February 2012
21 posts
Parenting and micromanaging
…children often move so slowly that impatience gets the best of us and we start putting on their shirts, their pants, and their shoes when they’re perfectly capable of doing it themselves. But just as often, it’s because we want to spare them difficulty. Our desire to do so, however, is clearly as misguided as it is understandable. How, after all, did we learn to succeed at...
Look at where Agile fits in Management and HR
Traditional annual performance appraisals use an older “waterfall” method – continuous feedback and recognition is an “agile” approach.
Traditional formal training and certification is a “waterfall” model – rapid e-learning and informal learning is an “agile” approach.
Top down cascading goals are a “waterfall” approach – rapidly updated “objectives and key results” (sometimes called OKR –...
Complexity vs a villain to blame
…during this election season, think about how much of the debate centered around figuring out who is to blame for each problem. Whose fault is it that the health care system is screwed up? Washington? The insurance companies? The lawyers? We must know! It has to be somebody, dammit. It can’t just be, you know, some kind of complex, chaotic system subject to a billion variables no one...
Can you really design the user experience?
The more I think on this the more I feel strongly that you can’t design what people popularly call ‘user-experience’. You can, though, account for the variables that contribute to an experience with some of these being easier to account for than others. In essence, this is because we can influence how someone is likely to feel when they experience our products and services but we can never hope...
KM is FUQed; and as a strategic movement has...
…its not that the proper subject of KM (decision support, innovation, learning etc.) is dead, but that knowledge management as a strategic movement has served its time and is now irretrievably seen as a sub-function of IT
I think more or less all solutions marketed as KM are a waste of time. New KM capability comes from social computing and developments in the decision support/research...
"Lean" towards complexity
A selection of slides from Jurgen Appelo’s brilliant presentation Complexity versus Lean
- see another post from the same presentation Complexity is different than systems thinking
This one is timely as I just snipped a post about social meets lean meets agile, and read the Dave Snowden is working on complexity meets lean meets agile.
Related
Window of...
Where compliance dictates specific procedures,...
In today’s increasingly dynamic business environment, organizations must continuously adapt to survive. Ironically, change management has become a major bottleneck. Inefficient offline reviews are disconnected from daily operations and unresponsive to evolving requirements. Organizations’ need a practical mechanism for managing controlled variance and change in-flight to break the logjam.
...
Complexity is different than systems thinking
A selection of slides from Jurgen Appelo’s brilliant presentation Complexity versus Lean
- see another post from the same presentation “Lean” towards Complexity
Related
In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present,...
Characteristics of "a system"
• A system is an integrated whole, comprising interconnected and interdependent parts or sub-systems.
• A system is bounded – i.e. it has a clearly defined ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.
• “System” is therefore a spatial concept (as opposed to “process”, which expresses the notions of movement and time).
• A system which has a permeable boundary between itself and its (‘external’) environment is...
Gauge your culture - look at the way decisions are...
Do you run into your culture every day? Does it inspire you, or smack you in the face and get in your way, slowing and wearing you down? Is it overpowering or does it inspire you to overcome challenges? It’s important to understand what is driving your culture. Is it power and ego that people react to, and try to gain power, or a culture of encouragement and empowerment? Is it driven from...
Corporate Epistemology
SOURCE: Joe Firestone http://www.dkms.com/papers/corporateepistemologyandkm.pdf
Performance in business is nothing more than knowledge in use
What passes for knowledge is therefore of enormous importance – outcomes depend on its quality
Knowledge can be seen as beliefs or claims that we regard as true
First some background…
CRITICALISM: A view of inquiry which holds that all human...
Capacity is a horrible measure of throughput
SOURCE:Can’t remember where I found this
KM - a balance of extractionism and connectivism
There is an “extractionist” school of thought out there which focuses on separating knowledge from an individual, then combining, distilling and packaging in into a convenient and accessible products.
