Curiouser and Curiouser!

The following is a ~500 word summary of my notes from Dave Snowdens talk on the Cynefin framework and Dynamics (~2800 words). Please note that this is my interpretation of Daves words and any errors, omissions, falsehoods or downright lies are down to me, not Dave.

Also note that, due to personal circumstances, Dave was not able to be present in person. Instead he did the full hour and a half talk via phone. I thought he gave a great performance under difficult circumstances and I was very grateful that he made this effort. Thank you Dave!

• After the party an After Action Review is used to evaluate performance of children & adults, leading to the creation of a "party best practice" database. Breathe a sigh of relief when one of them works and try to stabilize the pattern. Then head upstairs to disrupt the negative pattern forming around your 14 year old daughter and a bottle of vodka.
• In Method B the focus is less on total design (input/output) control.
• At the heart of the distinction: Systems of order and of unorder.
• When you look backwards everything makes perfect sense but there was no way, at the time, of predicting that particular outcome. What happens is that 'patterns of interaction' stabilize and you can then understand how this occurred.
• Structured methods from business schools and management systems do not cope. Instead an approach based upon complexity theory (boundaries & attractors) is required.
• Ordered systems: The aspects of organisation that are highly structured and where things repeat.
• Shift towards heuristics expressed as value alignment.
• Order emerges as the result of the interaction of agents.
• Additionally multiple collective identities can be held in sequence or in parallel leading to a 3rd level of complexity.
• Neurophysics & cognitive science tell us that we actually make decisions based upon complex patterns.
• Great leader comes in and pulls all the network controls into themselves, tightening to shift the problem back into the visible ordered space, e.g.
• Oscillation between anarchy & control which is the common method of crisis management.
• Boundaries (negative, repel) Brittle -- any rigid, when it breaks it breaks catastrophically with no recovery Elastic - middle Permeable -- crossed all the time but people know they've crossed them The more you constrain the less adaptable you have.
• Whilst the model may be new they have never had a problem with the concept when applied to a real problem.
• There is a critical distinction between hidden order and complex unorder. 9-11 was hidden order: we didn't join the dots. There are so many orders of magnitude difference in considering a problem of 1 pattern among 27 and 1 pattern among 3.4 trillian.
• Do peoples personalities fit naturally into a domain?
• Most innovation occurs under the age of 17 and over the age of 50. If the context shifts we are capable of changing. Personality can also act as a pattern entrainer.
• UN peace keepers need permeable boundaries/rules, to be guided by underlying principles. In a riot situation officers delegate to NCO's. Officers understand strategy; NCO's understand tactics and execution.
• It's informal systems allow it to survive, to make the formal systems work. The problem is that people designing the formal processes do not see this. Apparent conformity validates their model/view leading them to believe it is working and put in even more processes!
• Think about yourself as a bundle of identities.

I've finally gotten round to editing my notes from the 3rd Gurteen Knowledge Conference on Organisational Complexity. This was held on the 5th March so apologies that it's taken me this long to come up with the goods.

In the end I had about 30 pages of rough notes which I am working up into 4 postings, 1 for each session. Tonight I shall be posting the first piece correspoding to Dave Snowdens presentation on the Cynefin framework and dynamics.

I have also put up a selection of photographs to give a flavour of the event.

Papers I read on the plane home yesterday:

• Implementing dynamic AOP using abstract schema by Rickard Öberg
• Sense-Making and Knowledge Collaboration Tools by Dr. Jeffrey Conklin.

Rickard is doing a lot of thinking (& acting) in the Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) field. I think it's pretty exciting and fully expect AOP to be as mainstream, in 3-5 years, as OOP is today. I'm playing with Dynaop which is a very low impact AOP solution for Java written by "Crazy Bob". It's a great package and laughably easy to get started with.

Sense making is I guess one of my key themes these days. My work has taken me from the mainstream of KM (i.e. document management) into the world of organisational complexity, deep collaboration, wicked problems, patterns in information and making sense of it all. In particular this paper introduced me to Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS) and how they affect tools & approaches.

Gordon's Gin advert. Birds & the Bees by Patrick Dawes.

Here are my current 50-words from my Ecademy Profile:

Fifty Words: london, poker, cats, INTP, music, powershot a70, thunderstorms, italy, wine, reading, books, kurt vonnegut, comedy, tony hancock, film, maltese falcon, laughter, learning, research, challenge, caring, win-win, search for meaning, pragmatic, writing, games, collaboration, complexity, aspects, hi-tech, degree, director, knowledge, strategy, early adopter, km, knowledge management, entrepreneur, innovator, software, networking, java, topic maps, values, weblogs, knowledge organisation, rss, politics, libertarian, open minded, listening, leadership

I'm scouting Ecademy and LinkedIn and just came across Larry who works for a company that sounds very interesting:

Whilst most companies who take away redundant computer equipment charge you for it, Larry's company actually gives you a percentage of the profit they make on the sale. They turn a cost into a profit. That sounds like a brilliant idea to me. I wonder if it works as well as it sounds.