Sensemaking@TheEdge

Social Media, Emergence, and Telos

2011-11-13T13:49:00.001-08:00

MIT's Sloan Management Review recently published an interview with Anthony Bradley and Mark McDonald about their new book "The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees."

I was encouraged to see them emphasize the need for Purpose in the creation of effective social media-based communities. There's a lot of money being thrown at corporate social media with a "build it and they will come" / "emergence magic" mindset.

Social media with no coherence, boundaries, and attractors is Chaos. Internet-scale chaos works for socialization purposes where individuals form their own informal communities. But, even the largest companies will probably find the intersection of "bottom-up" communities and the company's key exploratory activities relatively small.

Within a company, purposefully working to "manage the emergence of beneficial coherence within boundaries, within attractors" would seem to be an essential partial constraint on social media.

Seems like we prefer mindless solutions: an algorithm at one extreme or "emergence magic" at the other. Managing complexity (and complicatedness) requires intention and mindfulness ... drones need not apply.

Identity as a Learning Disability

2011-11-13T13:15:00.001-08:00

Two recent articles on identity's effect on learning caught my eye. Both seem to lean toward the possibility that Identity inhibits learning when it focuses more on what I am (we are) than on what I do (we do) ... ontology vs. action/telos.

"Why Do Some People Learn Faster?" - Wired blog post discussing a new study showing that academic accomplishment is increased by praising effort and inhibited by praising ability. My reaction: seems like more fallout from a century-old societal shift from Christian skepticism about fallen humanity to secular optimism about human perfectability. For more, see Freud , John Dewey, the birth of modern progressivism. The therapeutic mindset, so strange barely a 100 years ago, is now so pervasive as to be invisible.
"Can Everyone Be Smart At Everything?" - KQED covering much of the same ground.

This is one of those topics that quickly becomes a lightening rod for all kinds of noise. I suspect it's not productive to allow culture war issues associated with identity to detract from the task at hand. As someone who loves to create stories (and despite my antipathy towards pragmatism as a worldview), I liked this quote from a recent Peggy Noonan column:

"Here's the problem: There is no story. At the end of the day, there is only reality. Things work or they don't. When they work, people notice, and say it."

Data Priori Computing

2011-09-21T17:17:00.000-07:00

A year ago I discussed the possibility of an emerging frontier of computing ... "smart machine, smart human". Instead of me sitting in/on a machine's hard-coded data processing loop, the machine uses a mesh of sensors and processors to look over my shoulder and anticipate what information I need to maker better decisions.

It's a "machine on my loop" instead of "me in/on a machine's loop".

Walt Mossberg's WSJ review of a new browser add-on called Digital Folio made me wonder whether smart computing will be more about data than function. What makes Digital Folio compelling is that it's tightly focused on one type of data (price) within a specific context (shopping), and that the add-on has been designed to smartly and unobtrusively weave "just enough" additional data into the user's sensemaking work.

At a more general level, I'm beginning to wonder if the primary "smart machine" design challenge is to make it fun for the novice user to "play" with them. And, to make it unobtrusively slip into the user's normal sensemaking flow.
If that's the case, then what makes a smart machine fun/playful? Here's some snap reactions on a design approach:

Identify the one/few data items that are the "pivot points" of a decision/sensemaking context. For Digital Folio, these include the product and its price, along with the context of shopping for electronics equipment.
Identify what makes these data item(s) most intriguing within the context ... specifically, determine how the core data item values/relationships shift between ambiguity and clarity. For Digital Folio, price is the key data item.
Finally, create a compelling "in-the-flow" user interface so that a novice user can "play with / probe" the data and its connections within a specific sensemaking context.

The design work order ....

Identify key data within a specific sensemaking context
Design a UI that (a) makes key data/connections compelling, (b) allows the user to immediately see interesting possibilities in the data/connections, and (c) enables the user to easily explore the data/connections
Define the required functionality

... reverses the typical machine design process:

Define function(s) that automate one or more tasks
Create a user interface for a specific user community-need
Design the data schema

Since the user's key sensemaking/decision data precedes everything, I thought the term Data Priori Computing captured the overall concept which:

focuses on sensemaking-centric data (traditional computing focuses on machine-function-centric data)
leverages the user's contextual flow of sensemaking data to create a framework for the emergence of presentation and function, possibly guided by the user's interaction with the data
is a context-centric bundle of data-presentation-function where the data is a tightly focused nexus around which all sensemaking and decision making revolves (it is not BI or data mining)

BTW, when I googled "Data Priori" the only place I saw this term used in a similar way was "The Global Data Palette: Massive Databases and the Reformation of Content Creation in Film/Video and Music/Sound Art Practice" ... data-priori movie-making.

Deloitte Report on Social SW in Business

2011-04-18T18:51:00.000-07:00

Deloitte has released an interesting report on the ongoing effort to discover how social SW can create real value in an enterprise.

It's a helpful reminder that social SW in business requires much more than "build it and they will come", since a business's stakeholder community has neither the size nor the scope of the Internet.

And, it emphasizes the need to focus on outputs (eg, value-added) instead of inputs (eg, adoption rates).

There are several challenges discussed:

1. Employees must gain some basic familiarity with the tool. While some Internet-based knowledge will transfer, business-specific tools will have their own learning curve, even if they're based on common open source SW.

2. Employees must discover how the tool can help them do their job better. There's no recipe for this, and I suspect that existing roles & processes will have to remain largely intact during the initial adoption phase. One employee at Alcoa is quoted as saying "One day it just clicked for me. ... That's when I started seeing Traction help me do my job better."

3. There's a bit of an ontological mismatch between the formal teleological structures of a workplace (processes, roles, organizations, etc) and the unstructured (mostly) telos-free landscape of social SW. A "deer in the headlights" response is entirely appropriate. Add in employee workload and a relative low level of employee engagement, and you're looking at a daunting task to (a) find potential high-value, low-cost bridges between "as-is" and "to-be", and (b) build critical mass once promising bridges are identified. This mismatch seems to grow exponentially as the size & bureaucracy of the business grows.

None of this is Simple or Complicated; it's definitely "managing the emergence of beneficial coherence within attractors within boundaries" (Snowden).

Deloitte asserts that the need for these tools is becoming critical as work is increasingly characterized by activities with significant Complex (exploratory) aspects (page 7).

Figure 3 lists five "unique" capabilities of social SW:
1. Identify expertise
2. Facilitate cross-boundary communication & conversation
3. Preserve institutional memory
4. Harness distributed knowledge
5. Discover emerging opportunities

Unfortunately, there seems to be little, if any, awareness that these tools are unlikely to be used effectively for these purposes unless there's good social connectivity across the business. There's a "chicken-egg" problem here that folks like Dave Snowden have addressed with such activities as Social Network Stimulation. I'm not sure I see much awareness in this report of how critical this issue is.

The discussion of metrics (pp. 9-11) made me slightly uneasy (eg. "Recipe for Success"); an understanding that there's a risk that a metric will become a goal (thereby ceasing to be a metric) seems to be missing. A boundaries/attractors approach would seem to be more effective; maybe this was done for the OSIsoft example, but if so, it's not clear. It seems more of a "build it and they will come", though that may just be retrospective coherence.

Figure 10, a "Social software capability and tool heatmap", may be the most interesting part of the report. My initial reaction was that the ratings (eg, a Prediction Market is rated as Low for "Preserve institutional memory") might be a bit simplistic, but they're still interesting. I suppose you could try to envision scenarios where a rating is completely wrong if you find the table offensive.

Bottom line: the overall approach feels more Complicated than Complex; I kept thinking that a sensemaking approach (eg, construction of a Cynefin map) would be much more effective in identifying and exploring how to best use social SW in a business context. Although there are hints that the authors understand this (pp. 16-17), I would have thought that they (John Hagel and John Seely Brown) would have spent more time discussing Complex needs and approaches.

A Flat World is Noisy

2011-02-20T14:31:00.000-08:00

Much (negative and positive) has been written about Thomas Friedman's 2005 discussion of globalization ("The World Is Flat"). A key enabler of globalization has been transportation, communications, and information technologies.

The current issue of the Sloan Management Review has an article discussing leadership in this context ("Flat World, Hard Boundaries - How To Lead Across Them", Ernst & Chrobot-Mason).

A few snap reactions (which are equally applicable to the use of social media inside an organization):

1. A flat world is noisy. Although the opportunity for amazing new "signal" emerges in a flat world, the risk of increased noise drowning it out is real. Brokers of various types used to manage this risk in the physical world. Increasingly connected and transparent individuals and organizations are almost bereft of tools to manage this risk in the virtual world.

2. Focus becomes much more important in a noisy world. At the same time, leaders are much more constrained in their ability to control & command focus. They are left with a largely complex task; in Dave Snowden's memorable phrase "managing the emergence of beneficial coherence within attractors within boundaries." At the same time, they are largely unprepared to either recognize or effectively engage complex contexts.

3. As a result, leaders must simultaneously address at two difficult and novel issues: increased noise, and managing complexity.

The six boundary-spanning practices the authors discuss are not inherently bad. I'd feel better, however, if they emphasized the need for these practices to be introduced in the context of very specific customer-driven tasks and goals. Without that focus and discipline I'm afraid the authors' advice could easily be warped into some sort of "happy-clappy" initiative where generic "do-good" activities do more to breed cynicism than success.

Misc. Sensemaking Items

2011-01-09T15:12:00.000-08:00

Figure 5 of this AF report has sensemaking woven all through it
A human-intensive approach to defeating IED attacks shows promise
Our understanding of how to weave the mindful and the mindless (i.e., unordered and ordered) is immature at best; see, for example, experiments in easing traffic-related "boundaries"
"Self-evident computing"? ... something about "self-evident" grates, but the basic idea reflects the trend toward weaving technology and sensemaking
Sensemaking always has a teleological aspect ... a good, if rambling reminder, from one social media commentator
A key driver for sensemaking is the explosion of IT-based solution spaces and the associated need to constrain them enough for useful innovation to occur
More evidence of just how utopian the dreams of singularity are ... and of the vast gulf between IT and neurological structures/processes
As someone who has taught Statistics, I liked this discussion of the scientific method and statistical analysis. It highlights a basic fact: getting really good data is the hard part; the numbers are easy. And, despite a few exceptions, it shows that any statistical discussion of a complex system (and all biological systems are complex) is very vulnerable to mis-interpretation.

SW Development Archetypes

2010-11-03T08:09:00.000-07:00

Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond has published a report on Software Development Archetypes. In it, he describes 3 archetypes: Solid Utility, Trusted Supplier, Partner Player. Based on his description, these seem to map to the Simple, Complicated, and Complex domains of Cynefin (using Cynefin as a taxonomy).

Since the report is behind a paywall, see slide 16 of this recent presentation by Hammond on open source software and lean development for a summary of the archetypes.

Smart Machine, Smart Human

2010-09-28T18:07:00.000-07:00

At the risk of being simplistic, I'm starting to wonder whether the evolution of information tools might not be something like the following:

1. Dumb machine, dumb human - hammers, shovels, etc. (caveat: I'm not dissing the craftsmanship of a Michelangelo...I'm talking about information)

2. Smart machine, dumb human - monolithic systems (e.g., mainframes) with a priesthood of operators that tend to them. "human on the loop"

3. Dumb machine, smart human - distributed systems (e.g. networked PCs, pre-mobile Internet) with humans using the machine as a "speed of need" information tool in a fixed location. "human in the loop"

4. Smart machine, smart human - adaptive agent-like chunks of IT that we weave into our everyday sensemaking activities everywhere we go. "machine on the loop"

The last stage is just emerging...Apple's amazing market cap is evidence of the potential value of such a combination. However, it is a complete paradigm shift (in the strong Kuhnian sense of the word) from machine-centric to human-centric

It raises a fundamental issue: how do you enable humans to easily create, monitor, and manage automated micro-models/narratives? And, do all this within the daily flow of sensemaking?

I mentioned one possible approach a couple of years ago...it seems awfully crude in retrospect and it does not begin to address the create/monitor/manage challenge (which is the real "magic" in the ecosystems that Apple has created).

The only widely used general user IT *modeling* tool I can think of is a spreadsheet (Project is a specialist tool IMO). However, spreadsheet modeling is not done "on-the-fly", so it provides no insight into how to weave micro-modeling into sensemaking flow.

The challenge posed by a smart human, smart machine capability is daunting; the potential is incredible. The good news is that the necessary pre-conditions are largely in place, the needed tools are emerging, and we have some good frameworks for thinking about how to go about architecting this kind of IT (e.g., Klein's Data-Frame, Cynefin).

Meshing Exploration and Exploitation

2010-09-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year I posted a couple of items discussing how information technology seems to cycle through complex-complicated-simple-chaotic as a new capability moves from (a) a one-of-a-kind monolithic structure to (b) a partially decoupled structure to (c) a commoditized fully decoupled structure which then (d) provides a chaotic swirl of standardized components that are then used to create a brand new capability with a monolithic structure (Techno-Apocalypse and Business Models, IT, Architecture, Cynefin). I also alluded to the possibility that the time it takes IT to traverse this cycle is rapidly dropping...which may be one reason the whole Explore-Exploit contrast is getting more attention.

Anyway, I just ran across an OSCON (July 2010) presentation by Simon Wardley entitled "Situation Normal, Everything Must Change") that covers much of the same ground...though in a far more entertaining fashion. Highly recommended (even though I'm not a big fan of the "flashing/slashing graphics" style of presentation).

Explore and Exploit - some background

2010-09-05T13:18:00.000-07:00

Although it's been several years since this compare-contrast first hit me, I suppose I should make a note of a few of the resources that helped me see that this view/pattern is probably widespread.

1. This first came from my thinking about the Cynefin framework (as a taxonomy, in this case) in conjunction with business processes and innovation...I first saw this as Discovery and Execution. This morphed into Exploration and Execution.

When I went searching for literature with these terms, I came across a number of items, including the following:

2. John Hagel and John Seely Brown's disucussion of Push Programs and Pull Platforms.

3. "When Learning and Performance are at Odds: Confronting the Tension", Singer and Edmondson, Harvard Business School Working Paper. See especially Figure 3.

4. Various HBS working papers by Tushman, et. al. Two that I found useful were:
"Organizational Designs and Innovation Streams"
"Ambidexterity as a Dynamic Capability"

5. "Strategy and Your Stronger Hand" by Geoffrey Moore (Harvard Business Review, December 2005.

6. "Organizing for Innovation in the 21st Century" by Deborah Dougherty (Rutgers Business School September 2004) - this has a nice summary of various approaches to innovation

7. "Planning: Complex Endeavors" by Alberts and Hayes - one in a series of publications about complexity and NCW that was published by the DoD's CCRP. This publication is the follow-on to Alberts and Hayes' "Understanding Command and Control", also recommended. If you're completely unfamiliar with how complexity science relates to organizations, Czerwinski's "Coping with the Bounds" is not a bad intro.

I'm sure there are lots of other (and much earlier) writers who've discussed this...these just happen to be some of the folks that helped me see what seems to be a basic pattern. Now that I think about it, Klein's Data Frame model covers this space well (i.e., "elaborate" is Exploit, "question" and "reframe" are Explore).

"Simple" IT

2010-08-30T13:59:00.000-07:00

One possible indication of the end of the Dark Age of IT will be that "complex" has a negative connotation and "simple" has a positive one when used in conjunction with IT products/services.

Seems like the labels we currently use to describe IT capabilities tend to be more ontological than epistemological....I suppose there are lots of potential reasons why...one might be that there's no end in sight to the ontological task of creating IT models of "the world."

NCW Update

2010-08-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

Recently the Defense Business Board recommended that the Assistant SecDef's Networking and Information Integration (NII) office be eliminated. With that recommendation has come a new round of "death of NCW" commentaries (e.g., Lexington Institute, Wired).