And there’s a “connectivist” school of thought which seeks to turn information into an advertisement for a conversation with the source.
I think the best knowledge assets combine these...
The kids who had played together, worked better...
We put groups of twenty or so kids in this almost empty room. Empty except for three piles of scrap masonite and recycled computer paper, and a big, one-way mirror.
We asked them to build a city for us. “Could you build a city out of this stuff?” we asked, and then we added, “we’ll come back in a while to see what you made.”
The test groups had spent a couple of hours a week over the last...
Three aspects of an emergent property
When a property of a system cannot be traced back to any of the individual parts in the system, it is called an emergent property.
Your personality is an emergent property of your brain. It cannot be traced back to individual neurons. Likewise, fluidity is an emergent property of water, and culture is an emergent property of a group of people.
Three aspects are important for a property to be...
Constraints in the unknowable
About patterns persisting but not being eternal, I rather like Ralph Stacey’s saying that the ‘the future is unknowable but not unrecognisable’. Along the same lines, Nicholas Nassim Taleb points out that the unknowability of a roulette wheel (highly constrained) is very different from the unknowability of a complex system (much more flexible in terms of evolving boundaries and interactions) –...
Window of viability : resilience vs efficiency
- Greg Fisher
Related
Efficiency destroys resilience
Leadership: From diagnosis to dialogue; from...
…seven possible shifts in the ways that we conventionally make sense of leadership in organizations
1. From elite practice to emergent property
Leadership would be recognized as an emergent property of people in relationship, not as an elite practice confined to individuals at senior levels in organizations…
2. From individual dynamism to interactional dynamics
The approaches to...
The criticality of initial conditions
The critical importance of initial conditions to the outcomes that emerge is another central tenet of non-linear dynamics and the complexity sciences. In discussing the patterning process of the brain, de Bono similarly points out that simply changing the entry point to a pattern can lead to a totally different outcome. The crucial effect that the sequence and timing of arrival of pieces of...
Polarization from categorisation
A critical dynamic of organization from a complex responsive process perspective is polarization. Stacey argues that the act of naming or categorizing an experience places it into one category rather than another. This identifies and accentuates the similarities that exist with other experiences placed in that same category and, at the same time, emphasizes the differences from experiences that...
Complex systems include patterns, randomness does...
Among the people I talk to about complex systems, a common point made is that the future is inherently uncertain or “unknowable”…it results from the concept of emergence “breaking” determinism (as well as from quantum uncertainty)…
…it’s important to distinguish between randomness and complex systems because the latter includes patterns whereas the former does not;...
January 2012
76 posts
“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”
– Kahlil Gibran
An individual’s personal frame of reference can be thought of as the ‘shell that encloses their understanding’. Change often threatens to ‘crack’ this ‘shell’; which is why it is often painful for people – and why individuals respond differently to what is proposed. The ‘deeper’ the...
Sometimes we say "evolve", when we probably mean...
Evolution is based on five principles:
Population - There must exist more than one version, or instance, of a system;
Replication - There must be a mechanism of making new versions from existing instances;
Variation - There must be differences between these versions or instances;
Heredity - The differences must be copied along from existing instances to the new versions;
Selection - The...
Why do we praise generous acts more when they seem...
Just as humans often use generosity in self-serving ways, they also scrutinize the generous acts of others for underlying selfish motives. When a corporation donates to charity, for instance, we may wonder whether it’s just an effort to generate governmental or public goodwill, in order to avoid regulation or to drum up business. To assess a generous act in this way, however, is not...
Our species tends to loathe complexity, and...
What led to the decrease, Gopnik found, was the combined effect of millions of small sustained actions by millions of determined people just trying to make their corner of the world a little better:
“Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely...
Learning itself is a form of invention
Recently I had reason to revisit some of the work of W. Brian Arthur, one of my favourite economists; while doing that, I couldn’t help but re-read his excellent The Nature of Technology. In that book, he makes the point that invention happens for two reasons: someone identifies a need to be filled, as in building jet engines rather than propellor-driven ones; or someone observes an effect that...
