A video clip from Al Gore's speech on his book The Future. He talks about change, entropy and complexity. While I applaud his courage of introducing the concept of complexity in the public speech to a general audience and I love his metaphors, he doesn't quite get right. But it's a great attempt.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4463895
Showing posts with label change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label change. Show all posts
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Reinventing Society in the Wake of Big Data
"With Big Data we can now begin to actually look at the details of social interaction and how those play out, and are no longer limited to averages like market indices or election results. This is an astounding change. The ability to see the details of the market, of political revolutions, and to be able to predict and control them is definitely a case of Promethean fire—it could be used for good or for ill, and so Big data brings us to interesting times. We're going to end up reinventing what it means to have a human society."
I have more concerns than positive thoughts about this provocative discussion.
Foremost is his understanding and beliefs related to complexity: "The notion that it is connections between people that is really important is key, because researchers have mostly been trying to understand things like financial bubbles using what is called Complexity Science or Web Science. But these older ways of thinking about Big Data leaves the humans out of the equation. What actually matters is how the people are connected together by the machines and how, as a whole, they create a financial market, a government, a company, and other social structures."
Complexity is all about connections, whether it is molecules (including genes), things, insects, animals and certainly social systems of humans. Melanie Mitchell's book Complexity: A Guided Tour, is a tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals. And, in One, Two, a Few and Many, I summarize this book and many other sources of information on complexity.
The problem is that if you have a truly complex systems composed of intelligent agents, more data will lead you nowhere. Remember, if we're talking about humans here, you have a complex system of complex systems. If it's truly complex, no matter how deep you dive into the data, there will always be uncertainty. (Think of a fractal.) And, if the systems is in disequilibrium, cause and effect are unrelated.
Pentland states, "With Big Data you can easily get false correlations, for instance, "On Mondays, people who drive to work are more likely to get the flu." If you look at the data using traditional methods, that may actually be true, but the problem is why is it true? Is it causal? Is it just an accident? You don't know. Normal analysis methods won't suffice to answer those questions. What we have to come up with is new ways to test the causality of connections in the real world far more than we have ever had to do before. We no can no longer rely on laboratory experiments; we need to actually do the experiments in the real world." Which won't help. That's like dropping a grain of sand on a pile of sand (think hourglass) and observing what happens. Then drawing a conclusion from your experiment when nothing happens. However, the next grain of sand you drop may cause a whole avalanche to occur. The best you can ever do is to gather historical data on the system and talk about probabilities. And, it's not normal statistics. Now imagine that each grain of sand has intelligence and you have the croquet game described by Lewis Carroll's surrealistic version of the game in the popular children's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; a hedgehog was used as the ball, a flamingo the mallet, and playing cards as the hoops.
"Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingos, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.
The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.
The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting 'Off with his head!' or 'Off with her head!' about once in a minute."
Another problem I have with Pentland's vision of the future is that the opportunities for abuse is enormous and will certainly happen. He recognizes this by writing, "Another important issue with Big Data is that since this data is mostly about people, there are enormous issues about privacy, data ownership, and data control. You can imagine using Big Data to make a world that is incredibly invasive, incredibly 'Big Brother'… George Orwell was not nearly creative enough when he wrote 1984."
There is some inherent limit to our ability to understand and predict the behavior of complex systems akin to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics. Heisenberg stated the principle in 1927 as "The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa." What occurs in complex systems is not the same as what happens in quantum physics, and we've not stated a similar law for complex systems, yet.
However, my biggest fear is that we will build the systems Pentland envisions.
"This is the first time in human history that we have the ability to see enough about ourselves that we can hope to actually build social systems that work qualitatively better than the systems we've always had. That's a remarkable change. It's like the phase transition that happened when writing was developed or when education became ubiquitous, or perhaps when people began being tied together via the Internet.
The fact that we can now begin to actually look at the dynamics of social interactions and how they play out, and are not just limited to reasoning about averages like market indices is for me simply astonishing. To be able to see the details of variations in the market and the beginnings of political revolutions, to predict them, and even control them, is definitely a case of Promethean fire. Big Data can be used for good or bad, but either way it brings us to interesting times. We're going to reinvent what it means to have a human society."