I hesitate to comment on these since I've done so before...but, I feel obliged to make two observations:

These critiques continue to either misunderstand or mischaracterize the nature of NCW. They create a techno-centric strawman, one that makes war deterministic and neat. This is wrong...NCW is more about cognitive and social factors than technology. The core of NCW is improving sensemaking and decision making, with technology only a tool. Large technology-rich armies and small technology-poor groups of insurgents can both operate in a net-centric fashion. See, as previously mentioned, "The Implementation of Network Centric Warfare", especially Figures 5 and 11.
The US has a bias towards technology and formal processes. So, it's not surprising that the US implementation of NCW theory has largely ignored its social and cognitive aspects. And, it's not surprising that, as net-centric technologies and concepts became pervasive, a central office (NII) for their promulgation became largely irrelevant.

Leaders Aren't Hoop-Jumpers

2010-05-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

The American Scholar has published a speech that William Deresiewicz gave last year at West Point. Entitled "Solitude and Leadership", it has some observations about leadership that are similar to those made by the Hopper brothers in "The Puritan Gift."

I especially liked the following:

An observation about kids at Yale...seems like this is the implicit goal of all large Western organizations these days...the creation of "excellent sheep."
So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.”
A comparison of Marlow's description of the Central Station manager in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" with the stereotypical hoop-jumping bureaucrat:
About the 10th time I read that passage, I realized it was a perfect description of the kind of person who tends to prosper in the bureaucratic environment. ..... it was a perfect description of the head of the bureaucracy that I was part of, the chairman of my academic department—who had that exact same smile, like a shark, and that exact same ability to make you uneasy, like you were doing something wrong, only she wasn’t ever going to tell you what. Like the manager ...... the head of my department had no genius for organizing or initiative or even order, no particular learning or intelligence, no distinguishing characteristics at all. Just the ability to keep the routine going ...
On leadership:
...... for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders. What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.
On multitasking:
Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

I'm a little uneasy about some of the fuzziness in the author's description of solitude...nothing in, nothing out. But, I completely agree that we need time for things to soak in and we need to periodically take some serious time out to consider ideas that have been percolating.

Bill Gates' annual retreat is a bit too structured for me, but anyone who's serious about ideas has to occasionally spend a significant amount of time slowly chewing on core aspects of fundamentals (e.g., assumptions, constraints, coupling, connections, etc) of what matters most.

Nick Carr's upcoming book "The Shallows" looks to be an interesting look at how IT is "making us dumber."

Web OS Speculations

2010-05-08T16:56:00.000-07:00

A couple of "must read" takes on the companies, architectures, and business models that will dominate the next wave of IT:

Charlie Stross on "Why Steve Jobs Hates Flash". I thoroughly enjoyed Stross's "Halting State", so I'm always intrigued by his take on IT
Tim O'Reilly on the "State of the Internet Operating System" (Part 1, Part 2) - O'Reilly's always worth reading, but these two (long) posts are "must read".

I haven't seen stuff this intriguing since the early Web 2.0 days....

"Thinking Traps" Trap

2010-05-08T11:54:00.000-07:00

A couple of recent posts on "Thinking Traps" (Part 1, Part 2) are typical examples of discussions of how cognitive limitations can result in poor decision making.

While an awareness of this sort of thing is good, these discussions almost always focus on (a) specific biases, or (b) processes/heuristics that help compensate for or avoid these biases.

Those of us who design IT-intensive capabilities for expert use need something more substantive: models of how experts make decisions in the real world. Which is why I'm a big fan of Gary Klein's writing (e.g., Data-Frame, Sources of Power).

Techno-Apocalypse

2010-05-06T19:32:00.000-07:00

Clay Shirky sparked a fair amount of dialogue about the dangers of what he called "Complex Business Models" in a recent post. This is an important topic that is not discussed enough, so I was happy to see him take a shot at it.

My snap reaction was that he was describing a dynamic that is (a) becoming commonplace, and (b) accelerating. This dynamic consists of the following:

A concept/technology emerges.
An almost "one-of-a-kind" capability is built (e.g., IBM's Stretch computer). This capability is tightly coupled internally, and certain aspects of it are not well understood.
If the capability becomes more available (e.g., cheaper), fault lines in the internally coupling begin to emerge (e.g., plug-compatible peripherals). At this point, variations of the capability are created and adapted to different specific needs/uses (e.g., IBM 360).
If the capability moves toward a mass market, key coupling fault lines will be institutionalized via de facto or de jure standards, and the capability will be built of interoperable components (e.g., IBM PC).
Finally, these interoperable components and standards will provide much of the raw material for the creation of a new concept/technology (e.g., what has become the Web), starting the process all over.

The risk Clay discusses is real during the tightly-coupled phase of this dynamic. And, his concerns are becoming increasingly valid as (a) these loops are being traversed faster and faster for IT-intensive capabilities, (b) the interoperable components/standards ecosystem grows at an exponential rate, and (c) the transparency of a capability's structure (which allows critical dependencies to be seen clearly) decreases exponentially, at least during the tightly-coupled phase.

Complicating the Complex

2010-05-06T18:56:00.000-07:00

Almost every week I see confusion caused by the lack of a vocabulary that distinguishes between Cynefin's Complicated domain and its Complex domain.

The latest incident was an article entitled "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint" in the 27 April New York Times. I was walking through the airport that Tuesday morning and was amused to see a familiar diagram above the fold on Page 1.

The article was the latest in a long line of critiques of the use and abuse of PowerPoint, including a dash of McLuhanesque "media is the message" thrown in for good measure. There's not much to add here...though I do find it slightly puzzling that the focus is almost totally on how the tool can/is abused, versus how the tool can/should be used to be effective.

Regardless, the graphic shown is the real story...it's a classic Systems Dynamics concept map that provides a good example of the limitations of trying to create a Complicated map of a Complex context. In defense of those who created it, I suspect that the conversations that went into creating it were valuable. And, as a focal point for an ongoing series of conversations about the social/cultural landscape, it probably has some use.

However, this diagram has inevitably left out key entities and linkages that are (a) rarely active, and (b) extremely important....i.e., it left out linkages that may provide the most leverage in achieving a specific contextually activated goal. If you're familiar with the Cognitive Edge tools and methods, you understand that there's a more effective way to address this kind of need. Unfortunately, most folks still lack the vocabulary to distinguish between the Complicated from the Complex and fail to realize that this "unknown unknown" would significantly increase their ability to effectively characterize a Complex context.

Cultural Perceptions

2010-04-13T18:55:00.000-07:00

I ran across an interesting monograph by Christine MacNulty that discusses (among other things) how culture influences perception. A few snap reactions:

p. 11 - a nice table contrasting how Eastern and Western thinking differs. Dave Snowden often points this out in his talks.
p. 22 - alludes to a move "away from authoritarian epistemology of medieval religious doctrine"....while this monograph only touches on the emergence of modern science, this seems slightly simplistic. See, for example, Frances Yates' "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition", Carl Becker's "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophyers", or Pierre Duhem's "The System of the World."
p. 26 - places epistemology on a spectrum from authority-based to empirical - seems like a triad with the emotive at a third corner might be a bit more realistic (inspired by Cognitive Edge's patent-pending triadic scale)....I understand the reason for the over-simplification, but it still makes me cringe slightly... :-)

Anyway, it's an intriguing take on cultural analysis. Check it out if you have an interest in this sort of thing.

Business Models, IT, Architecture, Cynefin

2010-03-20T14:23:00.000-07:00

Dave Snowden continues to hone his description of business life cycles in a recent presentation and podcast from the Henley KM Forum Conference.

His discussion coheres with thoughts I've be considering recently...how People, Processes, Organizations, and Technology intersect with Cynefin. Here's a few observations:

It seems that IT-intensive businesses move roughly from Complex to Complicated to Simple in the following sense: an amorphous vision emerges in Complex space where existing knowledge and interoperable resources are "mashed-up" in unexpected ways to explore potential new capabilities. A one-of-a-kind capability is created, which, if it is valuable enough, creates a rough pattern for creating new versions of the capability in Complicated space. If the new capability can find a relatively large market, then a vertically integrated architecture will emerge where the capability begins to segment into interoperable layers. Finally, if the interfaces among the layers become standardized, the overall capability may move into Simple space where each of the layers becomes a submarket with vendors competing to provide components, assembly line integrators allowing end users to "build their own" capability, and the few vendors with critical intellectual property controlling the ecosystem of the new mass market version of the capability.
An example from the area of computers: IBM's Stretch (Complex, moving into Complicated), IBM System/360 family (Complicated, moving into Simple), and the IBM PC (built from interchangeable parts; quickly became dominated by Intel and Microsoft, and a volatile, competitive, low margin market for almost everything else, including integration of the parts).
Such a cycle might be seen in physically-intensive industries (e.g., automobiles, guns), but the lack of malleability of a product that is mostly physical (vs. a product that is dominated by information) constrains the evolutionary potential.
Businesses in Complex space tend toward small high-margin consultancies, innovation groups, and startups. They are exploratory groups that focus on vision, probing, and prototyping.
Businesses in Complicated space tend toward large medium-margin analytically-oriented organizations that work to bridge the gap between a new capability and the existing ecosystems of People, Processes, Organizations, and Technology. They are exploitative groups that focus on architecting and systems engineering to provide the new capability to users who can afford it. As the vertically integrated capability finds a larger market, it begins to segment horizontally, and the businesses tend to shift toward processes that are less "skunk works" and more "Six Sigma."
Businesses in Simple space tend to be large low-margin rules-oriented organizations that work to provide a generic capability at the cheapest price possible. They are exploitative groups that focus on predictable process execution. As the capability moves into a mass market, standard interfaces result in submarkets of interoperable components.
The interoperable components and associated standards eventually float into a Chaotic space where they can be recombined to start a new cycle of Complex-Complicated-Simple.
The cycle time through C-C-S decreases dramatically wherever a wide range of interoperable components and associated standards appears. At some point, the cycle may be largely Complex-Simple, with little, if any, movement through Complicated.

As I was putting these thoughts together, I reviewed a HBS Working Paper ("The Architecture of Platforms") by Carliss Baldwin and Jason Woodard I had read a year or so ago. My notes in the paper prompted me to look for other presentations by Baldwin. She has a number of them that discuss IT architecture's shift from vertically integrated capabilities to horizontal layers of modules...her "Design Theory and Methods" presentation at L'Ecole de Mines (Oct 2007) has a series of slides on the computer industry from 1979 to 2005 that nicely illustrates the point.

And, Clayton Christensen's latest book, "The Innovator's Prescription", covers similar ground. See this presentation from the Health Information Technology (HIT) Symposium. The voice track helps but is not free (unless your company subscribes to a service which provides this sort of thing).

Finally, it's not just the good guys who understand this dynamic...the agility and adaptability of the bad guys in asymmetric warfare indicates the importance of being able to quickly cycle through Complex to Complicated to Simple...or maybe just cycle quickly between Complex and Simple as communications, command and control, processing, and sensor capabilities are increasingly interoperable, cheap, and pervasive.

Accountability - Control = Catalyst

2010-02-13T20:01:00.000-08:00

[Just to be clear up front...the title of this post means "the gap between span of accountability and span of control (where accountability exceeds control) catalyzes exploration"...that may not pop out from a cursory reading of what follows.]

[Note: assumes familiarity with Cynefin]

Ever since the explore-exploit tension came to my attention in O'Reilly and Tushman's 2004 HBR article on the "ambidextrous organization", any discussion of it has been of interest...primarily because of its resonance with Cynefin ("Exploit" is an Ordered domain tactic, and "Explore" a Complex domain tactic).

The most recent discussion I've seen is an HBS working paper ("Accountability and Control as Catalysts for Strategic Exploration and Exploitation: Field Study Results", Simmons).

As Simmons observes, there's no clear agreement on how organizations should balance the tension between Exploit and Explore. At one extreme, both can be integrated at the lowest organizational level. At the other extreme, Exploration can be assigned to a dedicated group at the enterprise level. Regardless, managing the tradeoffs between the two seems to be a Complex (probing/exploratory) job.

In this working paper, Simmons uses data from 102 field studies to study two related organizational variables, span of control and span of authority, and how they can be varied to explore one aspect of the tension between Exploitation and Exploration.

My initial reaction was that a traditional approach to control systems and delegation of authority would probably look more like analyzing Complicated domains (e.g., balanced scorecards, Six Sigma, etc) than probing Complex ones. Although Simmons acknowledges the need for the former, his earlier research focused on interactive control systems that are designed for the latter.

In this paper, he investigates violations of the "controllability principle", which states that a manager's span of control and span of accountability should be the same. He comes to the conclusion that innovation (Exploration) may actually require that the span of accountability be significantly larger than the span of control.

Span of control (C) and span of accountability (A) differ depending on job type (a CEO has a wide range of both; a front-line supervisor has a narrow range of both), and can be combined in various ways:

C = A As discussed above, this is considered to be the desired norm at all levels for Exploitation activities. My reaction was that it maps to Cynefin's Simple (for lower organizational levels) and Complicated (for upper organizational levels) domains.
C > A At all levels, this is a recipe for inefficiency...the inefficiency gap may be Chaotic (i.e., agents may be relatively unconstrained in those areas where they exercise control without accountability)
A > C This creates what Simmons calls the "Entrepreneurial Gap", where managers must explore areas outside of their control to close the gap between accountability and control. This seems to map to Cynefin's Complex domain. This is consistent with the oft-made observation that constraining resources seems to spark innovation. Influence, not control, must be used to span the gap between C and A. The use of persuasion, not coercion, requires the manager to use attractors and boundaries that can exert influence to achieve a goal (rather than the blunt imposition of Ordered controls). This forces the organization to orient itself toward key uncontrollable entities related to accountability (customers, partners, etc). Where A exceeds C across the enterprise in a coherent way, a coherent external orientation may also emerge across the enterprise, providing a framework for coherent Exploration across organizational stovepipes...an activity that is not, by definition, subject to detailed planning and control.

Sometimes, A is increased or C is decreased (or both) deliberately to encourage Exploration...but an entrepreneurial gap can also be unexpectedly imposed by shifts in external factors (e.g., technological shifts, financial crisis, etc). In these situations, adequate organizational resources, including such "soft" resources as identity and experience in exploring, can determine whether the organization flounders or thrives. And, the opposite can occur...external changes cause A to decrease, C to increase (or both), resulting in increased sloppiness & inefficiencies (e.g., the American auto industry after WWII).

See the paper for more details....the primary concept I took away was that C & A are organizational variables that can be changed to better match the organization's activities (explore/exploit) to its context (simple, complicated, complex).

Entertain or Empower?

2010-01-31T14:18:00.000-08:00

Ok, maybe it's a false dichotomy, but I think it's at least a contrast worth mentioning.

Neil Postman's classic "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" has been one of my favorite books since I read it in the late 80's. In it, he asserts that an image-centric age (TV, etc.) is inherently unable to engage in deep rational discourse.

He may overstate the case, but I think he has a point. His focus was political discourse and education, but the same observation has been applied to televangelists, popular scientists, and in this satirical video, to television news.

So, what does this have to do with enterprise KM? If you're trying to convey concepts of any complexity, you face a real challenge: how to convey the knowledge to an audience whose frames and micro-narratives lean toward entertainment. This is not just a challenge of a short attention span...it's also a challenge of a lack of practice in thinking about complicated cause-effect structures.

Sophisticated tools and visually sophisticated audiences often equals flashy pablum. I suppose that's ok for Madison Avenue, but I'm not sure how effective it is for in-depth education, especially where training budgets are tight.

We've all had talented teachers who had a knack for engaging, challenging, educating, and empowering students without wasting their time with superficial entertainment, so we know it's possible...but that's a topic for another post.

I generally don't like making a negative statement without pointing out some possible solutions, but in the interest of space, I'll limit this post to highlighting the challenge of corporate communication and education in a culture that is visually hyper-literate.

Core Prerequisites for Effective KM?

2010-01-29T20:12:00.000-08:00

Hagel & Seely Brown's Big Shift blog is usually worth reading...the latest post is a nice description of what seems to be an emerging agreement that catalyzing informal collaboration is the "sweet spot" of organizational KM.

