Cultural Perceptions

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

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

[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?

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?

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

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

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.