Self-organization is not the same thing as...
Organisation dynamics…“self-organization” is not something that is within the gift of managers to decide upon. It is at play just as surely in an organization ruled by the proverbial ‘iron fist’ as in one that has all the attributes of empowered self-management. However, the critical thing to emphasize here is that it is the conversational interactions that are self-organizing. And it is...
Employee performance rides on commitment; which...
The proposition is that people need three things if they are to commit to excellent performance. These are: the Motive to excel; the Means to excel; and the Opportunity to excel.
If any one of these three conditions is missing, there cannot be commitment. At least not in the sense described here. There may be good intentions, without the means or opportunity to deliver against them; there may...
Leaders are not in control of outcomes
…despite what might be suggested by the formal trappings of organization, decisions arising wholly from rational analysis of ‘the facts’ and step-by-step decision-making are rare – if they exist at all. In practice, people tend to make progress through informal interactions, ad hoc sense-making conversations, ongoing political accommodations, and plain, common-or-garden ‘muddling...
You can't achieve change based on ideal behaviour,...
…you have to embed change in process, not depend on individual competence. You can’t achieve change based on ideal behaviour, but you can change process and context
Rather than trying to solve the problems of the world (or the organisation or whatever) by sitting around with a group of like minded people and creating pipe dreams about how things should be…you instead focus on...
The challenges of complex systems are...
Natural systems are highly effective but inefficient due to their massive redundancy (picture a tree dropping thousands of seeds). By contrast, manufactured systems must be efficient (to be competitive) and usually have almost no redundancy, so they are extremely vulnerable to breakage. For example, many of our modern industrial systems will collapse without a constant and unlimited supply of...
Patterns of enterprise 2.0 adoption, and...
JH: Companies are most successful when they realize that tech by itself will not achieve anything. Instead, companies have to change the way that they work.
1st pattern
JH: It is the same pattern that you have seen in the tech industry for a long time. Each wave of new technology comes into the enterprise under the radar. People start using it without permission. The broadest adoption of...
The collaboration matrix - what dynamic structures...
Task: Because the “outcome” drives the members’ attention and participation
Trait: Because the “interest” drives the members’ attention and participation
Transactional: Because the “process” drives the members’ attention and participation
Social: Because the “shared insight” drives the members’ attention and participation
- Paul Culmsee
...
...acting with the intention of enabling rather...
Chris Rodgers on Twitter answering some questions through the perspective of social complex processes:
@RSessions Thx for interesting insights into your thinking re simplifying “enterprise architecture” and seeking greater ‘coherence’. @johnt
@RSessions Paper’s theme seems to be about ‘doing things better and getting them right’–as defined by set of universal design laws…@johnt
I see all...
One size fits all Community of Practice?
Q: Why should there be at least 50 people in a CoP?
A: In a typical community, 10% or fewer of the members will tend to post, ask questions, present, etc. If a CoP has only 10 members, that means that only one person will be doing most of the activity. In a CoP of 50, you can expect around 5 people to be very active, and that is probably the minimum number for success. As the community grows...
Communities of Practice are self-forming and...
Q: Would you include project teams or operating units as communities of practice (CoPs)?
A: Not typically. Communities form around people who share a common specialty, interest, or concern. Project teams and operating units share some characteristics, but they are not self-forming.
Communities exist to help their members better do their jobs and to deepen their skills and expertise. Project...
A networked team is...
A networked team is a social entity that carries out tasks in order to serve the needs of a customer (internal or external) and is embedded in one or several larger social systems . It stands out from regular teams by its network awareness, which mainly manifests itself in the following characteristics:
- Cohesive construct: A networked team is a cohesive social network. It is not too tight...
“Naysayers like to dismiss me as an outlier, telling me I’m the 1% of the...”