William Calvin wrote in his book, The Cerebral Symphony: Seashore Reflections on the Structure of Consciousness, “Inconsistency is part of flexibility, of nature's strategy of keeping options open. Animals that cannot adapt to new environments will not survive the incessant fluctuations of climate. Judicial systems that cannot grow and change with our society's evolving problems will become rigid anachronisms that promote social earthquakes. Consistency and rationality are human virtues in dealing with certain potentially orderly situations; we make excellent use of them in engineering and legal systems, but we shouldn't expect living systems to have made them centerpiece of their operation in a changing, unpredictable world.”
In the book, A Simpler Way, Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers write, "The universe is a living, creative, experimenting experience of discovering what's possible at all levels of scale from microbe to cosmos. Life's natural tendency is to organize. Life organizes into greater levels of complexity to support more diversity and greater sustainability. Life organizes around a self. Organizing is always an act of creating an identity. Life self-organizes. Networks, patterns, and structures emerge without external imposition or direction. Organization wants to happen. People are intelligent, creative, adaptive, self-organizing, and meaning seeking. Organizations are living systems. They too are intelligent, creative, adaptive, self-organizing, meaning-seeking."
Life needs messes. Let's not attempt to get rid of them all and in so doing destroy life.
Monday, March 21, 2011
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
For a down-loadable version of this article, click here.
Eric Hoffer published this book in 1951 (There have been 23 editions published.) after studying and reflecting on the mass movements of his recent past. Even though this book is 60 years old, it is perhaps more relevant now than it ever was. In America we have become irreconcilably polarized on a number of factors important to our future. His thoughts provide some insight on this issue. And, its application to the issue of fanatical, radical fundamentalism internationally is quite obvious. While the book definitely has structure and a narrative, it is primarily a series of thoughts in 125 sections. As the book’s title suggests, it is about two things – the true believer and mass movements.
Eric Hoffer published this book in 1951 (There have been 23 editions published.) after studying and reflecting on the mass movements of his recent past. Even though this book is 60 years old, it is perhaps more relevant now than it ever was. In America we have become irreconcilably polarized on a number of factors important to our future. His thoughts provide some insight on this issue. And, its application to the issue of fanatical, radical fundamentalism internationally is quite obvious. While the book definitely has structure and a narrative, it is primarily a series of thoughts in 125 sections. As the book’s title suggests, it is about two things – the true believer and mass movements.
In the Introduction Hoffer describes his book. “This book concerns itself chiefly with the active, revivalist phase of mass movements. This phase is dominated by the true believer-the man of fanatical faith who is ready to sacrifice his life for a holy cause-and an attempt is made to trace his genesis and outline his nature. As an aid in this effort, use is made of a working hypothesis. Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed: 1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer; 2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.”
Hoffer[1] does not take an exclusively negative view of true believers and the mass movements they begin.
Before the beginning of the book, Hoffer quotes Blaise Pascal from his book Pensées:
Man would fain[2] be great and sees that he is little; would fain be happy and sees that he is miserable; would fain be perfect and sees that he is full of imperfections; would fain be the object of the love and esteem of men, and sees that his faults merit only their aversion and contempt. The embarrassment wherein he finds himself produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults.
This quote provides a pretty good summary of Hoffer’s description of a true believer. This discontent with the self is not limited to any economic strata. Shakespeare even has King Richard express this in his play Richard III:
"Now is the winter of our discontent" are the opening words of the play and lay the groundwork for the portrait of Richard as a discontented man who is unhappy in a world that hates him. Later he describes himself as "Deformed, unfinished, sent before his time into this breathing world, scarce half made up". This deformity, which has now been shown to have been exaggerated or even deliberately faked in portraits of Richard, is given as the source of his supposed evil doings. He says that as he "cannot prove a lover" he is "determined to be a villain".
Hoffer writes, “There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change. The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on. "If anything ail a man," says Thoreau, "so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even ... he forthwith sets about reforming-the world."
