Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on organisational-complexity http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic organisational-complexity Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb 3rd Gurteen Knowledge Conference on Organisational Complexity Sun, 14 Mar 2004 23:18:32 +0000 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 <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/Gurteen%20Knowledge%20Conference%203/GKC3.html">selection of photographs</a> to give a flavour of the event. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001993.html Dave Snowden: Cynefin dynamics Sun, 14 Mar 2004 23:48:19 +0000 The following is a ~500 word summary of my notes from <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/stories/2004/03/15/daveSnowdenCynefinDynamics.html">Dave Snowdens talk on the Cynefin framework and Dynamics</a> (~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! <blockquote><ul> <li>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.</li> <li>In Method B the focus is less on total design (input/output) control.</li> <li>At the heart of the distinction: Systems of order and of unorder.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>Structured methods from business schools and management systems do not cope. Instead an approach based upon complexity theory (boundaries & attractors) is required.</li> <li>Ordered systems: The aspects of organisation that are highly structured and where things repeat.</li> <li>Shift towards heuristics expressed as value alignment.</li> <li>Order emerges as the result of the interaction of agents.</li> <li>Additionally multiple collective identities can be held in sequence or in parallel leading to a 3rd level of complexity.</li> <li>Neurophysics & cognitive science tell us that we actually make decisions based upon complex patterns.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>Oscillation between anarchy & control which is the common method of crisis management.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>Whilst the model may be new they have never had a problem with the concept when applied to a real problem.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>Do peoples personalities fit naturally into a domain? <li>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.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>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!</li> <li>Think about yourself as a bundle of identities.</li> </ul></blockquote> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001996.html First outing for People Centred Knowledge Management Thu, 22 Apr 2004 13:04:12 +0100 <blockquote><a href="http://blog.xrefer.com/2004_04_01_xrefer_archive.html#108246245765384532">City Information Group April seminar - A trip to t ...</a>. <a href="http://blog.xrefer.com/#108246245765384532"></a>City Information Group April seminar - <a href="http://www.cityinformation.org.uk/Events/FutureEvents/April04.htm">A trip to the virtual world</a> - 27 April 2004 - London, UK - Roger Brown from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), will describe the dramatic transformation of the GSK libraries from physical to virtual, focussing on the implications for their information vendors. Matt Mower, partner in Evectors Software, will discuss exciting new developments in people-centred knowledge management. He will focus on "social software" including weblogs, aggregators and instant messengers [<a href="http://feedster.com/rss.php?q=evectors&sort=date&ie=UTF-8">Feedster.com Results For: evectors</a>]</blockquote>I shall be speaking on April 27th to the <a href="http://www.cityinformation.org.uk/">City Information Group</a>.  I am presenting the first fruits of the work that <a href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</a> and I have been doing over the last couple of months.  I'll be presenting our theme: People Centred Knowledge Management, talking about issues such as collaboration, innovation, and trust, and illustrating how social network tools from weblogs to wikis to IRC combine to address those issues in a way existing tools cannot. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002110.html Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium Wed, 19 May 2004 07:27:36 +0100 Yesterday at various times around the world we held an IRC chat in the #kmtalk channel to get started organising an <a href="http://www.socialtext.net/stes/">event</a> in London in July (July 12th it now transpires).  The working title is 'Social Tools for Enterprises' and the event is aimed to be a practical get go for CxO's in Enterprises as to how social tools & methods can help them with problems like insufficient collaboration, low innovation and unmanaged risk. This first session was really a chance to ensure that everyone had a similar vision of what we want to achieve and to get some vital details like the date sorted.  Over the next couple of days we'll be working on the programme and there is another chat planned for Friday (details will be on the wiki soon). Everyone with an interest is welcome to join the next IRC chat and get involved. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002244.html