This sentence caught my eye: "We've found in our research ... that new knowledge comes into being when people who share passions for a given endeavor interact and collaborate around difficult performance challenges." Though I'm sure they don't intend this statement to comprise a list of core prerequisites, it does seem like a plausible jumping-off point for discussion:

Passion - it takes hard work to create distinctive new knowledge that clearly adds new business value. Sometimes it's difficult to find folks who are truly passionate about their work/customers/market.
Specific Endeavor - serves to focus individual and group attention.
Collaboration - even individuals working alone "collaborate" with themselves via an internal conversation.
Difficult Challenge - forces folks to get outside of their normal thinking patterns
Performance Challenge - provides constraints, resulting in more innovation within the remaining degrees of freedom?

Seems like traditional KM captures the past, while & Hagel & Seely Brown's "creation spaces" catalyze the creation of the future.

Knowledge and the Chief's Mess

2010-01-29T18:23:00.000-08:00

There's way too many threads to chase (and far too little time to chase them) in a fascinating discussion of how the Chief's Mess has evolved in the U.S Navy. Here's at least a few of the issues that came to mind when I read this:

The perhaps hidden risks associated with "rationalizing" work (roles, training, rotation frequency, etc.)
How much in-depth knowledge needs to be available to deal with capabilities that are large tightly-coupled chunks of knowledge (often requiring deep technical knowledge to perform more than routine maintenance).
The challenge of providing leadership that requires both robust people skills and robust technical expertise...one common solution being splitting the job between two people since individuals who have both types of skills are rare.
Whether the mechanical (vs. IT) "tinkering" culture that was common a couple of generations ago has faded (again, see "The Puritan Gift"), and if so, why?, what are the implications?, etc.
The risks associated with the loss of transparency that comes with building capabilities up from layers of interoperable components (e.g., cloud computing, multi-layered derivatives, etc.)

The author also explicitly addresses related issues (e.g., generalist vs. specialist).

Anyway, if organizational behavior/knowledge is something you're interested in, you might find this worth reading.

Panarchy

2010-01-29T17:44:00.001-08:00

I debated saying anything on this topic...it just doesn't seem significant enough.

About the time Noah Raford's video discussing panarchy and Cynefin came to my attention, I had an e-mail exchange with a professor who has a long-time interest in panarchy (per Gunderson & Holling), but had never heard of Cynefin (he was, BTW, quite excited by Cynefin when I suggested he take a look at it).

Regardless, I must say that I'm a bit underwhelmed by panarchy, at least what I've seen in Raford's videos & slideshares. At the risk of oversimplifying, my initial reaction is that it seems like a synthesis of 3 concepts: (a) S-shaped growth curves, (b) the dis-integration of a system that occurs when the context to which it is adapted changes enough that the system ceases to be self-sustaining., and (c) fractals.

S-shaped growth curves - these are well known, at least in systems circles (I feel obliged to offer that caveat since it seems like someone is always kicking up a fuss by using an exponential growth curve to forecast either utopia or doom....like the concept of infinity, exponential growth curves that never flatten are found only in metaphysics).
Systems that fail to adapt and dis-integrate (not disintegrate) - this sort of thing always triggers TRIZ (the innovation framework) for me; a well-known business example is the Silicon Valley churn of resources and knowledge...most companies that become successful go through a classic S-shaped growth curve with an initially successful configuration, then fast growth, then stagnation, consolidation, and dis-integration...with the dis-integrated knowledge and resources made available for a new configuration. This cycle is shown in panarchy as a figure "8" on its side (or an infinity sign...a perhaps not-so-subtle hint (or perhaps ironic wink) that panarchy might very well be the sort of secret knowledge that appears in Dan Brown novels).
Fractals - panarchic infinity symbols can be nested and as a context traverses the curve of the infinity symbol, it can both be part of a larger & slower curve traversal (at a different scale), and it can contain smaller & faster curve traversals within it.

I hope that my initial reaction reflects ignorance, but panarchy seems a bit too linear/wooden to encompass contexts that are truly complex. I like each of the pieces (discussed above), but the combination as seen in panarchy seems like a case where the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Sensemaking - Cynefin

2010-01-25T19:41:00.000-08:00

I first became aware of Cynefin in a 2003 IBM Systems Journal article entitled "The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world." It is largely associated with Dave Snowden, although Snowden has a co-author in both of the primary articles describing it (the other is in the Nov 2007 Harvard Business Review).

It is one of the few truly new things I've seen, and has become a part of my everyday vocabulary and thinking.

Cynefin is in many ways a deep framework. Although the basics are straightforward, its foundations/origins are fundamental and therefore have a wide range of potential implications and application.

Since it's documented in wikipedia and there are some good videos on YouTube describing it, I'll focus on areas that are perhaps less discussed. I should state that most of what follows is an attempt to honestly summarize what I've read/heard of Snowden's writing/podcasts. I may have not fully grasped some of what was conveyed; any mis-statements are unintended and my own.

Cynefin seems to have sprung in part from a consideration of how ontology (study of the nature of being) interacts with epistemology (how we know) when it comes to making sense of a situation and translating that sense into action. See, for example, Snowden's 2005 article entitled "Multi-ontology sense making" at cognitive-edge.com
Cynefin describes the combination of the world and our ways of knowing it via 3 basic categories: Order, Unorder, and Disorder. Disorder is an area of epistemological and ontological uncertainty. Order is an area where cause-effect relationships are stable and knowable. Unorder is an area where cause-effect relationships are unstable and our ability to know them is limited or non-existent. You can quibble about where the line is between ontology and epistemology in Unorder, but I think most folks would agree that our current state of knowledge requires that we acknowledge real epistemological limits in current theory (e.g., it's unclear whether it will ever be possible to describe what goes on "inside the quantum box", Godel's Incompleteness Theorem with regard to formal systems, etc.) and in current practice (e.g., the tangled loops of cause and effect that characterize Complex Adaptive Systems).
Order consists of two subdomains: Simple and Complicated. This is where the traditional scientific method reigns...observe, hypothesize, experiment, repeat. In these subdomains, a reductionistic approach to understanding and creating systems is adequate.
Unorder consists of two subdomains: Chaotic and Complex. The Chaotic subdomain is an area where cause and effect are unintelligible. And, the Complex domain is an area where cause and effect are tangled, with only pattern recognition possible.

One way that Snowden summarizes the domains is as follows:

Order - the system constrains the agents
Complex - the systems and agents constrain each other
Chaos - the agents are unconstrained

Although I like that description, as someone who used to teach Statistics, I tend to want to add that the agents in the Ordered and Complex domains are probably much more heterogeneous (at least with regard to the qualities we're interested in) than the agents in a Chaotic domain. Whether Snowden would agree is unclear.

Finally, Snowden seems to enjoy the interplay between theory and practice, which is reflected in an ongoing and evolving synthesis of various concepts from the social, cognitive, and complexity sciences. Some folks find this a bit difficult to parse; personally, I enjoy the journey. See the Resources section of cognitive-edge.com if you're interested in learning more. Until Snowden's long-promised book arrives, you'll have to create your own synthesis of the ideas he's put forth over the past few years.

A caveat: as with any framework that (a) has evolved, (b) is non-trivial, and (c) has become popular in certain circles, some folks will distort it (inadvertently or deliberately)....the more sophisticated of these distortions evoke a response I first had 4-5 years ago when I ran across an astonishingly bad (yet sophisticated) misinterpretation of NCW theory (where the author tried to recast NCW into something he had created a decade earlier): "The best use of this would be as a final exam in a course on the topic, with the only instruction being 'List, explain, and correct the primary misconceptions in the following paper.'"

Work Design & Task Identity

2010-01-04T19:31:00.000-08:00

Harvard Business Review just published their list of "Breakthrough Ideas for 2010." Since the new social-mobile information technologies hold the potential to restructure much of the work we do, I found the first "breakthrough idea" especially interesting: the single most important factor in great workday was a feeling that the worker had made progress.

One implication is that work should be structured so that everyone perceives clear progress each day. Among other things, this has a tie to Klein's Data-Frame model...work that is perceived as rewarding may be as much or more about how it's framed as it is about what is actually accomplished. Naturally, there are limits...a pig with lipstick is still a pig.

Anyway, this reminded me of one of the texts from my master's program...Hackman & Oldham's "Work Redesign" (kind of strange coincidence..tonight I was watching "This Emotional Life" on PBS and Hackman was one of the people interviewed). In this book, they propose a model of the properties that make a job rewarding. This model consists of 5 Core Job Characteristics that lead to 3 Psychological States necessary for high internal motivation. If you've not seen such a model before, you might find the 5 characteristics interesting:

Skill variety - degree to which a job requires a variety of different activities, involving different skills and talents
Task identity - degree to which a job requires completion of a "whole" and identifiable piece of work
Task significance - degree to which a job has a substantial impact on the lives of other people (e.g., a fireman)
Autonomy - degree to which a job provides substantial freedom, independence, and discretion to the individual in scheduling and carrying out the work
Job feedback - degree to which the work activities provide direct and clear information about the worker's performance

Task identity is basically the "progress" component of a job.

I don't do this sort of work, nor have I ever used this model in any kind of analysis. And, the book dates from an era that was focused on enriching jobs (with some justification...though the enrichment in the West seems to have been much cruder and more superficial (at least in manufacturing), than in Eastern companies like Toyota), and was characterized by "expert" consultants who would come in and "fix" things.

Bottom line: even though much of Hackman & Oldham's analysis seems grounded in the older control of function & control of information paradigms, the factors they identify seem as relevant as ever...especially since we seem to be moving toward an era where knowledge workers will have an increasing amount of say in how work is organized and framed.

Sensemaking - Klein

2010-01-03T16:52:00.000-08:00

Gary Klein is perhaps the leading researcher on how individuals actually make sense of a context. His Data-Frame model is an essential tool for anyone trying to improve decision making, especially on the edge.

In this model, Klein focuses on two sensemaking objects: (a) the data that is constantly streaming by a decision maker, and (b) the frames the decision maker uses to organize that data. As data streams by, frames are selected, elaborated, questioned, abandoned, and created. Although this may seem simple, it is not simplistic. Klein sees it as useful in catalyzing exploration; as with Weick's Enact-Select-Retain, it provides no simple answers.

A similar approach is seen in Zhang & Soergel's Sensemaking Model, which has a structure that seems slightly more linear than Klein's.

Klein is perhaps best known for his book, Sources of Power. Although it's only 10 years old, it's already a classic on how individuals make decisions...and, another "must-read" for students of sensemaking.

Sensemaking - Weick

2010-01-01T21:18:00.000-08:00

Karl Weick has been researching sensemaking for almost 40 years. His "Social Psychology of Organizing" (2nd edition, 1979) remains the most thought-provoking book on the topic I've read, and is the first place I'd send someone who is primarily interested in an academic discussion of how organizations know what they know, and how they turn that knowledge into action.

It's unfortunate that many people associate Weick only with his recent research into high reliability organizations. This research is narrower in scope and applicability than his earlier work, and can leave the misleading impression that Weick is primarily grounded in an analytical approach.

And, since Weick's a social psychologist, his focus is on group (vs. individual) behavior and needs to be augmented by an individual/cognitive model (e.g., Klein's Data-Frame).

Weick's basic framework focuses on how individuals and organizations use knowledge to Enact, Select, and Retain meaning. Weick's writing is provocative and challenging...he provides no simple answers.

Despite the limitations of his approach and the challenge of navigating his writing, any serious student of sensemaking should make Weick's "Social Psychology of Organizing" and "Making Sense of the Organization" (collection of papers, 2001) required reading.

Bottom line: Weick's "Social Psychology" remains for me the single richest source of provocative insights into organizational sensemaking. Even though equally rich sources may eventually emerge, I can't imagine them completely displacing it from a central place in the field of organizational sensemaking. Buy it & read it...now.

Why Sensemaking?

2010-01-01T10:03:00.000-08:00

Looking back over 10+ years of learning, synthesizing, and applying sensemaking concepts, it seems clear that their value remains largely untapped.

Possible reasons for this include:

It's an edge tool - sensemaking focuses on fast-changing, complex, ambiguous decision making contexts where domain expertise dominates. These situations are usually seen as "wicked", dominated by tacit knowledge that is so contextual that it cannot be formally captured...more art than science.
The "artists" who dominate edge decision making are, for good reasons, suspicious of any framework that claims to bring structure to a context that they know is inherently unordered.
Traditional tools (processes, organizations, IT, etc.) have been very successful in non-edge contexts. There's no pressing need to move the edge beyond art.
"Either-or" thinking that resists seeing tools as being useful in some contexts and and dangerous in others; instead it wants a "magic formula" that can be mindlessly applied, measured, and monitored...regardless of context.

I think we're seeing these barriers start to fall. Possible reasons for this include:

A growing recognition that some aspects of edge decision making can be captured in frameworks like Snowden's Cynefin framework and Klein's Data-Frame model.

Information, communications, and transportation technologies, along with commoditized capital markets, are shifting the business landscape from "80-20 core" to "80-20 edge", at least on those areas related to competitive advantage & innovation.

Technology is shifting from instantiating structured repeatable models of well-defined decision making contexts, to exposing composable chunks of business logic that a decision maker can easily integrate in an ad hoc fashion.

Dave Snowden characterizes this as a shift in emphasis from Scientific Management (control of function) to Systems Thinking (control of information) to Sensemaking (ability to situate a network).

As with all such shifts, they're subject to a Gartner-style hype cycle...with lots of either-or and magical formula swirling as expectations inflate. Perhaps the whole social-mobile web-enterprise 2.0 flurry is the leading edge of a sensemaking hype cycle...or, perhaps not.

Regardless, we seem to be moving from a "that's the way it is" era characterized by a mindless edge and centralized "control" centers, to a "collaboration" era with mindful decision makers inventing the future on the edge.

Dion on "the edge"

2009-12-13T19:03:00.000-08:00

In his latest ZDNet blog posting, Dion Hinchcliffe discusses "edge businesses."

I like the reCAPTCHA example and his discussion of how external interfaces are beginning to blur into a fractal mixture of business, customers, and suppliers.

However, the focus on business structure makes me a bit uneasy. It's true that changes in transportation, communication, and information technologies open up disruptive possibilities...the past 150 years provide many examples. However, there's also a risk that pursuing structural opportunities will begin to crowd out business fundamentals. The explosion in financial engineering over the past 40 years is perhaps the most prominent recent example.

Bottom line: As a long-time reader of Dion's blogs, I like the conversation and think it's worthwhile. But, discussions of business fundamentals that don't change (e.g., deep domain expertise) should not be negelected. For a good recent discussion see The Puritan Gift.

Closing the Learning Loop

2009-11-16T19:12:00.000-08:00

I tend to think of learning in terms of sensemaking (e.g., Klein's Data-Frame model), rather than, say direct instruction or constructivism.

However, an article I was reading recently (not on the web) triggered some thoughts about another view that I've seen expressed in a various disciplines...a view which focuses on how we internalize then communicate experience.

The key steps are:

1. Experience - a lived narrative. Raw sense data is stored in a loose structure that includes time, past narrative fragments, emotional intensity, etc.

2. Retrospective structuring - an ongoing process where the experience is relived, sensory data is structured, inferences are drawn, and individual data items are emphasized/de-emphasized. As the raw data is recalled and abstracted, a propositionally coherent structure is imposed on the data. Karl Weick sees this as a key aspect of sensemaking...hence his famous observation "how can I know what I think until I see what I say?" However, the emphasis here remains on the narrative...within an inferred structure that is the ground to the narrative figure.

3. Communication to self/others - this is the culmination of the previous step where the key aspects of the experience are verbalized.

This last step is where two approaches to communication become apparent. Depending on the context, either a narrative or a propositional approach may be taken. If the purpose is to entertain, narrative is likely. If the purpose is to persuade, propositions are often favored, especially in technical contexts.

None of this is especially noteworthy...except for technically-oriented professionals. We tend to be proposition-heavy and narrative-light in our communication.

Why is this a problem? It may not be. If a rich shared narrative exists, a proposition-heavy communication may be acceptable. However, if no such narrative exists, our audience is likely to struggle...if we don't wrap the propositions in a memorable narrative. Or, in a collaborative context, we may struggle to get beyond "talking past each other's propositions."

So, try to ensure that the learning loop is closed when communicating....from personal narrative to generalized propositions, then back to contextually-framed shared narrative.