It is understandable that those who fail should incline to blame the world for their failure. The remarkable thing is that the successful, too, however much they pride themselves on their foresight, fortitude, thrift and other "sterling qualities," are at bottom convinced that their success is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances[3]. The self-confidence of even the consistently successful is never absolute. They are never sure that they know all the ingredients which go into the making of their success. The outside world seems to them a precariously balanced mechanism, and so long as it ticks in their favor they are afraid to tinker with it. Thus the resistance to change and the ardent desire for it spring from the same conviction, and the one can be as vehement as the other.”
Read complete article.The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
Eric Hoffer, Harper and Row, 1951, 177pp
[1] “The book passes no judgments, and expresses no preferences. It merely tries to explain; and the explanations-all of them theories-are in the nature of suggestions and arguments even when they are stated in what seems a categorical tone. I can do no better than quote Montaigne: "All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed”."
[2] Archaic willingly; gladly
[3] Given what we now know about complex systems, this statement is probably true.
Monday, January 3, 2011
In Praise of Positive Deviance
From Utne Reader, January-February 2011
"What's the key to transforming a community that's merely surviving into one that's thriving? Perhaps just a single person.
The September 2010 issue of Ode features an excerpt from the book The Power of Positive Deviance by Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin. According to the authors, the theory of positive deviance holds that in every setting there's at least one person who strays from the norm-a positive deviant-someone who has found a way to buck the status quo and solve a problem despite the same odds that are stacked against everyone.
Such people have discovered crops able to survive the torrential conditions of floodplains and have transformed desert dunes into groves of saplings. These deviants don't have any special advantage-they just think outside the box. Positive deviance, the authors explain, "requires retraining ourselves to pay attention differently-awakening minds accustomed to overlooking outliers, and cultivating skepticism about the inevitable 'that's just the way it is:"
But identifying these statistical outliers isn't enough. The community needs to have a way to share the information, or the progress is simply isolated. The authors caution that "in the absence of a social process to disseminate innovation and incorporate it into the group repertoire, discovery bears few progeny:'
Positive deviance is most effective when a technical solution, such as a vaccine, doesn't exist, and where a problem is deeply rooted in the social fabric and mind-set of the culture. The concept has helped reduce gang violence in schools, corruption in Kenya, and minority dropout rates in California, proving that communities that are willing to embrace deviants can experience positive change."
The Power of Positive Deviance, Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin, Harvard Business Press, 2010, 256pp
"What's the key to transforming a community that's merely surviving into one that's thriving? Perhaps just a single person.
The September 2010 issue of Ode features an excerpt from the book The Power of Positive Deviance by Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin. According to the authors, the theory of positive deviance holds that in every setting there's at least one person who strays from the norm-a positive deviant-someone who has found a way to buck the status quo and solve a problem despite the same odds that are stacked against everyone.
Such people have discovered crops able to survive the torrential conditions of floodplains and have transformed desert dunes into groves of saplings. These deviants don't have any special advantage-they just think outside the box. Positive deviance, the authors explain, "requires retraining ourselves to pay attention differently-awakening minds accustomed to overlooking outliers, and cultivating skepticism about the inevitable 'that's just the way it is:"
But identifying these statistical outliers isn't enough. The community needs to have a way to share the information, or the progress is simply isolated. The authors caution that "in the absence of a social process to disseminate innovation and incorporate it into the group repertoire, discovery bears few progeny:'
Positive deviance is most effective when a technical solution, such as a vaccine, doesn't exist, and where a problem is deeply rooted in the social fabric and mind-set of the culture. The concept has helped reduce gang violence in schools, corruption in Kenya, and minority dropout rates in California, proving that communities that are willing to embrace deviants can experience positive change."
The Power of Positive Deviance, Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin, Harvard Business Press, 2010, 256pp
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Transforming Cultures from Within
Anderson, Amodeo and Hartzfeld summarize their work how businesses can change the culture of their organization to embracing sustainability while still being profitable. They open the article with:
“The current Industrial Age was born out of the Enlightenment and the unfolding understanding of humanity’s ability to tap the power and expansiveness of nature. The mindset that was developed early in the Age was well adapted to its time, when there were relatively few people and nature seemed limitless. Unfortunately, this mindset is poorly adapted to the current reality of nearly 7 billion people and badly stressed ecosystems. A new, better-adapted worldview and global economy are being born today from a greater understanding of how to thrive within the frail limits of nature.
