "gets" Complex aspects of a decision space. This post by David Wilcox is a nice discussion of the challenge. Enterprises are fundamentally grounded in what David Gurteen calls World 1.0. Their structures, processes, tools, and personnel are 1.0 in virtually all their formal aspects, and in many of their informal aspects.

The challenge is not, as some have implied, to change from 1.0 to 2.0. The challenge is to recognize how 1.0 and 2.0 interact in a specific context, and act accordingly (hence the unique value of Cynefin).

These kinds of discussions always make me wonder....if Hyperconnectivity is changing things this much in its early infancy, what sort of changes will we see a decade or two from now? Will those changes be, on balance, positive? And just how plastic are individuals and organizations in weaving an ever evolving tapestry of 1.0 warp and 2.0 woof?

Stories: Probing vs. Analysis

I've blogged previously about storytelling (though not nearly as much as you'd expect of someone who's interested in naturalizing approaches to complex decision contexts).

As social media begins to enter the enterprise, I better understand why those who emphasize the naturalizing aspects of KM also see stories as key sensemaking artifacts.

The intersection of the analytical culture that dominates large organizations with the probing nature of storytelling is fascinating...especially when experts try to synthesize analysis and stories. If you're a technically-oriented analyst who's grappling with the storytelling aspect of social media, here's a post from Anecdote that helps convey the complex probing nature of stories.

Micro-watts per Function Point?

Nick Carr's latest posting (along with a conversation with an IT facilities colleague) prompted me to wonder: Will Moore's Law (along with the associated standardization & interoperability at all levels, including semantic) eventually result in power being the primary way we measure SOFTWARE productivity?

Snowden on Social Media

Several items on social media appeared this week on Cognitive Edge:

• A new podcast and set of slides on the use of social media in what some are calling Enterprise 2.0. Well worth reviewing:
  http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/2008/11/km_asia_keynote_on_social_comp.php
• A subsequent conversation about IT's tendency toward centralized Complicated systems in a domain that's inherently Complex:
  http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/2008/11/the_major_obstacle_to_the_adop.php
• And, an interesting discussion about social computing and IT by the current guest blogger (Keith Fortowsky):
  http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2008/11/serious_play_in_a_complex_part_1.php#more

Here's my summary:

IT is about Simple & Complicated stuff (Cynefin), and social computing is about Complex (Cynefin) stuff.

So, IT tends to inadvertently stifle social computing by over-constraining it. As a result, it does not catalyze the kind of exploratory activities that characterize social computing.

The case may be overstated, but I think the basic concern has some merit.

This discussion seems to hint at a wider concern: large organizations are inherently bureaucratic and (mostly unintentionally) uneasy about relatively unconstrained activities. If you can't measure it, how do you know if it's worth it? How do you compute & monitor ROI?

This implies that social computing in a large organization is a bit oil-and-water...perhaps more of a challenge than it would seem at first glance. If social media is as revolutionary as some think it is, this aspect of it points toward a level of internal turmoil in large organizations that is unprecedented since their widespread emergence over 100 years ago....along with a change in structure so fundamental that it calls forth a new label. Identity crisis is just the jumping-off point.

Miscellaneous Complexity

I ran across a couple of interesting Cynefin-related items this week:

• 10 Principles of the New Business Intelligence (Tom Davenport, HBS) - Tom shows a pyramid that looks a lot like Cynefin's Simple, Complicated, Complex. It's titled "The Relationship Between Decisions and Information: Three Options", and shows them as Automated, Structured Human, and Loosely-Coupled. It's definitely highlighting key issues: the contextual aspect of decision support, the linking of information to decisions, and the emerging pattern of loosely-coupled. Several of the principles seem a bit slanted to the Complicated/Analytical perspective (e.g., loosely-coupled is efficient to provision, but often not effective...that seems a bit simplistic to me), but will definitely catalyze the kinds of conversations about information and decisions that remain all too uncommon.
• Trust and coherent group action ("When Should We Collaborate", Shawn Callahan at Anecdote) - Shawn describes three levels of interaction (Coordination, Cooperation, and Collaboration) that are characterized by increasing trust, increasing informal interaction, and decreasing formal interaction. He maps these directly to Cynefin's Simple, Complicated, and Complex. I like the Coordination, Cooperation, Collaboration taxonomy since these terms tend to get used a bit sloppily, and I really like the linkages to trust levels, formality, and Cynefin. This kind of thinking helps clarify some of the issues associated with group movement among the three types of activities (I remain optimistic, perhaps naively, that relatively small assemblages (~5 distinctive chunks at all levels above the individual) can move with some agility among all three domains...though the identity-shifting may turn out to be just too difficult for a multi-layer assemblage (i.e., more than 5 people)).