Creating such a narrative for this set of propositions is left as an exercise to the reader...as is a discussion of the risks of over-emphasizing narrative (e.g., being perceived as superficial and manipulative)... :-)

Forgetting and Learning

2009-11-08T15:21:00.000-08:00

While watching a PBS program on the "Botany of Desire" today, I was reminded of how important forgetting is in learning.

The program discusses THC (the psycho-active chemical in cannabis), a neurotransmitter with a similar shape (anandamide), and the importance of being able to forget (one effect of both chemicals) to avoid being paralyzed by fear or overwhelmed with contextually irrelevant data. A summary is available at "Cannabis, Learning, and The Botany of Desire" (pp. 14-ff).

Karl Weick, in his classic "The Social Psychology of Organizing", discusses the same issue as it relates to organizations. One section addresses the importance (and difficulty) of organizational "forgetting." In it he quotes a Journal of Applied Behavioral Science article discussing Albert Speer's (Hitler's minister of armaments) use of Allied bombing raids to enable organizational forgetting:

"These raids were 'helpful,' according to Speer, because they destroyed the filing facilities, those containers of paper which enable organizations to establish traditions, procedures, and so on, which are mainstays of bureaucracy. Speer was so enamored with the results of these bombing raids that, upon learning of the destruction of his ministry in the Allied air raid of November 22, 1943, he commented: 'Although we have been fortunate in that large parts of the current files of the Ministry have been burned and so relieved us for a time of useless ballast, we cannot really expect that such events will continually introduce the necessary fresh air into our work' (Singer and Wooten 1976, pp. 86-86).”

Organizational learning currently focuses on acquiring, structuring, storing, and retrieving information. As the volume of information explodes and hyperconnectivity moves many decision contexts into the complex domain, forgetting may need to be added as a core learning competency.

Contextualizing the Web

2009-10-27T19:51:00.000-07:00

The techno-centric approach to adding context to the Web is the Semantic Web. Two recent articles make me wonder if the sensemaking approach to adding context will be the Mobile/Social Web:

Techcrunch has an interesting discussion of a presentation by Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker highlighting the astonishing growth rates associated with the Mobile Web and the iPhone/iTouch. The entire presentation is available and worth reviewing.
Dion Hinchcliffe has a much longer discussion of the shift from traditional Web sites to the Mobile/Social Web.

Neither really address what may be the truly revolutionary aspect of this shift: dramatically improved sensemaking driven by the contextual aspect of mobile/social. Instead of the user being almost totally responsible for framing and crafting IT/data to fit a use context, mobile/social IT can automatically sense key aspects of the use context and perform some of the framing/crafting work. The result: a potentially dramatic increase in the sophistication/depth of data/services that can be incorporated into a use context.

I suppose I should note that it's not either Semantic or Mobile/Social...it's both.

Limiting Innovation

2009-10-27T19:25:00.000-07:00

Peter Merholz (Adaptive Path) talks about the "Highlander Principle" in this HBR blog post. He asserts that "there can only be one" true innovation in a new product if it is to succeed.

This is another area where cognitive & social limitations are often obvious only in retrospect. A use context of any complexity is usually tightly coupled to a larger ecosystem in ways that are difficult for both novices and experts to see. If an innovation is not almost "friction-free", the odds of it successfully carving out a niche (which usually means displacing existing capabilities and/or re-allocating/configuring existing resources) are low.

MIT's Sloan Management Review has a related discussion: small-fast use context experiments are a significant new tactic for innovation...at least for IT/data-intensive ecosystems.

DoD SOA Acquisition

2009-10-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

The SOA craze has generated massive volumes of techno-talk, moderate volumes of biz-talk, and little discussion of how to move from acquiring systems to acquiring services.

Thanks to a colleague, I just ran across a good discussion of this issue: the AFEI's "Industry Recommendations for DoD Acquisition of Information Services and SOA Systems (7 July 2008)."

What I liked in the paper:

Mission Logic and Mission Data receive equal attention
The SOA stack shows dependencies up and down (i.e., SLAs & Reverse SLAs)
The need for a different set of roles/rights/responsibilities is addressed. Table 1 seems to imply that the "role center of gravity" is shifting from technology to mission...which seems appropriate.
Appendix A is a thoughtful proposal on how to incrementally employ SOA concepts

Things I wish had been discussed more:

How organizational structures and processes need to change to cohere with the changes in roles.
How agile is implemented at the mission level

Figure 4 ("Evolution of Mission Capabilities via SOA") is interesting...it traces the structure of the stack from the 1960's mainframe to today's virtualized service-based open system. It shows how standardization/interoperability has moved up the stack, resulting in finer-grained plug-n-play functions that allow solutions that are more agile/adaptable. But, it seems to be mostly techno-centric...there's no discussion of how this affects the way IT, data, decision making, decision makers, and groups are woven together to complete a task or mission.

Incremental Transformation?

2009-10-27T18:10:00.000-07:00

This statement from Chapter 1 of "The Great Transformation" (Scott D. Anthony) caught my eye last week:

"Transformation comes from entering new markets and leaving old ones. Companies rarely transform themselves through cost cutting or improved operational effectiveness....in almost all cases, operational effectiveness is insufficient to stave off disruption and drive long-term competitive advantage."

In a footnote Anthony references a 2008 book by Steven Spear ("Chasing the Rabbit") that looks at some exceptions (Toyota, Southwest Airlines, Alcoa) that are characterized by a "learning culture."

I don't quite know what to think about the exceptions...is their synthesis of Exploitation and Exploration possible (at least in part), for example, because their business/capital/knowledge/etc. ecosystems are at the lower end of the complexity and/or rate-of-change spectrum? Or is this kind of incremental longevity possible in any ecosystem? Speculation is probably all that's possible...a large range of intertwined factors, many of which are impossible to analyze with any rigor, are likely responsible. About the only observation I feel comfortable making is that recipes are a sure path to failure.

Constraining Disruption

2009-10-19T18:19:00.000-07:00

Disruptive innovation is often thought of as an unexpected and significant shift in how an offering addresses a job need. By that definition, it's unclear whether the MIT picture taking example John Sviokla discusses in "Getting Started in Disruptive Business Design" is really disruptive...it's not clear exactly what job/market is being served by a $150 high altititude picture-taking capability.

However, each of the four ideas he discusses shows how important constraints are in sparking disruptive innovation. One key constraint is the importance of focusing on a radical improvement in only *one* area (e.g., cost in the MIT example).

The MIT example also, perhaps inadvertently, illustrates two other aspects of disruptive innovation...one positive and one negative.

First, very expensive IT-intensive infrastructure is becoming cheap, pervasive, and interoperable. The MIT students leveraged the cell phone and GPS systems to quickly and inexpensively cobble together a basic capability.

And, as one of the students admits (in the Boston Globe article), most of their engineering classmates are unimpressed...what they did was just not complex enough. This may be the most significant barrier to disruptive innovation---engineers who prefer "cool engineering" over "cool capabilities."

Sensemaking - The Toyota Way

2009-10-18T20:04:00.000-07:00

The Toyota Way and Toyota Production System are often thought of in terms of process-orientation and continuous problem solving. A manager in the West tends to translate this into a system that is more about analysis than sensemaking. This article in the Financial Post highlights how just-in-time distributed decision making in the system is a complex mix of analysis and sensemaking...which may explain why it's been more successful in the East.

Matching Tools to Needs

2009-10-12T20:11:00.000-07:00

We're in love with "magic incantations." Over the past hundred years or so, a popular version of the scientific method has been slapped on top of almost every area of knowledge. In this version, someone creates a model, gathers data to "prove" the model, and then promotes the model as a magic incantation that will solve all (or at least most) of your problems.

In the management domain especially, the fads come thick and fast. Usually, they have a valid use, but they rarely come with specific instructions of when/where to use them (and, maybe more importantly, where/when *not* to use them).

This is equally true with IT...SOA, wikis, Enterprise 2.0, etc., etc., etc. I've discussed this previously, but didn't have any suggestions beyond noting that a new tool will probably involve some exploring to determine where it does (and doesn't) fit. So, it's nice to see Ken Oestreich propose a framework for evaluating whether an application belongs in a cloud.

CapGemini's Take on Exploration

2009-10-12T19:56:00.000-07:00

CapGemini is promoting a framework that emphasizes how IT is enabling exploration.

I like the direction this points to, but it feels a bit on the fluffy side. However, it may provide some structure in a conversation with folks who are unfamiliar with recent developments in IT.

Streaming Sensemaking

2009-10-12T19:36:00.000-07:00

John Jonas has about the only techno-centric/analytical take on Knowledge Management I've seen that seems to avoid the traps of (a) thick/clunky semantic-trending-toward-AI technology, and (b) large complex models. Not surprisingly, it focuses on (a) context, and (b) streaming processing of event data.

This presentation needs the voice track to fully communicate (especially his description of how these concepts informed the fraud detection systems he built for casinos), but it clearly shows the challenge posed by the hyperconnectivity-driven growth in data and decisions. Regardless of where this particular technology goes, Jonas has some of the key nouns right (context, sensemaking, etc.).

Complex Enterprise Architecture

2009-10-12T19:08:00.001-07:00

Formal enterprise architecting frameworks tend to emerge in a systems engineering context. As a result, they have an analytical bent that is often ineffective at the enterprise scale, especially as IT continues to dis-integrate into finer-grained composable chunks (e.g., services).

This post by Dion Hinchcliffe reflects a growing realization that enterprise-level architecting must be capable of operating in a Complex (Cynefin) domain....where the key issues are better addressed by orchestrating boundaries and attractors than by sophisticated analysis. Key issues mentioned include COIs, adaptable policy/governance frameworks, and edge-driven capabilities.

Exactly where this is headed is unclear. Experienced architects understand that the enterprise is a mixture of the Complex, Complicated, and Simple, and that our tools for effectively engaging the Complex are immature and few. And, as the boundary between IT and decisions becomes more fractal, the fundamental impedance mismatch between the analog world of human decision making and the binary world of IT becomes increasingly problematic.

Exploration as a Core Competency

2009-10-12T18:52:00.000-07:00

More on the shift toward IT-catalyzed experimentation from the Sloan Management Review. It's mostly an up-beat take, with hints of COIs, governance, security, and the challenge of integrating the enterprise's Executing Core with its Exploring Edge.

When Is "Good Enough" Good Enough?

2009-08-30T19:48:00.000-07:00

Wired has a nice article ("The Good Enough Revolution") discussing various technologies that are technically a step backward, but functionally a step forward (e.g., MP3, the Flip video camera, the Predator UAV).

As the article points out, the shared key success factor is accessibility. The traditional engineering definition of a better mousetrap tends to focus on how well it catches mice, not on how easy/fun it is to configure, deploy, and empty.

For IT-intensive technologies, Moore's Law and standardization is allowing engineers to shift the focus of the design effort away from technical considerations and toward usability. Whether engineers are equipped to exploit this opportunity is unclear...most have little training (and often little interest) in the much softer challenge of understanding the social/cognitive use context.

So, when is "good enough" good enough? There's probably no general answer/heuristic...but the question may help engineers be more aggressive in pursuing minimalist/bare-bones solutions that revolutionize a use context with commodity technologies, instead of pursuing revolutionary technologies for commodity use contexts.

NCW Needs Cynefin

2009-08-30T14:40:00.000-07:00

In the Summer 2009 issue of "Parameters" (U.S. Army War College quarterly), Gautam Mukunda and William Troy draw some interesting parallels between the recent worldwide financial crisis and Network Centric Warfare ("Caught in the Net: Lessons from the Financial Crisis for a Networked Future").

I blogged about a similar link between the financial crisis and SOA last fall (Distrust 2.0), focusing on the lack of transparency and the difficulty of maintaining trust when entities are built to be combined/linked in unanticipated ways.

Though the authors don't quite put it this way, much of the article seems to highlight the risks of using Analytical (i.e., Complicated/Knowable domain of Cynefin) tools to cope with a Complex domain. However, the authors lack the concepts/language to do more than make some helpful observations. Putting those observations into a Complex-Complicated framework would help highlight why NCW is more about sensemaking and "managing attractors within boundaries" (Snowden) than it is about analysis, model building, and simulation.

To be fair, the proponents of NCW who the authors criticize are the ones who are dangerously confused in not clearly distinguishing the Complex from Complicated. However,the authors' critique would be more rigorous if it was grounded in a framework like Cynefin.

Organizational Shifting

2009-04-09T19:41:00.000-07:00

As an engineer, I'm familiar with the fascination the IT world has with emerging decentralizing technologies like SOA and cloud computing.

And, I know how foreign the world of organizational theory, structures, and behavior is to most IT folks...but IT leaders are going to have to become literate in this area if they're going to be effective in matching the new IT to business needs.

The basic reason is that all network technologies trigger massive non-technological shifts. This was true for railroads, telecommunications, and electricity.

John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison recently began a blog entitled "The Big Shift" to discuss how IT is triggering a fundamental shift in organizations from push-oriented to pull-oriented. They've written about the topic before (e.g., "From Push to Pull" in 2005), but the blog entries are perhaps more accessible.

Is push-pull a more catalyzing contrast than exploit-explore? than complex-complicated?

That's probably the wrong question...more relevant for systems engineers and architects is do you understand how these concepts highlight key aspects of this shift?

The Power of Asymmetric Knowledge

2009-04-07T19:50:00.000-07:00

This recent post by Joshua Porter at Bokardo comparing a symmetric social network (Facebook) with one that enables asymmetric social networks (Twitter) is worth reading.

Though the authors don't say it quite this way, my snap reaction was:

Asymmetric relationships are more powerful because they enable much more agile and adaptable in matching information to a decision context.

Symmetric relationships require a much richer shared context...which allows for deeper exploration of a specific context, but is much less agile/adaptable.

Porter links to James Governor's Monkchips blog on the topic which states "Asymmetric Follow is a core pattern of Web 2.0"...which sounds about right.

Why Services Are Hard...

2009-04-06T19:34:00.000-07:00

...or at least one reason why... :-)

I ran across a quote from "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?", Lou Gerstner's book about how he changed IBM:

“I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game—it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value....I have a theory about how culture emerges and evolves in large institutions: Successful institutions almost always develop strong cultures that reinforce those elements that make the institution great. They reflect the environment from which they emerged. When that environment shifts, it is very hard for the culture to change. In fact, it becomes an enormous impediment to the institution’s ability to adapt.”

I suppose this has always been true, but was less noticeable when organizations were smaller and the world changed more slowly.

Today, most large organizations are fundamentally complex transaction-oriented information ecosystems, or they specialize in the design, development, or maintenance of systems within such ecosystems.

Service orientation (not technology per se) transforms a transaction-oriented information ecosystem into a hybrid that both (a) maintains its transaction processing capabilities and characteristics, and (b) exposes services, enables the relatively unstructured bottom-up/middle-out wiring together of services, and creates innovative new information transformation capabilities (along with new management capabilities).

The culture that produces transaction-processing excellence tends to focus on such qualities as predictability, reliability, and lack of deviance from a standard, and tends toward a bureaucratic organization with well-defined roles, rights, responsibilities, and processes to create and maintain that excellence.

Such a culture is in most ways poorly suited to thrive in a service-oriented ecosystem with its dynamic, emergent, and relatively unstructured exploration of potential information transformation capabilities...many of which are also potentially disruptive.

If you work in a large organization, you may have seen a "deer in the headlights" response to this new "dance" challenge, which seems to be nearly universal these days for elephants since large organizations today are usually information-intensive.

If it's hard for the elephants, it seems even harder for the elephant keepers...who don't know how to do anything but design, develop, and maintain elephants.

And, what makes this especially difficult is that it seems to be as much about turning elephants into composable "ropes, spears, fans, etc." as it is about getting the elephant to move learn new steps.

Seems like more than a minor identity crisis is emerging...

Self-Creation and Knowledge

2009-04-05T19:56:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of decades, the term "autopoiesis" has been popular in certain scientific and organizational circles. Its literal meaning ("self-creation") hints at the possibility of some sort of emergent behavior that results in "information for free." This diagram from emergentfool.com is typical.