Vital to the transition of the economy is the very institution that serves as its primary engine: business and industry. To lead this shift, business must delve much deeper than just the array of eco or clean technologies that are in vogue, to the core beliefs that drive actions. While a few visionary companies have been founded on the principles of sustainability, most businesses will require radical change. In the coming decades, business models and mindsets must be fundamentally transformed to sustain companies’ value to their customers, shareholders, and other stakeholders.
More and more organizations are turning to sustainability as a source of competitive advantage. Yet many companies are trapped and frustrated by their limited understanding of this challenge; many see it only as a set of technical problems to solve or a clever marketing campaign to organize. Perhaps the greatest danger is that these superficial approaches give companies a false sense of progress, which in the long run will very likely lead to their demise.”
One of the companies on this journey that was profiled in this article is Interface, Inc.
“The U.S.-based global carpet manufacturer Interface, Inc. offers a valuable case study of a company that has embraced and achieved transformational change toward sustainability. Interface reports being only about 60 percent of the way toward achieving its Mission Zero 2020 goals, but the company has come far in its 15-year journey to sustainability. It has reduced net greenhouse gas emissions by 71 percent, water intensity by 74 percent, landfill waste by 67 percent, and total energy intensity by 44 percent. It has diverted 175 million pounds of old carpet from landfills, invented new carpet recycling technology, and sold 83 square kilometers of third-party certified, climate-neutral carpet. In the process, Interface has generated substantial business value in its brand and reputation, cost savings of $405 million, attraction and alignment of talent, and industry-leading product innovation.”
The cultural change model they used is summarized in the graphic below and described in the article.
Other businesses profiled are Nike, and Wal-Mart.
The cultural change model is similar to the one I have used to increase innovation in organizations. This model is specifically applied to sustainability.
I speculated in an earlier post that ecology might be the single issue that can drive substantive change. Perhaps we have almost arrived there.
“Business and society are in a period of crisis as well as potential. Doing the same things a little differently, better, or faster will not bring about the transformational changes needed to address today’s challenges or grasp new opportunities. The Industrial Age can be supplanted by a new age of evolving human wisdom and emergent innovations, but only if businesses are willing to challenge existing paradigms and proactively discover new answers through collective inspiration.
Business and industry—the most dominant institutions on the planet in both size and influence—can bring about organizational awakening that can catalyze more sweeping societal change. If business models are grounded in the values of sustainability, the people who work in those firms will also likely accept and adopt the behaviors associated with sustainability as the “way things are and should be.” This offers business and industry a unique opportunity to accelerate the tipping point needed to correct society’s current trajectory. To achieve this shift, companies must explore new worldviews and discard the old flawed views by encouraging personal reflection and new dialogue about the purpose and responsibility of business.”
Changing Business Cultures from Within, Ray Anderson, Mona Amodeo and Jim Hartzfeld, 2010 State of the World, Transform Cultures: From Consumerism to Sustainability, The Worldwatch Institute
For additional information, go to the Blog Transforming Cultures.
“The current Industrial Age was born out of the Enlightenment and the unfolding understanding of humanity’s ability to tap the power and expansiveness of nature. The mindset that was developed early in the Age was well adapted to its time, when there were relatively few people and nature seemed limitless. Unfortunately, this mindset is poorly adapted to the current reality of nearly 7 billion people and badly stressed ecosystems. A new, better-adapted worldview and global economy are being born today from a greater understanding of how to thrive within the frail limits of nature.
Vital to the transition of the economy is the very institution that serves as its primary engine: business and industry. To lead this shift, business must delve much deeper than just the array of eco or clean technologies that are in vogue, to the core beliefs that drive actions. While a few visionary companies have been founded on the principles of sustainability, most businesses will require radical change. In the coming decades, business models and mindsets must be fundamentally transformed to sustain companies’ value to their customers, shareholders, and other stakeholders.