– Thiel Fellow Dale Stephens Drops Out (Of College), Moves In (To Silicon Valley), And Starts Up (Talent-Scouting RadMatter) | Fast Company
Instead of keeping the bonus, the employees must...
If I were to ask you if you would prefer to spend your year-end bonus on yourself or spend it on your coworkers, you would likely choose the former.
Pret-a-Manger, a U.K. food chain that is expanding in America, believes the opposite to be true.
“When employees are promoted or pass training milestones, they receive at least £50 in vouchers, a payment that Pret calls a ‘shooting...
The difference between motivation and...
“Peter,” my friend Byron emailed me a few days ago. “I haven’t been diligent about working out over the past five years and I’m trying to get back in the gym and get myself into a healthier state
“I need to fix it,” he wrote. He is motivated to work out; otherwise he wouldn’t have emailed me. He clearly cares about getting fit and when you care...
Parenting, the scientific experiments and...
The scientific experiment is useful for understanding general trends for the type of people studied, but it usually doesn’t apply to everyone (unless you are studying the effects of highly toxic substances that kill all). Hypothesis testing, the usual method for determining significant effects, tests group difference. All that is needed is to find a significant difference between the mean...
Knowledge is captured in the social network...
Increasingly seeing the ability to turn communications into content. Social tools do a better job of capturing the conversation and turning it into knowledge
In essence, you see social networks turning into a knowledge institution
No longer does a departing employees network drive get wiped. Instead, the knowledge is captured in the social network instead of the drive.
- Michael Porter
...
Memory isn't etched in neural stone. It's a...
They said their finding provided evidence that the mind uses sophisticated compression routines … for efficiently packaging previous events as they are being sent to memory.
After watching each video clip, the participants were shown a series of stills and asked to say if each one had or hadn’t featured in the video they’d just watched. Here’s the main finding....
“If you think knowledge is power, you aren’t living in the real world. Knowledge...”
– - Richard McDermott
President of McDermott Consulting (From “Lagestion du savoir”, proceedings of the November 2003 colloquium)
Related
The fallacy of know-how recipes and hoarding
“…rather than scale up successes (the fruits), we should focus on scaling...”
– - Ewen Le Borgne
Related
Replicate starting conditions
Beware of outcomes thinking in complex environments
Social construction of meaning, rather than...
This gave us an idea from which we evolved a series of experiments to see if from a body of culturally situated narrative, we could enable the emergence of archetypes that would allow insight into issues relating to culture and perception. Those experiments were successful and also established the importance of the social construction of meaning, rather than meaning mediated or interpreted by...
An example contrasting a survey vs narrative...
Prompting questions should be indirect to avoid correct answers and role play; the question should situate the storyteller in a meaningful context and should be phrased to ensure that a real story is told, either about the storyteller or about someone they know
An example of such as question follows…within a pharamceutical company looking at corporate values; Imagine you have just...
Excessive order stifles the opportunities for...
You can build a wonderful portal with the best taxonomy in the world but people will still use people to connect with knowledge. I often ask a simple question at conferences: faced with a difficult or intractable problem, would you use a best practice or find a group of people with relevant experience and listen to their stories? Inevitably people go for the stories not the database. Of course...
What you can learn about the behaviour of dopamine...
With Internet porn it’s easy to overstimulate your brain. Each search, each novel image, each surprising visual, each new genre, and sexual arousal itself all release dopamine in your reward circuitry. Dopamine is the gas that powers the reward circuitry and it equates with desire, anticipation, cravings, and wanting something in particular.
Unfortunately, too much stimulation causes some...
KM and sensitization
This post points out how we make memories; and from it I reinforce that real KM is about dialogue, reframing to your context, and then acting on this to create personal knowledge; an imprint on our mind. When we act, dopamine runs to our prefrontal cortex…it can signal an important experience.
This adds another pattern to our mind and is correlated with other similar patterns…the...