From a philosophical perspective the term is potentially problematic since it seems to imply that something can emerge from nothing...that there are uncaused effects (or that the assertion that all effects have causes is false). A part of the brilliance of Cynefin is that it largely dodges the ontological issue and focuses on the epistemological one.

Regardless, autopoiesis has been used as a concept to explore how organizations know and how they translate knowledge into action. "Exploring the Foundations of Organisational Knowledge" (Vines, Hall,and Naismith) is a recent paper that takes this approach.

They have a nice discussion of Karl Popper's "three worlds", and apply evolutionary theory to KM in a metaphorical fashion...though I was a bit confused by the conflation of evolution's "random mutation" with an organization's individual intelligent agents engaged in purposeful activity.

As a rough metaphor, there's a lot I like about highlighting the emergent aspect of knowledge. However, I'm not sure how useful it is when it comes to specific decisions and actions. Having slogged through Stuart Kauffman's "Origins of Order" a decade ago, I understand the attraction. And, I'm intrigued by ongoing laboratory efforts reproduce the origin of life and the emergence of complex subsystems in living organisms.

Agent-based approaches that decentralize attractor/constraint-oriented behavior clearly have value. But I wonder whether we've hit "peak emergence" (ala "peak oil") in our understanding of this phenomena...we don't seem to be much closer to a good understanding of the underlying causes of emergent information and behavior than we were before the topic became a staple of popular science 20+ years ago.

Whether we have or not, it seems inevitable that the rate of new emergent behavior will continue to accelerate for the foreseeable future as connectivity and interoperability continue to increase at warp speed.

Side Trails from Empirical Knowing

2009-04-03T16:27:00.000-07:00

A couple of references from "Imperial Secrets" I found interesting:

Persistent Surveillance and Its Implications for the Common Operating Picture" - Kelley's critique in "Imperial Secrets" was of such statements as "Once achieved, persistent ISR coverage will, in theory, deny the adversary sanctuary, enabling coherent decision making and action with reduced risk." I'm reminded of Dave Snowden's highlighting the fact that we filter ~95% of the raw data that hits our senses, and that the sense we make of what gets through our filters is shaped by a variety of factors, including which narrative fragments have been recently activated. For a nice summary of the limits/biases of individual sensemaking, see "The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis." A Panopticon-style capability would dramatically improve decision making in some ways...but it would also shift attention to the limits imposed by basic cognitive and social constraints on translating data into action, and, perhaps more important, would have significant and unpredictable effects on the activities of those under surveillance. Overall, it would seem that the net result is a more Complex space where prediction becomes more, not less, difficult.

Critical Thinking and Intelligence Analysis - Another NDIC publication that thoughtfully considers the art and science of transforming data into decisions. I especially liked Table 7 (Analysis: Past, Present, and Future), which highlights various aspects of the shift from in-depth slice/dice analysis to agile sensemaking.

The challenge of knowing irregular, ambiguous, and rapidly changing threats has resulted in an emphasis on capabilities that are more exploratory/agile than exploitative/structured. A couple of articles in Joint Forces Quarterly (Q1 2009) highlight two aspects to this trend. Both reflect a maturing understanding of the limits of exploratory and exploitative capabilities.

"Hybrid Warfare and Challenges" (Frank Hoffman, pp. 34-39) - "hybrid warfare"is the term associated with what seems to be the next phase of an ongoing transformation to make the U.S. military more agile. It emphasizes the need to operate in multiple "modes" simultaneously to effectively engage an opponent using conventional, irregular, and terrorist tactics in a coordinated fashion. Hoffman acknowledges the difficulty of such an endeavor...one that is similar in some ways to that discussed by Cash, Earl, and Morrison in the Nov 2008 HBR, which I discussed here.
"Systems versus Classical Approach to Warfare" (Milan Vego, pp. 40-48) is a good summary of the concerns that have been raised about NCW, EBO, and SOD. Attempts to apply Complicated (expert, analytical) tools to a Complicated domain have, unsurprisingly, provoked reactions ranging from skepticism to hostility among many students of warfare. If you're unfamiliar with recent critiques of Systems of Systems Analysis, Systems Thinking, and other mechanistic approaches to warfare, you might find this article interesting. The bottom line is "Uncertainty in war is not only a result of a lack of information, but is also often caused by what one does not comprehend in a given situation." Analytical approaches (crafted for Complicated situations) may actually degrade the ability to comprehend in Complex situations.

Finally, John Arquilla has been writing about network/swarming tactics for years. "The Coming Swarm" is a recent summary of the current situation...it reminded me of Israel's approach to dealing with swarm terrorism.

Empirical Knowing

2009-03-30T19:18:00.000-07:00

A recent book by Patrick Kelley explores how empires know. Entitled "Imperial Secrets: Remapping The Mind of Empire", it's a fascinating and non-traditional exploration of the challenges and limitations empires face in translating data into action.

Although most organizations are not empires, many dominate a specific context in ways that create the same kind of challenges in knowing. So, it's worth at least a look if you're a student of organizational behavior.

Kelley focuses on three empires facing challenges in knowing: Rome in the first and second century AD, Ottoman Turkey, and Britain in India. He draws lessons from specific narratives, including:

As an empire comes to dominate its time and place, it struggles to detect signals that are weak or don't fit the frames that made the empire successful. An additional complication is that an empire's dominant presence warps the information space it inhabits.

Informal networks are often critical and unrecognized in filling in an empire's blind spots.

Empires are occasionally surprised when actions it perceives as being ordinary provoke an extraordinary response.

Although much of this will be familiar to students of epistemological approaches to organizational sensemaking (e.g., Karl Weick), the narratives provide a framework for a nuanced explication of the concepts. And, Kelley is a thoughtful analyst. Here's a few excerpts I liked:

"I wish to contest the unidirectional read of how 'knowing' works; i.e., that an observing subject gains ever more knowledge of some given object and consequently, power over the latter accrues to the former."
"I propose that the Panopticon actually operates in reverse in the imperial context....empires will nearly always operate at an information deficit in relation to their subjects....The overseer is there for everyone to observe—what the empire believes, does, wants, and will do is laid out in imperial media, legal codes and judicial decisions, the conduct of its agents, and the architectural and scientific 'performances' of power—all in contrast to the 'inscrutable oriental' who resists observation physically, linguistically, and epistemologically in his capacity rather than inability to 'imagine that....' "
"...imperial policy makers faced the problems of 'slippery' knowledge—data points collected, analyzed and presented in a context different from where they originally resided by virtue of imperial process."
"Empire consists of a certain set of patterns that characterize the meaning and function of physical reality—Empire is information, which may almost sound like a definition, but my intent is rhetorical emphasis. Consequently, the management of information—disseminating the preferred patterns, and identifying competing patterns for elimination—becomes the core function of imperial administration."
"The risk of drawing virtual lines and imposing order on the grand confusion of reality is not simply that our lines may be imperfect, our approximation inexact. Rather, these virtual creations can become so comfortable and accessible that we come to inhabit them as real, producing 'knowledge' about things and places that don’t actually exist. Reality as such then enters into the 'species of alterity'; it literally becomes something foreign and other—opaque, if not irrelevant, to our attempts to understand it."
"... the strategic information most fundamental to a successful imperial order—information about beliefs, identity, authority and allegiance—does not appear as some 'golden nugget' at the end of an operational or tactical tasking order. Rather, it circulates along networks of exchange, akin to an economy in which information serves as currency."
"The unique intelligence problem of empire, in contrast, is precisely that such distinctions [foreign-domestic] do not exist—or rather that they exist in over-abundance, with inside/outside fractures splintering and overlapping ad infinitum within and between spaces, communities and individuals under the imperial umbrella."
"If absolute power corrupts absolutely, it also tends to isolate completely—twin tendencies any executive authority risks as it ascends to the heights of imperial power. Bureaucracies rise in tandem with that isolation, providing the intellectual equivalent of walls and gates; but subverting that intellectual structure by act of will can prove nearly as impossible as escaping from the physical walls for reasons of either status or security. "
"Modern strategic discourse is full of discussions about decision cycles and getting inside an opponent’s OODA loop (Orient, Observe, Decide, Act). Less well explored is how to get inside or engage another’s time, as such, which may be moving at a different rate and in a different direction."
"A key aspect of the British performance, and an enduring problem of imperial intelligence, I suggest, is not to correctly 'know' foreign minds, but to read backward, and accurately perceive how those foreign minds come to understand the apparently familiar and domestic."
"As I have argued throughout this text, imperial intelligence is less a problem of determining the truth or falsehood of specific facts, and more an issue of negotiating how truth is constituted and what 'knowing' means. These issues leap to the fore in the contest over education, which is fundamentally a fight to frame how meaning can and will be constituted in both the past and future."
"None of these [narrative] products would suitably respond to any conceivable state information request, and certainly would not fit into the almost infinitely replicated 'intelligence cycle' model, but they might well answer information requirements. The rhizomatic nature of information, particularly in an imperial environment, indicates that there will nearly always be connections and contexts not immediately evident to any decision-maker posing specific questions....Better still, they are quite obvious in what they leave out, and in this are less deceptive than traditional maps."
"Th e language and image of empire is universally visible and available to its nominal subjects, while the reverse is not usually the case."
"...the rise of imperial power creates the demand for a whole host of new government functions and institutions, which cannot be created, except with great difficulty and foresight, ex nihilo. Far easier, and more common, is to simply adapt existing institutions to new roles..."
"Modern Americans have come to believe that the norms and values encapsulated in their form of government and their ways of conducting foreign relations are the birthright and open options for men everywhere. In accordance with this persuasion there simply can be no 'others.' " [Adda Bozeman quote]
"...new information—in order to make sense—must fit into a narrative, a history, and this history amplifies the problem of the other/same dichotomy. 'As distinct from the present, the past is alien, exotic, or strange; as continuous with it, this past is familiar, recognizable and potentially fully knowable.' [Hayden White quote] "
"Empires thrive despite, rather than because of, their information institutions."
"In early days, say just after you have sacked Carthage or defeated the Nawab of Bengal, you might know very little, but you also know what you don’t know, i.e. basically everything. This makes the 'known unknowns' a very large category, but also makes the more dangerous 'unknown unknowns' very small. As imperial experience progresses, as administrators learn the languages and jurists incorporate local legal principles, the 'known known' flourishes in a rhizomatic way...For as 'known unknown' shrinks with every census and cartographic survey, the 'unknown unknown' consequently expands proportionately. While the analogy may be inexact, imperial power becomes more expert over time, and consequently more subject to the patterning and heuristic biases associated with the 'Paradox of Expertise.' "
"My general assessment has been that empires are always at an information deficit—telling more than they hear—and the deficit over time becomes associated with a lost capacity to listen."
"A perspective which presumes the role of an objective machine loses twice over by deliberately abjuring to assimilate the specifically human factors that only humans can collect, while making inevitable bias more difficult to detect in bureaucratically neutral discourse."

As someone who is more critical realist than postmodern, I think Kelley occasionally overstates his case. But, given the growing importance of Complex contexts and the growing number of "virtual empires", he may be right to do so.

Complex Knowing

2009-03-29T20:12:00.000-07:00

A few miscellaneous items from the past couple of weeks that highlight the limits to and evolution of analytical approaches to decision making and decision support:

"When Knowledge Management Hurts" - This short article by London Business School professor Freek Vermeulen discusses a study asserting that incorporating formal knowledge into decision making can actually result in worse decisions. I don't have time to discuss the actual study (link in article), but it's worth looking at if you are a KM practitioner.
Unintended consequences are inevitable when services are made mashable. This slashdot posting discusses Google having to shut down free SMS message after a popular iPhone app overwhelmed Google's servers.
"The Rise of The Social Network System" - a short article on social hyperconnectivity...it's about linking contexts. I'm always slightly surprised by articles like this in light of how much science fiction has explored this area in the past few years. Also, Tim O'Reilly's discussion of the article.
Lots has been written recently about the decline of newsprint. Clay Shirky has a nice overview of the rise and decline of this particular asynchronous hardcopy Few-to-Many media channel. It's nice to see some historical perspective in something as ephemeral as a blog post.
Finally, Deloitte has posted a study of mining safety in South Africa that was done using Cynefin. If you've found this framework a bit abstract, this study might help you better understand one way it can be used.

Those Who Can, Do...

2009-03-10T21:17:00.000-07:00

Those who can't, scribble?

That was my initial reaction to some recent discussions of 90-9-1 as it applies to Jive. Whether my reaction makes much sense is unclear, since "doing" and "scribbling/teaching/creating/contributing" are not either-or categories. And, I'm struck at how fundamental language/conversation/writing is to the creative process. So, I'm not implying that speaking/writing is necessarily wasteful...it's just that I get the feeling that separating signal from noise is getting exponentially more difficult.

Regardless, much of the discussion of 90-9-1 is about increasing the percentage of those who contribute (vs. lurk), and not much is said about increasing the signal-to-noise ratio.

In the context of enterprise social media this distribution makes me wonder...when should we start worrying a little more about quality and a little less about quantity?...do our metrics emphasize quantity simply that's what's easy to measure?...or perhaps the emphasis on participation is simply because enterprise social media is in an orientation phase where the key challenge is getting folks to participate because they'll never "get it" until they do?

Is this the sort of space where you have to increase the noise to a tipping point before you can begin to detect really valuable signal?....or before you get emergent value?...I'm not sure anyone really knows.

Decision Contexts and Flow

2009-03-10T21:04:00.000-07:00

This TED video is a nice example of how the "intersection of decisions and technology" is becoming ever more fractal...and why sensemaking becoming a central concern in the creation of innovative information technology.

Whether you design IT, or are simply a user, you're increasingly going to be struck by how truly innovative IT morphs itself to a decision context in a way that fits the user's decision flow...and you'll begin to notice just how much traditional IT interrupts that flow.

Overloading CASE

2009-03-01T15:16:00.000-08:00

In the engineering arena, we think of software when we see the acronym CASE.

Barry E. White (MITRE) is using it as a combination of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and Systems Engineering...Complex Adaptive Systems Engineering. I had not seen any of his work when I last visited this topic.

This presentation and paper are a recent discussion of the topic. In the presentation, I like White's highlighting of the importance of non-technical factors, and I especially like the Enterprise Systems Engineering and Systems Engineering profilers (slides 20, 21). I'm a bit puzzled by the inclusion of an Enneagram Web...its origin in what appears to be mysticism seems to clash with the rest of the presentation. The paper strikes a more serious tone...its discussion of the limits of control and the importance of context are applicable to any large scale architecting/design effort.

Regardless, it's nice to see a CAS-oriented discussion of systems engineering.

Backlash Against Process Standardization?

2009-03-01T13:55:00.000-08:00

Joseph Hall and Eric Johnson have an article entitled "When Should a Process be Art, Not Science?" in the March 2009 Harvard Business Review. In it they discuss the fact that some contexts are too variable to allow standardized processes to be effective.

Although there are echoes of Tushman's Exploitation-Exploration contrast and Cynefin's Complicated-Complex contrast here, Hall and Johnson emphasize the need for "artistic processes" when the following condition exists:

A variable environment (inputs, process, and/or desired outputs) - at some point, the costs of standardized processes outweigh the benefits. Costs may be real (i.e., a very complex "scientific" process that's expensive to design and maintain) and/or opportunity (i.e., the "scientific" process is either too slow and inflexible to address key customer needs).
And, the authors rightly emphasize the fact that most real world contexts have artistic aspects and scientific aspects. Where analysis and best practices are effective they should be used (science); where they are not, a probing approach that uses qualitative metrics should be used (art).

Since the article's purpose is not to examine the sources of a focus on standardization, the authors don't have much to say about why the need to balance science and art is becoming more pressing. Here's a few snap reactions I had...I suspect you can think of a few more if you're interested in systems and their structure. These are reasons why there tends to be a bias toward "scientific processes."