More and more organizations are turning to sustainability as a source of competitive advantage. Yet many companies are trapped and frustrated by their limited understanding of this challenge; many see it only as a set of technical problems to solve or a clever marketing campaign to organize. Perhaps the greatest danger is that these superficial approaches give companies a false sense of progress, which in the long run will very likely lead to their demise.”
One of the companies on this journey that was profiled in this article is Interface, Inc.
“The U.S.-based global carpet manufacturer Interface, Inc. offers a valuable case study of a company that has embraced and achieved transformational change toward sustainability. Interface reports being only about 60 percent of the way toward achieving its Mission Zero 2020 goals, but the company has come far in its 15-year journey to sustainability. It has reduced net greenhouse gas emissions by 71 percent, water intensity by 74 percent, landfill waste by 67 percent, and total energy intensity by 44 percent. It has diverted 175 million pounds of old carpet from landfills, invented new carpet recycling technology, and sold 83 square kilometers of third-party certified, climate-neutral carpet. In the process, Interface has generated substantial business value in its brand and reputation, cost savings of $405 million, attraction and alignment of talent, and industry-leading product innovation.”
The cultural change model they used is summarized in the graphic below and described in the article.
Other businesses profiled are Nike, and Wal-Mart.
The cultural change model is similar to the one I have used to increase innovation in organizations. This model is specifically applied to sustainability.
I speculated in an earlier post that ecology might be the single issue that can drive substantive change. Perhaps we have almost arrived there.
“Business and society are in a period of crisis as well as potential. Doing the same things a little differently, better, or faster will not bring about the transformational changes needed to address today’s challenges or grasp new opportunities. The Industrial Age can be supplanted by a new age of evolving human wisdom and emergent innovations, but only if businesses are willing to challenge existing paradigms and proactively discover new answers through collective inspiration.
Business and industry—the most dominant institutions on the planet in both size and influence—can bring about organizational awakening that can catalyze more sweeping societal change. If business models are grounded in the values of sustainability, the people who work in those firms will also likely accept and adopt the behaviors associated with sustainability as the “way things are and should be.” This offers business and industry a unique opportunity to accelerate the tipping point needed to correct society’s current trajectory. To achieve this shift, companies must explore new worldviews and discard the old flawed views by encouraging personal reflection and new dialogue about the purpose and responsibility of business.”
Changing Business Cultures from Within, Ray Anderson, Mona Amodeo and Jim Hartzfeld, 2010 State of the World, Transform Cultures: From Consumerism to Sustainability, The Worldwatch Institute
For additional information, go to the Blog Transforming Cultures.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Complexity, Change and Well Being
Some interesting thoughts about complexity by Mike Bell from his LinkedIn Group Social Entrepreneurship and Complexity.
Complexity, Change and Wellbeing
Complexity, Change and Wellbeing
View more presentations from Mike Bell.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Capitalizing on Complexity
Capitalizing on Complexity: Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study
“This study is the fourth edition of our biennial Global CEO Study series, led by the IBM Institute for Business Value and IBM Strategy & Change. To better understand the challenges and goals of today’s CEOs, we met face-to-face with the largest-known sample of these senior executives. Between September 2009 and January 2010, we interviewed 1,541 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders who represent different sizes of organizations in 60 countries and 33 industries.”
The beginning few paragraphs of the executive summary read, “In our past three global CEO studies, CEOs consistently said that coping with change was their most pressing challenge. In 2010, our conversations identified a new primary challenge: complexity. CEOs told us they operate in a world that is substantially more volatile, uncertain and complex.
Many shared the view that incremental changes are no longer sufficient in a world that is operating in fundamentally different ways. Four primary findings arose from our conversations:
Today’s complexity is only expected to rise, and more than half of CEOs doubt their ability to manage it. Seventy-nine percent of CEOs anticipate even greater complexity ahead. However, one set of organizations — we call them “Standouts” — has turned increased complexity into financial advantage over the past five years.
Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organizations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.
The most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. They are adopting new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number-one priority.