We like predictability...the more the better (up to a point, see "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" for more detail). In my more cynical moments, I wonder if American management writing might be best summarized as a continual search for the Holy Grail of "The Magical Incantation" that allows any unthinking human to mindlessly create unending value. I'm sure the authors generally don't feel that way (after all, they are innovative thinkers almost by definition), but the mass readership's appetite for the latest concept make me wonder.
As the lower layers of various capabilities become standardized (everything from double entry accounting to gun parts to automobile designs to the IP stack), dramatically more complex capabilities are enabled...which (at least initially) have a large amount of variability as users probe the new solution space that such standardization opens up. Eventually, aspects of that solution space become standardized (sometimes de facto, sometimes de jure), and the cycle starts over. For example, in the IT arena, the emerging emphasis in services is due in large part to the increasing standardization of technologies that used to be largely artistic (trends like Moore's Law are significant drivers in enabling this standardization). And, as the standardization-complex-standardization cycle time compresses, the importance of balancing the two increases.
Since processes attempt to interact with the world in a predictable way to achieve a desired goal, they instantiate/reflect a model of that world. Although traditional modeling may contain non-deterministic elements (e.g., events may have an associated probability distribution, etc.), the modeling mindset is primarily quantitative, deterministic, and "scientific." So, processes tend to be scientific.
The Scientific Revolution, the subsequent Technological Revolution, and the Quality Revolution have combined, for the first time in world history, to create amazing amounts of excess wealth. Routinization of a process enables first the use of lower skill labor, then automation, of that process, resulting in lower costs for a specific capability. Ford's River Rouge complex is what I always think of. The coming worldwide demographic bust will create even more pressure for moving artistic work into scientific space.\

If you're in an environment that seems relentlessly focused on standardizing processes, this article is a nice summary of why some balance may be due.

User-based Blending

2009-02-17T19:46:00.000-08:00

The traditional approach to modeling is for modeling experts to observe, analyze, synthesize, etc. to produce a model of a real world decision space. This model is then used by a non-expert model user to explore that decision space.

Occasionally, a modeling tool emerges that allows non-experts to create fairly sophisticated models without expert intervention....the one I always think of is electronic spreadsheets, which were the initial killer app for the PC.

A potentially interesting development in user-based, non-expert, modeling tools is described in a recent TED presention...Siftables from David Merrill of the MIT Media Lab. The basic idea raises interesting possibilities and questions. For example, each Siftable could be instrumented to monitor how it is used, and log and report that data to a central repository which could then be mined by experts for insight into how to modify the existing Siftables' methods, display, etc. Or, users and experts could use Siftables as a collaborative design artifact to explore how to define a decision space. Or, Siftables could be used as a distributed workflow data collection tool by distributing them to individuals in a value chain/net with instructions on how to model decisions/workflows in that chain/net....sort of a physical wikipedia entry creation activity.

This sort of thing has been enabled in a virtual way with multi-touch capabilities like Microsoft's Surface. However, it may be that Surface is too configurable to efficiently address some modeling needs...the physical constraints imposed by Siftables may actually help catalyze more effective exploration in some situations.

Maybe this goes nowhere, but it seems like an innovative new way to explore a decision space by blending the physical and information domains...it's that distinctive blending of the two that I find most fascinating.

Shifting Identity

2009-02-01T16:31:00.000-08:00

In a world where ideas, values, and beliefs constantly swirl, individual identity arguably is more fluid than it was, say, 100 years ago. Whether the same is true of organizations is unclear; they often struggle with establishing an identity, much less working to establish a new one.

A new HBS Working Paper ("Technology , Identity, and Inertia through the lens of 'The Digital Photography Company'", Mary Tripsas, August 2008) sheds some helpful light on this topic by discussing the place of identity in organizational sensemaking in times of transition.

When it comes to defining a company's strategic direction, those of us with a business background tend to think of frameworks that are more ontologically oriented (e.g., SWOT) than those that are epistemologically-oriented (e.g., Cynefin). And, unless we have an interest in sociology or anthropology, we probably never think of identity. The closest we get is terms like "culture", but they tend to lack the sense of purpose that comes with identity.

Here's a few of the paper's key points that are consistent with what I've observed in the workplace over the past few years.

Tripsas notes that identity is both internal and external. It's not just how individuals and groups see themselves within the company, but how customers, suppliers, competitors, and financial analysts see the company.
External identity often serves as a "forcing function". One aspect of this is that organizational identity is coupled to its business context...if key aspect(s) change enough, it forces an identity crisis. And, external identity helps solidify an emerging internal identity.
When identity must change, a period of ambiguity is important in establishing a new identity. This is clearly Complex space.
"Established firms have particular difficulty adapting to ... change that requires the acquisition of fundamentally new knowledge and routines. .... Some routines such as TQM that are meant to improve a firm's efficiency in a core business crowd out more exploratory initiatives, limiting the firm's ability to take advantage of novel opportunities." I suspect this is especially true in industries (e.g., automotive, defense) that have placed a lot of emphasis on improving exploitation.
"As the core essence of the organization, identity directs and constrains action. The routines, procedures, information filters, capabilities, knowledge base, and beliefs of an organization all reflect its identity." This is perhaps the key point...since identity tends to be perceived as ground (not figure), it tends to shape more than be shaped.

As I've said before, the topic of organizational identity is probably underappreciated. This was perhaps understandable 30-40 years ago. It's much less so today as the effects of hyperconnectivity and hypercollaboration begin to fundamentally restructure the business landscape.

For a more conceptual discussion of organizational identity, see Kurtz & Snowden's "Bramble Bushes in a Thicket" at http://www.cognitive-edge.com/ceresources/articles/52_Bramble_Bushes_in_a_Thicket.pdf

Business Case ROI

2009-02-01T16:15:00.000-08:00

In this article, Susan Case asked if business cases are a waste of time. Her answer was "yes", but do them anyway.

Although she didn't quite put it this way, what I heard her saying was that opportunities are often a mixture of Simple, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic (Cynefin taxonomy). We tend to limit business cases to the analytic (i.e., Complicated) domain.

However, most opportunities will have Complex aspects that must be addressed with techniques that are more exploratory than exploitative. Susan clearly understands this and helps highlight the limits of analysis in achieving a positive ROI when pursuing an opportunity.

"Complex" Maturity Models?

2009-01-18T14:24:00.000-08:00

In the systems engineering domain, I'm seeing increasing interest in complexity. There seems to be a growing realization that IT (e.g., SOA) is pushing all technology toward a greater intertwining of individuals/groups and technology.

This is a disruptive shift. When tools are largely decoupled from exploration/sensemaking, the designers, implementers, and maintainers of those tools can largely ignore how individuals and groups explore a context to make sense of it. When tools begin to be woven into individual/group exploratory work, they can no longer ignore sensemaking concepts.

It's unclear whether there's much recognition of this need in the mainline systems engineering community. A few recent observations:

"Modeling and Analysis of Interoperability Risk in Systems of Systems Environments" - This article in the Nov 2008 issue of CrossTalk is one of the few I've seen that seems to understand that interoperability has a significant cognitive component. The basic representations of interoperability reminded me of DSMs...not exactly the same, but a similar concept.
"Systems Thinking Comes of Age" - This was the editorial by Pat Hale in the Dec 2008 INCOSE Insight magazine. Since you have to be a member INCOSE to read this, I'll refer you to this presention by Pat Hale at a recent conference.
"SOA Contract Maturity Model" - This article by Kjell-Sverre Jerijærvi provides an approach that seems a bit more appropriate for Complex contexts than the CMMI-centric SOA maturity models that seem to be more at home in the Simple & Complicated domains.
"Cloud Maturity Models Don't Make Sense" - This post by Roger Smith is one of the few I've seen questioning the limits of maturity models. Since most engineers have little understanding of the Complex domain, I suppose it's understandable that few consider the limits of analytical approaches.

A final note: I'm seeing more interest in Systems Thinking, System Dynamics, etc. ala Senge, Forrester, Beer, Ashby, Weiner, et.al. All engineers should have a good understanding of the tools in this area, since they're part of a good foundation for modeling and simulation. However, my impression is that these tools are more Complicated than Complex. For the truly Complex, you're probably going to need a different approach (e..g, Cynefin).

For those who love taxonomies, here's my favorite diagram of where Systems Thinking fits in the overall scheme of thought...from the International Institute for General Systems Studies. I discussed this topic previously on this blog here. I suspect it won't be the last time.

Against Collaboration?

2009-01-18T13:26:00.000-08:00

I suppose there are several reasons why collaboration has become more popular over the past decade.

First, there's a long term cultural/philosophical shift toward radical egalitarianism that is uncomfortable with any distinction among individuals (a topic which is beyond the scope of this blog). Many members of my generation find it a bit disorienting to encounter young people who were raised in a sub-culture where everyone always got a trophy. This perspective emphasizes collaboration over individual initiative (not that the two are necessarily in conflict, but they're not exactly orthogonal).

Associated with this trend is a backlash against the "lone gun" hero stereotype who has a firm grasp on Moral Truth and The One Right Way. And, there's the simple fact that we're creating larger and more complex capabilities...which is only possible when large numbers of individuals sacrifice their interests and desires (to some degree) to achieve a group goal.

In the organizational theory domain, we've seen the rise of Wegner's CoPs and DoD's CoIs, along with a slew of other "communities of" TLAs that attempt to increase the effectiveness of organizational collaboration.

Perhaps the primary reason for the explosion of interest in collaboration recently is the rapid growth of social media capabilities on the Internet. This growth has highlighted one of the key challenges of group action: the formulation and governance of a web/hierarchy of shared purpose.

Since group agility slows exponentially as group size increases, collaboration is a two-edged sword in Complex contexts. The diversity of understandings (of causes, effects, and shared purpose) provided by a group will, on average, probably make sense of a Complex context faster than an individual. On the other hand, if the situation requires a lot of fast exploration of intertwined alternatives, it's not clear that a group will necessarily outperform an individual, especially when purpose, cause, and effect form tangled hierarchies.

Those of us who've worked in group settings recognize there's also a danger of synthesizing several understandings into a mediocre whole. And, the classic danger is the group being hijacked by a strong personality.

As with all such swings, the swing toward collaboration runs the risk of going to an extreme where highly capable individuals are not effectively used.

These observations were triggered by a recent post by Oliver Marks that mentions a 2006 article by David Freedman entitled "What's Next: The Idiocy of Crowds."

As our ability to collaborate increases, we may bump into basic cognitive and social limitations more frequently and violently...it's not clear that all such limitations necessarily point toward more Complicated collaboration tools, processes, or frameworks...they may point instead toward Complex tools, processes, and frameworks.

Innovation and CAS-Driven Organizations

2009-01-12T18:55:00.000-08:00

The increasingly Complex (even Chaotic) nature of information-intensive contexts is highlighting the relevance of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory for organizations. As I've said repeatedly, Cynefin is the best framework I've run across for thinking about the implications of this change.

Most technical and business people have little understanding of CAS, so papers that describe how CAS theory applies to organizations can provide a quick introduction. "Complexity-Based Agile Enterprises", by Dyer & Eriksen, has just been published by Cornell's Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies. If you're looking for an introduction to CAS from a traditional management perspective, you might find this worth reading.

I have a few misgivings. The paper seems to assume that a context is either ordered (Complicated/Simple) or Complex. Although a specific context may be dominated by the Complex (or Complicated, etc.), most contexts have aspects of multiple domains (Chaotic, Complex, Complicated, Simple is the Cynefin taxonomy) that allow the decision maker to move the context from one domain to another. That's one of the strengths of Cynefin...it defines strategies and tactics for doing this. This paper seems to emphasize a linear movement (Explore, Exploit, Adapt, Exit), where Cynefin emphasizes deliberate movement among domains in a direction dictated by current needs.

The paper does a nice job of describing some of the ways in which a primarily Complex context has different staffing and organizational needs. And, they emphasize our knowledge in this area is relatively immature.

Anyway, if you're academically-oriented and interested in how CAS theory applies to organizing, check it out.

Can Collaboration be Monetized?

2009-01-12T18:44:00.000-08:00

Lots of very smart people have thrown millions (billions?) of dollars at social media with very disappointing financial results. I have no idea whether/how social media can discover a distincitive business model that breaks new ground and lays a robust financial foundation.

This post is an interesting perspective on the question.

Cross-Silo Exploitation/Exploration

2009-01-02T08:56:00.001-08:00

IT-driven hyperconnectivity continues to increase the need for and challenge of creating cross-silo capabilities. James Cash, Michael Earl, and Robert Morrison present an interesting proposal in their November 2008 Harvard Business Review article entitled "Teaming Up to Crack Innovation & Enterprise Integration."

They propose two small/agile enterprise-wide groups engage in cross-silo Exploration and Exploitation; called the Distributed Innovation Group (DIG) and the Enterprise Integration Group (EIG) respectively. Each group is more of a catalyst than a traditional matrix. The authors note that "businesses are better at stifling innovation than capitalizing on it," and "better at optimizing local operations than integrating them for the good of the enterprise and its customers."

Since innovation is distributed across the business, the DIG focuses on "fostering and channeling" cross-silo innovation rather than being responsible for it. And, the EIG prioritizes and provides resources for cross-silo horizontal integration projects.

The DIG:
- "Scouts for new ideas and untapped potential in current technologies"
- "Scans…for emerging technologies"
- "Facilitates participation in idea forums"
- "Acts as a center for innovation expertise"
- "Publicizes [and incubates] promising innovations"

The EIG:
- "Manages the corporate portfolio of integration initiatives"
- "Serves as the corporate center of excellence in process management and improvement"
- "Provides staff to major business integration initiatives"
- "Is responsible for enterprise architecture"
- "Anticipates how operations might work in a more integrated fashion" \

The article also discusses what the groups are not, and explores in some detail what capabilities are needed to form and deploy them. Integration work is discussed in more detail than Innovation…perhaps because it is more amenable to traditional management techniques.

Six sets of skills are identified as central to Integration:
- Familiar with business process design/improvement
- Experience with cross-functional systems implementation
- Competence in architecture analysis
- Expertise in information management
- Experience in program management
- A talent for relationship management

They note that the last skill is rare, but essential to "open people’s eyes to the possibilities and benefits of horizontal integration and to enlist their commitment to making integration happen."
Finally, they note that the DIG and EIG groups are similar:
- "Each is a collection of catalysts"
- "Neither offer direct solutions"
- "Both lead through relationships, communication, and targeted expertise"
- "Networking is an essential activity for both"
- "Both focus on adding customer value"
- "Most members must be trilingual…in the languages of business, IT, and sociability"
- "They must know the organization"

The details proposed in this article seem reasonable and implementable, though I suspect that more innovation may arise from the EIG than the authors seem to anticipate.

My guess is that the most difficult challenge will be getting these groups institutionalized as effectively carrying out their duties. Strong top management support and staffing by top-notch personnel who are already carrying out these functions would seem to be essential if they are to have any chance of success. I suspect many large organizations will find it difficult to pay the opportunity cost required to make these groups successful.

Why Social Media is Counter-Enterprise

2008-12-21T14:57:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-13T20:34:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-12-07T20:23:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-07T20:03:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-07T19:16:00.000-08:00

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)).

Design Thinking

2008-11-27T20:18:00.000-08:00

I ran across recent article by Tim Brown of IDEO on design thinking (June 2008 HBR). A statement in the introductory paragraph caught my eye:

"...Edison understood that the [light] bulb was little more than a parlor trick without a system of electric power generation and transmission to make it truly useful."

Brown highlights the need to fit technological innovation into a larger ecosystem. Big-picture engineers probably are better at this than puzzled-oriented engineers. Brown describes the personality profile of design thinker:

Empathy
Integrative Thinking
Optimism
Experimentation
Collaboration

He also describes a design thinking dynamic with 3 nodes: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation. Inspiration and Ideation would seem to be more divergent (though Ideation is a mixture of divergent and convergent), and Implementation more convergent.

Brown's article is a pointed reminder that truly disruptive innovation often spans multiple levels (system, enterprise, ecosystem), domains (technology, people, process), and perspectives (strategy, operations, consumption, complements, etc.).

Divergent-Convergent Zones

2008-11-27T11:28:00.000-08:00

I've come to think of techies as falling into one of two camps: puzzle (likes well-defined puzzles) or big picture (likes understanding how well-defined puzzles fit into a larger context). Although I only have first hand experience with engineers, I suspect other technically-oriented disciplines (e.g., accounting, medicine) have a similar division.

I mention this in the context of a model I stumbled across recently. It's in Viv McWaters' blog and describes how groups work through a specific issue. The phases shown are (a) a new topic emerges, (b) the topic is potentially closed via "business as usual", (c) the topic diverges into a Complex exploratory space, (d) a "groan zone" is entered where the group struggles to create a frame that will move the issue into a Complicated space, (e) the topic moves into a convergent Complicated space, and (f) the topic is resolved.

Traditional engineering is largely in the convergent zone. Non-engineers (e.g., business analysts, marketing) usually inhabit the divergent zone. They are responsible for exploring topics in the divergent zone and organizing them so that they can be handed over to engineers for creating specific capabilities. Engineers use traditional processes and tools to converge on an implemented capability. And, engineering education is largely devoted to training engineers to use a range of tools that transform an abstract description into a concrete implementation.

This works well enough when capabilities are relatively decoupled (from each other and various use contexts) chunks of knowledge (e.g., systems, machines, applications, etc.). However, it becomes rigid, stovepiped, and slow when small chunks of composable knowledge (along with interoperable data) begin to dominate a topic area.

Technology seems to be in the early stages of such a shift today in the area of information technology. Traditional IT has a clear divergent-convergent divide...divergent in the need/requirement exploration phase, and convergent in the analysis/design/implementation phase. New IT (SOA, cloud computing, and similar composable technoogies) is beginning to blur the distinction between the divergent and convergent zones.

In topic areas where capabilities are information-intensive (and most capabilities are increasing in the amount of information they store and process), this shift means that the divergent and convergent zones will overlap in an increasingly fractal fashion.

This trend seems to point toward small teams of big picture-oriented explorers, puzzle-oriented implementors, topic experts, and a few part-time cognitive and social domain experts...first in IT-intensive domains, then in all information-intensive domains where agile decision making is important.

On the other hand, information storage, processing, and communication infrastructure would seem to be headed toward being a convergent commodity that requires deep and narrow technical expertise (similar to the production and dissemination of electricity)...except when new technologies disrupt (then displace) existing infrastructure technologies.

Structuring Innovation

2008-11-17T19:54:00.000-08:00

The need and opportunity to innovate is an ongoing challenge/risk for all competitive contexts. Since the modern world has (for good reasons) an analytical bias, it's not surprising that there's a tension between incremental innovation that can be produced using analytical approaches, but yields only modest improvements, and disruptive innovation that seems to be largely the result of serendipity, but yields dramatic improvements.

This presentation by Robert Austin (HBS) is a nice discussion of this contrast/tension. My impression is that very few organizations have even a basic awareness of many of the key questions surrounding the full scope of innovation possibilities. This is especially true of large organizations whose DNA usually contains a "process maturity" gene that suppresses the expression of what Austin calls "artful making."

Here's a similar Austin presentation with an IT emphasis.

And, a NYT article on the fact that very few organizations manage the radical changes required to survive more than a few decades.

Data-Centricity

2008-11-17T19:32:00.000-08:00

I suppose that software's malleability is one reason I first heard about the contrast between data/state and process/sequence in the SW engineering domain. It seems like this tension continues to evolve as technology changes...imperative vs. functional programming, SOA vs. REST, etc.

EMC's latest technology, Maui, is an interesting take on an object-centric world where processing related to storage policy is highly decentralized. A short article describing it appeared recently in The Register.

Beyond Analysis

2008-11-17T18:54:00.000-08:00

Since the emergence of the unique blend of empiricism and rationalism called "science", many critiques of its power and limits have been made. I've discussed some of Dave Snowden's thoughts on the topic. Here are two other perspectives that also highlight the value of non-analytical tools:

Stacey's Agreement and Uncertainty Matrix - highlights some challenges of coherent group action
"The Tools of Cooperation and Change" - This October 2006 HBR article by Christensen, Marx, Stevenson highlights the types of tools used to reach group agreement when there is consensus (or lack thereof) in two areas: (a) goals, (b) cause-effect structure. This diagram summarizes the article.

I suppose it's no coincidence that these two perspectives (along with Cynefin) emphasize the epistemological limits of individuals and groups. Although there's a risk that such an emphasis may overstate the limits of analysis, that risk may be justified for those whose training and experience has tended to emphasize its power.

Innovation and Sensemaking

2008-11-04T19:49:00.000-08:00

As someone who finds Dave Snowden's writing generally thought-provoking, I was glad to see that he recently discussed innovation with an Australian government network that focuses on continuous improvement.

Although Dave seems to be more focused on disruptive improvement in the Complex domain, and continuous improvement seems to be more consonant with the Complicated domain, Dave's talk was an intriguing critique of the dangers of using analytical and/or best practice approaches to innovation. Although I found some of the rationale for his conclusions unconvincing, the overall message was a refreshing change from the Complicated/Analytical approaches to innovation usually seen in large organizations.

A nice summary is here. It contains a link to the (partial) podcast. And, here's Dave's summary: http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/2008/10/to_distinguish_the_ordinary.php#more

Dis-Integrating Architectures

2008-11-04T18:28:00.000-08:00

Although SOA gets most of the attention when the topic turns to composable business capabilities, the discussion is often either superficial or trite. A couple of recent items are welcome exceptions.

The first is a series of articles in the Economist on corporate IT. Although the overall theme is cloud computing, the articles discuss a range of trends that are driving increasing composability. Despite the lack of depth, the collection provides a nice summary of how IT is dis-integrating.

The second, however, provides some real depth. Carliss Baldwin and Jason Woodard recently published "The Architecture of Platforms: A Unified View." This fascinating HBS Working Paper (09-034) reviews three waves of research on business platforms (product-oriented, technological system-oriented, and transaction-oriented), considers various aspects of platform architectures, and describes three ways of representing platforms and their architectures (network graphs, design structure matrices (a long-time favorite of mine), and layer maps). This is the sort of article that is essential for understanding how dis-integrating IT intersects the business. Unfortunately, it is also the sort of article that most technology-centric architects are unlikely to ever stumble across since there remains a largely unbridged gap between IT-centric engineers (who read IT publications) and and business analysts (who read HBR and The Sloan Management Review).

Finally, Nick Carr created a bit of a fuss recently in his discussion of cloud computing. His post describing how the emergence of the electric grid triggered a wave of products that had a standard way to plug into that grid was interesting, as was his "typology of network strategies."

These articles/posts provide valuable insight into how dis-integrating technologies are changing the business environment, especially for those who think of WS-* or ESBs when someone says "SOA" . As IT shifts from being an expense to being a source of competitive advantage, the need for those who can bridge the IT-business gap will continue to grow.

Governance and Strange Loops

2008-10-19T14:57:00.000-07:00

I remember a retrospective on the 90's asserting that the two least read books of the 80's were Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" and Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, and Bach" (Hawking's "Brief History of Time" is a 3rd candidate).

Although I disagree with some of the basic assumptions in each book, their books are interesting explorations of key issues. Bloom helped catalyze my interest in various understandings of basic questions in philosophy. And, Hofstadter remains the only person I've run across to explore the epistemological implications of recursion.

Since I've never finished GEB (unlike Bloom's book), I'm not familiar with all the nuances Hofstadter explores. However, the basic theme of the intertwining of what might be called "sensemaking of a context" and "the governance of that sensemaking" is a profound one.

It recognizes an aspect of sensemaking that we constantly juggle, but rarely think about. Both Boyd's OODA loop and Klein's Data-Frame model recognize that sensemaking is perhaps most distinguished by the pervasiveness of a GEB-style "strange loop" of Orientation (Boyd) or Questioning/Reframing (Klein).

Since engineers are grounded in the "sensemaking execution" thread that is basically analytical, the orientation challenge of "governance" is often ignored or assumed to be static...which may be why I've found few engineers who really latch on to frameworks that place equal (or more) emphasis on the "strange loop" that makes all sensemaking adaptable, agile, and real-world.

And, it may be yet another reason why engineers seem to have a difficult time grasping why sensemaking governance must be distributed/decentralized, limited in scope to a specific type of context, as informal as possible, and an 80/20 solution (i.e., not optimized).

My Virtual Crews

2008-10-06T18:36:00.000-07:00

Will it become feasible to assemble a virtual crew from composable IT chunks (local and “in the cloud”) to automate significant aspects of a decision making context? The following comments explore this question.

The decision maker faces several simultaneous challenges. Among them are (a) managing goals, strategies, and tactics by constantly seeking alignment across all three levels, (b) understanding an evolving decision context, and (c) constantly making adjustments to goals, strategies and tactics to more effectively address the decision context. Sensemaking frameworks are intended to provide insight into the dynamics of these challenges.

The sensemaking frameworks I’m most familiar with seem to assume a “single CPU” decision maker. John Boyd’s OODA loop, Mica Endsley’s Situation Awareness model, Gary Klein’s Data-Frame model, and Karl Weick’s Enact-Select-Retain framework all highlight key aspects of sensemaking, but only Weick’s E-S-R seems to have been intended to apply to both individual and group sensemaking.

In addition to individual and group sensemaking, there seems to be a middle ground emerging where a single decision maker “outsource” contextually-oriented chunks to IT that is partially autonomous. These chunks are “smarter” than traditional IT, but are also more coupled to the decision maker’s sensemaking process than traditional IT.

Most discussions of IT in this context involve systems (or “intelligent” agents) which are largely decoupled from the decision maker. However, technologies/styles that are loosely coupled raise an interesting question about how decision makers interact with technology…will the increasing fragmentation of IT eventually result in a complex interleaving of decision maker and technology that allows an individual to achieve the kind of sensemaking agility currently only achievable by a group…specifically the kind of group often referred to as a crew?

The use of traditional IT by a decision maker looks more like a carpenter with a hammer than a human with a hand. IT is generally not much “smarter” than a hammer…it does what it’s told to do, and nothing more. Although a hand also does what it’s told (usually), it also provides complex feedback that allows the hand to take on several roles simultaneously.

The following is a proposal for four fundamental roles (and one meta-role) that IT can take on to allow a composed “IT Crew” to act more like a hand.

Watcher – IT that observes a specific context (physical, logical, semantic, etc.) for events of interest, and issues reports about these events. This includes rules about how events are linked (causually or correlated) and about what events to report. Depending on how complex the watched context is, it might include meta-rules that allow the Watcher to “shift focus.” And, it probably involves an ability to do some predictive modeling of the context.
Miner – IT that “digs” deeply into a specific context when a Watcher detects events of interest. The context must be constrained enough to allow mining, but ambiguous enough that further information is needed before a decision can be made.
Actor – IT that initiates actions in a specific context to achieve goals
Decider – IT that consists primarily of rules-based models that tie Watchers, Miners, and Actors together. As with the Watcher, this probably includes meta-rules that allow the Decider to exhibit a limited amount of adaptability. It almost certainly includes some predictive modeling of the decision context.
Executive – forms goals, composes Watchers, Miners, Actors, and Deciders (WMAD) patterns to pursue goals, creates and deploys WMAD packages to achieve the desired effects, and monitors and modifies WMAD patterns and packages as needed to cope with environmental changes. Includes predictive modeling of how contexts affect progress toward a goal. While some of this involves IT, complete automation would seem to be feasible only for constrained and predictable contexts/goals.

This sort of taxonomy is similar to that seen in discussions of autonomous software agents (see, for example, IBM’s ABLE toolkit (). Although the IT Crew taxonomy resembles an AI (techno-centric) taxonomy, it differs in several ways. First, it uses a sociological construct (a crew) instead of a brain/mind construct. Second, it focuses on dynamic crew composition and deployment by the decision maker for a specific decision context. And, as noted above, autonomous agents usually do not involve the complex human-tool coupling that is seen between a person and their hand.

In an “IT Crew” framework, IT is built to fill one of the roles listed above. It is also built to be composable (loosely-coupled). Each composable IT chunk is explicitly designed for a specific range of contexts. A designer defines key aspects of a decision context, brings up a palette of IT crew members for each role listed above, and selects and assembles the selected crew members into a WMADE package to be tested and deployed. Note that a package may have multiple members of a given type (e.g., Miners), or it may have only one member type (e.g., Actor).

While much of the research on crews appears to have been focused on high-reliability contexts that require group agility and adaptability (e.g. operating room, aircraft carrier, airplane, etc), it seems to me that a similar pattern could also describe an individual decision maker using a wide range of local and remote Information Technologies to cope with a complex sensemaking challenge.

I suspect that variants of this sort of thing have been discussed in association with artificial intelligence, complex adaptive systems, agent technologies, etc. If someone knows of proposals or research where the organizational concepts associated with crews have been combined with recent types of composable IT, I’d be very interested in hearing about it.

Bits and pieces of today’s IT that seem to fit into this framework continue to appear in the Web domain: e-Bay sniping software, wiring frameworks like Yahoo Pipes and Ubiquity, etc. However, I can’t remember seeing a taxonomy (like that mentioned above) that would provide a crew-style plug-n-play design framework.

Bottom line: I’ve been a bit frustrated by the lack of architectural structure associated with most composable IT technologies/styles (e.g., SOA). Perhaps connecting these concepts to the organizational concept of crews would catalyze some useful design activity by (a) focusing on types of decision contexts, (b) parsing a context type into a small number of decoupled roles, and (c) providing enough structure to enable relatively simple, but robust, interoperability.

Context & Connection

2008-09-29T04:17:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-29T04:11:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-21T17:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-15T18:45:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-09-11T19:37:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-01T20:34:00.000-07:00

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.

The Death of EBO?

2008-08-31T13:55:00.000-07:00

General Mattis's guidance that USJFCOM cease the use of Effects Based Operations (EBO) concepts does not bode well for its future. Here's a few extracts I found interesting:

"The joint force must act in uncertainty and thrive in chaos, sensing opportunity therein and not retreating into a need for more information."

"EBO ... assumes an unachievable level of predictability"

"... any planning construct that mechanistically attempts to provide certainty and predictability in an inherently uncertain environment is fundamentally at odds with the nature of war."

"The use of 'effects' has confused what previously was a well-designed and straightforward process for determining 'ends.'"

"The underlying principles associated with EBO, ONA [Operational Net Assessment], and SoSA [System of Systems Analysis] are fundamentally flawed and must be removed from our lexicon, training, and operations. EBO thinking, as the Israelis found, is an intellectual 'Maginot Line' around which the enemy can maneuver. Effective immediately, USJFCOM will no longer use, sponsor, or export the terms and concepts related to EBO, ONA, and SoSA in our training, doctrine development, and support of JPME."

My limited understanding of EBO was acquired incidentally when I became interested in Network Centric Warfare a few years back. So, I don't know enough about the details of EBO to have strong opinions about it.

However, General Mattis's statement did prompt a few snap reactions:

EBO, like NCW, seems to have come to prominence in part because of the emergence of hyperconnectivity in communications and information technology. This revolution prompted visions of coordinating effects with unprecedented precision across a battlespace. As I've said before, I think the basic concepts of NCW (as depicted in Figures 5 and 11 of "The Implementation of Network Centric Warfare") are exactly right in their emphasis on the social and cognitive aspects of turning information into actions. However, I've also noted that the U.S. implementation of these concepts seems to have overemphasized information sharing, to the detriment of the social and cognitive domains. General Mattis's critique of EBO recognizes that robust information may actually degrade decision making if the cognitive and social domains are not also considered.

There seems to be a widespread feeling among John Boyd's followers that the intellectual leaders of NCW have promoted concepts that are flawed understandings of Boyd's ideas (e.g., the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) loop). I may have misunderstood these critiques, or it may be that the NCW theorists were on a track parallel to Boyd (a common situation when a fundamental new idea is on the horizon). Regardless, I think it's true that NCW does not emphasize "staying inside the opponent's decision making loop" the way OODA does. General Mattis's critique seems to imply that EBO reflects this deficiency.

Users of a process must own it. According to Mattis, EBO is "staff, not command, led." All of us who live in large organizations understand that creating robust and mature processes is relatively easy (though expensive). The hard part is getting those processes into the heads of those who use them, and to do so in such a way that robust coherent decisions and actions are established and maintained.

There seems to have been a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of war. This is why I think Cynefin is such a useful framework. It helps analytically oriented individuals and organizations understand the limitations of analysis and the need for agile probing in Complex contexts (which is what most battlespaces are).