Better performers manage complexity on behalf of their organizations, customers and partners. They do so by simplifying operations and products, and increasing dexterity to change the way they work, access resources and enter markets around the world. Compared to other CEOs, dexterous leaders expect 20 percent more future revenue to come from new sources.”
Now in line with “full disclosure” and “transparency”, I have to tell you that I worked for IBM for 30 years. In the first ten years of my career with IBM I pursued technology invention and development. I thought that IBM would be successful if we were a leader in technology. In the second ten years I pursued innovation in business practices and product development helping to create the first independent business unit of IBM. Essentially we were doing what came to be called process reengineering some years later. Having first found out that technology development was stymied by the formal business practices of IBM, I then found out that changing business practices did no good if the organizational culture remained the same. The changes were only temporary and quickly snapped back to what they were before. So, I spent the last ten years on organizational culture and how you change it. For about the last seven years, I was a “grass roots” agitator for changing the values of the culture to strengthen creativity, innovativeness, leadership (called situational leadership at the time) and professionalism. After retiring from IBM I wrote a book on my methodology titled Innovate!.
I’m sure that you have guessed by now that my message fell on rocky ground with little soil in the 1980s.
Now, 30 years later and IBM is in the consulting business big time and touting, of all things, creativity.
OK, times change, People and organizations change. I get it.
So, I read the report carefully, marking sections and quotes to call out in this analysis I’m now writing. Unfortunately when I finished the report, I hit a brick wall. The report repeatedly used key words like complexity, creativity, leadership and innovation. These are words that I know well as I’ve lived them for 52 years. I also know that they are some of the fuzziest concepts in the business lexicon. Just about everyone has their own definitions of these words and very few of them agree with each other. Furthermore, the report did not define the words making most of the conclusions suspect. For example, when CEOs said that complexity was their biggest challenge, what definition of complexity did each of them use.
Most of the time when the authors mention complexity, they are really talking about complicatedness. If a system is complicated, cause and effect are related. If a system has the characteristic of organized complexity, cause and effect are no longer related. If the system is characterized by disorganized complexity, cause and effect are again related, but statistically.
Simple, complicated and disorganized complex systems are tractable. Organized complex systems are not. Unfortunately, many of the systems that CEOs (and the rest of us as well) have to deal with now are organized complex systems.
I’m guessing, but I think that this latter type of complexity is what the CEOs are apprehending. Unfortunately the solutions being considered and the recommendations made are not useful for this type of complexity, and may even be harmful.
In "The Reality of Complexity", Lewin writes, “We argue that managers, consultants, entrepreneurs, executives, other business professionals indeed, anyone who works can take some comfort in the fact that they are not alone in riding a bucking bronco of change that demands a different understanding of the world. Science, too, is in the midst of an important intellectual shift, a true Kuhnian paradigm shift that parallels what is happening in business, or, more accurately, is the vanguard of that change. Where once the natural world was viewed as linear and mechanistic, where simple cause-and-effect solutions were expected to explain the complex phenomena of nature, scientists now realize that much of their world is nonlinear and organic, characterized by uncertainty and unpredictability. As in science, managers are discovering that their world is not linear but rather predominantly nonlinear, not mechanistic but rather organic and complex. It’s amazing how far we have been able to take the linear model for understanding the world, both in science and in business. But in the new economy, the limitations of the mechanistic model are becoming starkly apparent. A new way of thinking is required.”
The Reality of Complexity
Some Thoughts on Complexity
1, 2, a Few, Many
Capitalizing on Complexity: Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study
“This study is the fourth edition of our biennial Global CEO Study series, led by the IBM Institute for Business Value and IBM Strategy & Change. To better understand the challenges and goals of today’s CEOs, we met face-to-face with the largest-known sample of these senior executives. Between September 2009 and January 2010, we interviewed 1,541 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders who represent different sizes of organizations in 60 countries and 33 industries.”
The beginning few paragraphs of the executive summary read, “In our past three global CEO studies, CEOs consistently said that coping with change was their most pressing challenge. In 2010, our conversations identified a new primary challenge: complexity. CEOs told us they operate in a world that is substantially more volatile, uncertain and complex.