Trying to attack a Complex problem using analysis, complicated organizations, and thick processes is a recipe for failure. What's needed are relatively simple organizations and processes that (a) provide "just enough" structure to maintain coherent action and (b) are able to run OODA loops fast enough to maintain relevance. Again, see Cynefin.

Finally, I can't help wondering if there's a bit of "emergence magic" mixed into EBO. As with NCW, I may be misunderstanding what I've seen, but there's an "information for free" mentality that seems to occasionally pop up in discussions of pervasive hyperconnectivity. As someone who has been entranced by a number of books describing complex adaptive systems and emergence, I understand the temptation to think that mixing the right ingredients with the right incantation might result in the emergence of an unexpected synergy. However, our ability to design emergent behavior to achieve a specific goal seems to be very limited at this point.

Anyway, if you're the least bit interested in asymmetric and irregular warfare, General Mattis's article is must reading.

The Decontextualization of IT

2008-08-30T18:47:00.000-07:00

Seems like every few weeks there's new swirling about SOA vs. WOA/REST/ROA.

I doubt I can add anything new to the discussion, but it occurs to me that a part of what we're seeing may be the gradual and ongoing decontextualization of IT. Here's the progression:

Mainframe era - an entire entire enterprise of related contexts are modeled on a single box. User interaction was limited to block-mode terminals & printouts. My first job after leaving college was programming on such a box.
Microcomputer era - similar to mainframe; for smaller organizations
PC era - a small set of a specific users' or group's contexts are modeled. New tools allow users to do their own modeling (Excel, Access). IT spends a decade or more figuring out how to govern the resulting dis-integration.
Web 1.0 - entire enterprise of contexts are exposed via a standard presentation layer (i.e., a browser); in some ways this looks like the return of the mainframe; albeit a distributed one.
Web 2.0 - coarse-grained business-oriented subsets of specific contexts are exposed. Although the integration of those services remains largely an IT job, the services carry much less context with them than the apps/systems they replace. As a result, the SOA style is promoted as enabling increased business agility and innovation.
Resource-oriented web - decontextualized resources are exposed. IT builds apps, services, workflows, etc. that contextualize resources. Users string resources together to contextualize them "at the speed of need." (e.g., Ubiquity).

If you emphasize the contextual aspect of knowledge (as I do), you may find this trend slightly puzzling. Ever since the birth of computing & IT, there's been a focus on increasing the amount of context that's automated. There was a concerted effort, now seen as largely failed, to create what became known as "strong AI." And, recently, there's been lots of speculation about a Web 3.0 or Semantic Web.

Even Dion Hinchcliffe, in an interesting discussion about how the Web is increasingly about user-driven contextualization of resources, has a diagram that speculates that the next step may be Semantic.

He may be right...but, if so, it will be a dramatic swing back toward contextualization. Since it's unclear how resources/services can become much more decontextualized, maybe it's time to move back a little. If so, a key issue will be how to do so while maintaining the adaptability that comes with decontextualization.

Regardless, increasingly decontextualized IT, along with standards/provisioning/tools that make it easy to recontextualize "at the speed of need", would seem to be exactly what's needed to support more adaptable and agile sensemaking and decision making.

If you're unaware of the SOA, WOA/ROA/REST, etc. swirling, here's a few recent items: Burton Group blogger, here, here, and here. This shows no sign of clearing up any time soon...which, given how fundamental it is, may be a healthy sign.

Drawing Distinctions

2008-08-28T19:13:00.000-07:00

Two recents posts got me to thinking about the drawing of distinctions.

Dave Snowden discussed various types of stories, and referenced a Patrick Lambe discussion of the dangers of simple, closed typologies. If you're unfamiliar with this topic, both are well worth reading.

Anyway, my reaction was that there are two extremes that folks tend to react against. At one end is the logical positivist dream of "one taxonomy to rule them all." At the other end is the postmodern "taxonomies are a tool used by the dominant culture to oppress those who are not of it." In this latter perspective, the only appropriate action is to deconstruct the taxonomy to uncover the underlying assumptions and power structures.

Both extremes highlight real concerns. Drawing distinctions is an inescapable activity in creating meaning and taking action. However, the distinctions drawn do reflect historical and environmental considerations that are often invisible to those using them. And, it seems likely that the creation and using of distinctions forms a sort of "strange loop" that is inextricably entwined with identity formation.

Practically speaking, Known/Knowable (Cynefin) domains tend to be Exploitation/Execution-oriented, and generally have relatively stable taxonomies/typologies that are relatively invariant across those who use them (though an expert's will be much richer than a novice's). If you want to push a Known/Knowable context into the Complex domain, deconstruct its taxonomies.

Complex domains, on the other hand, are likely to take a bite out of any taxonomy you bring to the table. This is one of the challenges of probing these domains...you're constantly shuffling a morphing deck of distinctions to keep the useful ones in play...not the sort of thing taught in the average engineering or business curriculum.

Teaching Programming To Accountants

2008-08-28T18:22:00.000-07:00

When I was in college in the late 70's, I had the opportunity to attend the national meeting of DEC minicomputer users. At lunch one day I sat at the same table as the president of a small accounting software vendor. When I asked him about what kind of background he looked for in a developer, he said "I hire accountants; it's easier to teach programming to accountants than to teach accounting to programmers."

I was reminded of that while reading a Forrester report ("Complex Event Processing in a Quant World"). In it, Charles Brett interviews Robert Almgren, a pioneer in using Complex Event Processing to build algorithmic trading strategies. Regarding the skills he looked for, Almgren says "I wanted quants — not IT or technology people. This was because creating the algorithms determines the event processing. If you do not know what you want to do with the events available, no amount of CEP will help."

It seems like IT is splitting into two pieces: commoditized & standardized (but complex) data processing, and domain-specific business-focused capabilities that are becoming deeply woven into the non-IT fabric of the business.

It's not clear to me that IT-trained personnel will ultimately perform much of the work in the latter category...at least where the related business knowledge is largely Knowable (the domain of experts) or Complex (the domain of pattern management). Then again, maybe it's always been that way...

Dis-Integrating E-Mail

2008-08-16T21:16:00.001-07:00

As asynchronous electronic connectivity became commodotized in the 80's and 90's, two types of tools became pervasive: e-mail for one-to-one (1:1) or one-to-few (1:F) communications, and bulletin boards (then Internet forums) for many-to-many (M:M) communications. Since I'm mostly interested in group sensemaking, I'm going to ignore 1:M communcations for this post.

Enterprise 2.0 has begun to explore how social media can be used on a scale that is much smaller and more formal than the Internet. That exploration is mostly of 1:1 & 1:F capabilities, since most group conversations inside an enterprise are on that scale.

Given that e-mail is basically snail mail in an electronic form, it would seem that e-mail might disintegrate into multiple capabilities that are crafted for the various types of small group activities.

Matt Moore (engineerswithoutfears.blogspot.com) has an interesting post & SlideShare of how he sees e-mail disentegrating...check it out.

Mashup Wiki Apps

2008-08-11T20:33:00.000-07:00

I suppose that sounds like a bad translation from some foreign language, but it seems to be what MindTouch Deki enables. In this blog post, Dennis Howlett discusses the latest release.

I heard an interview over the weekend with the inventor of the wiki and thought it was interesting that he invented it to replace e-mail-based collaboration on project. What little I know about wikis indicates that, within the enterprise, they still work best in the context of a group that needs to collaborate to complete a task.

I suspect it has to do with the fact that individual identity within an enterprise is usually tightly coupled to specific goals and tasks. As a result, most individuals are a bit at sea when asked to start or contribute to a wiki outside the context of some specific goal/task.

I'm not sure anyone can keep track of all the innovation going on in the social media arena, and I don't even try. So, there may be a number of products that look like MindTouch Deki. Regardless, it's an intriguing concept: combine the artifact-oriented wiki with the ability to mashup application inputs/outputs and you get something like a collaborative workflow exploration tool. Something about this sounds catalytic...

Will IT Be Run by Social Scientists?

2008-08-09T16:17:00.000-07:00

As a big fan of Karl Weick & Gary Klein, I'm sympathetic to Gartner researcher Tom Austin's answer of "yes" to this question in this interview.

However, I'd probably answer "no, but." I do think that systems engineers and architects are going to have to become much more literate about social and organizational behavior, and about how information technologies affect individual and group sensemaking and decision making.

And, managers at all levels are also probably going to traverse a similar learning curve.

IT might even have a few social scientists on staff who are techno-literate. But, I don't think you'll have to have a degree in the field to effectively use the required social science knowledge.

Conversation Types

2008-08-09T14:29:00.000-07:00

This blog entry by Jennifer Legio references a "Conversation Prism" as a tool in enterprise social media strategy formulation.

It's an interesting taxonomy that raises an interesting question...when will the rate of change in the taxonomy/structure of social media begin to flatten out? I certainly don't have a clue, but do have a couple of snap reactions:

The variety of social media tools will probably continue to increase for 5-10 years
So far there's very little of what I'd call "user governance" tools for managing your social net. I can't imagine social media being considered mature without mature governance capabilities across a range of contexts (e.g., individual, internal, external, ad hoc, group, enterprise, etc.).
Given that this ultimately will result in a much more complex mixture of Exploration and Exploitation across multiple organizations, along with the likelihood of more fluid individual and group identities, I lean toward 30+ years before this begins to shake out.

Fitting Organizations

2008-08-08T20:59:00.000-07:00

I suppose we all struggle some with separating ends from means. But it is still frustrating to see individuals and groups pursue tools like process and organizational structures as an end in themselves.

To a certain degree, focusing on a tool is useful. Human-intensive tools are always evolving, and the environment in which a tool is being applied also evolves. So, there's a certain amount of tool focus that's required to engage in the ongoing task of molding the tool to the context.

However, it seems that we're more likely to shift our focus from a goal to a tool than vice-versa. And, finding a good balance between ends and means is often difficult.

This task is considered in an article by David Tucker (from Homeland Security Affairs). It's an interesting discussion of fitting organizational structure to the context of fighting terrorism.

Hyperconnectivty in the Enterprise

2008-08-08T20:00:00.000-07:00

Posts by Andrew McAfee about micro-blogging and messaging in the enterprise ignited a small firestorm about whether a company should set up constrain how these tools are used.

Seems like this is classic Complex (Cynefin) territory, so boundaries and attractors make lots of sense.

Furthermore, enterprises have goals and engage in a mixture of Exploration and Exploitation activities to reach those goals, so integrating exploratory tools like micro-blogging and messaging into ongoing Exploitation activities makes a lot of sense (e.g., many web retailers now have chat integrated into their sales workflow).

Regardless, a related item may be more interesting in the long run. Mozilla has released a Firefox plugin called Snowl that aggregates messaging and micro-blogging. While Flock is more established, Snowl's focus on aggregating messages raises some interesting questions. The one I find most intriguing is how this tool may evolve to allow users to manage hundreds to thousands of message sources (and tap into the associated social network). I don't have an answer, but this may be the cutting edge of hyperconnectivity in the enterprise.

Complex Organizations

2008-08-05T18:24:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot written about social media and modern organizations, but publicly available research in this fast-changing area is relatively scarce. Which makes this HBS Working Paper interesting.

The fact that Micheal Tushman is one of the authors makes it interesting to me...he's one of the main popularizers of the Exploitation-Exploration contrast.

The focus is on coordination across the organization, and has some interesting observations of the single large company studied. Here's one that caught my eye: "...the category spanners in the firm are women concentrated in the upper-middle management ranks and in a few functions, most notably sales, marketing, and general executive management."

Focus and Resource Scarcity

2008-08-05T17:43:00.000-07:00

We tend to focus intently on key resources that are relatively scarce.

This truism seems so pervasive as to be trite...so why mention it? Where resource supply and demand change relatively slowly (or oscillate in a bounded range) I suspect there's no compelling reason to think much about this topic.

However, the world of IT continues to change quickly, and Moore's Law remains in force. One implication of this is being discussed by Joe McKendrick in his coverage of the emergence of a Service Science curriculum.

How does engineering and IT change when processing, communications, and storage becomes commoditized (i.e., cheap, pervasive, and standardized/interoperable)? Since the telegraph was invented, an enormous amount of effort has been focused on dealing with resource scarcity in these areas. As that focus is freed up, it's beginning to shift to the business application of hyperconnected and commoditized IT.

It's a very different kind of problem demanding a different set of skills...and, IBM is recognizing this.

Finally, Dion Hinchcliffe has a nice summary of one current aspect of this transition...cloud computing.

Twitter in the Enterprise

2008-08-05T17:32:00.000-07:00

SAP is rolling out an Twitter-like capability for the enterprise, discussed here by Oliver Marks.

I suspect no one really knows whether/where this might work. Seems like it might be useful for individuals and groups that are in a sensemaking/orientation role, especially if constant conversation is needed (e.g., marketing).

Like all social media, using metrics to track usage and infer value may be difficult since gaming and unintended consequences may become pervasive (i.e., just knowing something is being measured can turn it into a goal).

Andrew McAfee also has a couple of posts on the topic (here and here).

Knowledge Binding

2008-08-03T13:22:00.000-07:00

Few (if any) contexts are pure Known/Knowable. If a human is involved, there's at least a few Complex threads. Which means that there's usually a trade space involving when to bind Knowledge to Context.

I was reminded of this late last year when I heard an NPR piece on reducing catheter-related infections in the ICU. The traditional approach was to create a more sophisticated (and expensive) technology...that seemed to be more "idiot-proof." The non-traditional approach was to create a process and roles that made the existing technology less risky.

Here's a few observations:

Technology solution - antibiotic-coated catheter

Complicated point technology
Intended to reduce risk in a range of contexts
Expensive; one-size-fits-all "silver bullet"
Knowledge is statically bound to all potential contexts at the time the the technology is designed and created
Unanticipated risks are not mitigated
Infection rate remains unacceptably high

Process/roles solution - checklist to control infection sources, non-traditional roles/responsibilities to increase organizational reliability

Simple process
Intended to ensure the Context is low-risk
Cheap; humans ensure fit between context and technology
Knowledge is dynamically bound to a specific context at the time of need
Unanticipated risks are addressed when cather is inserted
Infection rate drops to near-zero

As technology becomes more sophisticated, agile, and adaptable, the temptation to create sophisticated "silver bullets" increases. And, it gets easier for a designer to be seduced by the illusion that smarter technology can move the Complex into the Known/Knowable.

When you add in the fact that financial incentives tend to be biased toward Technology (i.e., a product or system that's easily monetized) and away from Process/People/Organization, it's not surprising that the doctor in the NPR story had a difficult time getting hospitals to adopt his very successful solution.

Bottom line: Complex threads require late knowledge binding (driven by Context)...which often means humans in/on the loop. And, short-term financial incentives often point away from the most effective solution.

See also the original New Yorker article.

SOA Generations?

2008-07-28T20:56:00.000-07:00

In the commentary section of recent post on causes of IT complexity, Roger Sessions (ObjectWatch) described 3 eras of Enterprise Architecting:

Need to align IT and business - Zachman
Need a process - FEA, TOGAF
Need something thinner - VPEC-T, AEA, SIP

This sounds a lot like the SOA discussions I've seen recently...with most of the current focus being on the pre-process phase (e.g., how to carve up the objects in "SOA-space" so that we can begin to talk about a SOA-centric process). Or maybe I'm just seeing connections where there really are none... :-)

Does NCW Include Social-Cognitive?

2008-07-28T20:30:00.000-07:00

After 3+ years of reading NCW literature, I'm starting to wonder if I just imagined that "The Implementation of Network Centric Warfare" has diagrams delineating four domains: Information, Social, Cognitive, and Physical.

Much of what is written either ignores the Social and Cognitive, or decries its absence. The latest item I've run ("Unintended Consequences of the Network Centric Decision Making Model") across falls into the latter category. It's actually a couple of years old, but it's a good critique of why NCW must include the Social and Cognitive domains. If you're still unconvinced, go read the various online books by Garstka and/or Alberts which provide a more abstract rationale (e.g. "Understanding Command and Control").