Many shared the view that incremental changes are no longer sufficient in a world that is operating in fundamentally different ways. Four primary findings arose from our conversations:
Today’s complexity is only expected to rise, and more than half of CEOs doubt their ability to manage it. Seventy-nine percent of CEOs anticipate even greater complexity ahead. However, one set of organizations — we call them “Standouts” — has turned increased complexity into financial advantage over the past five years.
Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organizations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.
The most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. They are adopting new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number-one priority.
Better performers manage complexity on behalf of their organizations, customers and partners. They do so by simplifying operations and products, and increasing dexterity to change the way they work, access resources and enter markets around the world. Compared to other CEOs, dexterous leaders expect 20 percent more future revenue to come from new sources.”
Now in line with “full disclosure” and “transparency”, I have to tell you that I worked for IBM for 30 years. In the first ten years of my career with IBM I pursued technology invention and development. I thought that IBM would be successful if we were a leader in technology. In the second ten years I pursued innovation in business practices and product development helping to create the first independent business unit of IBM. Essentially we were doing what came to be called process reengineering some years later. Having first found out that technology development was stymied by the formal business practices of IBM, I then found out that changing business practices did no good if the organizational culture remained the same. The changes were only temporary and quickly snapped back to what they were before. So, I spent the last ten years on organizational culture and how you change it. For about the last seven years, I was a “grass roots” agitator for changing the values of the culture to strengthen creativity, innovativeness, leadership (called situational leadership at the time) and professionalism. After retiring from IBM I wrote a book on my methodology titled Innovate!.
I’m sure that you have guessed by now that my message fell on rocky ground with little soil in the 1980s.
Now, 30 years later and IBM is in the consulting business big time and touting, of all things, creativity.
OK, times change, People and organizations change. I get it.
So, I read the report carefully, marking sections and quotes to call out in this analysis I’m now writing. Unfortunately when I finished the report, I hit a brick wall. The report repeatedly used key words like complexity, creativity, leadership and innovation. These are words that I know well as I’ve lived them for 52 years. I also know that they are some of the fuzziest concepts in the business lexicon. Just about everyone has their own definitions of these words and very few of them agree with each other. Furthermore, the report did not define the words making most of the conclusions suspect. For example, when CEOs said that complexity was their biggest challenge, what definition of complexity did each of them use.
Most of the time when the authors mention complexity, they are really talking about complicatedness. If a system is complicated, cause and effect are related. If a system has the characteristic of organized complexity, cause and effect are no longer related. If the system is characterized by disorganized complexity, cause and effect are again related, but statistically.
Simple, complicated and disorganized complex systems are tractable. Organized complex systems are not. Unfortunately, many of the systems that CEOs (and the rest of us as well) have to deal with now are organized complex systems.
I’m guessing, but I think that this latter type of complexity is what the CEOs are apprehending. Unfortunately the solutions being considered and the recommendations made are not useful for this type of complexity, and may even be harmful.
In "The Reality of Complexity", Lewin writes, “We argue that managers, consultants, entrepreneurs, executives, other business professionals indeed, anyone who works can take some comfort in the fact that they are not alone in riding a bucking bronco of change that demands a different understanding of the world. Science, too, is in the midst of an important intellectual shift, a true Kuhnian paradigm shift that parallels what is happening in business, or, more accurately, is the vanguard of that change. Where once the natural world was viewed as linear and mechanistic, where simple cause-and-effect solutions were expected to explain the complex phenomena of nature, scientists now realize that much of their world is nonlinear and organic, characterized by uncertainty and unpredictability. As in science, managers are discovering that their world is not linear but rather predominantly nonlinear, not mechanistic but rather organic and complex. It’s amazing how far we have been able to take the linear model for understanding the world, both in science and in business. But in the new economy, the limitations of the mechanistic model are becoming starkly apparent. A new way of thinking is required.”
The Reality of Complexity
Some Thoughts on Complexity
1, 2, a Few, Many
Capitalizing on Complexity: Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Reality Check
From Weblogg-ed by Will Richardson
"It is the thesis of this book that change—constant, accelerating, ubiquitous—is the most striking characteristic of the world we live in and that our educational system has not yet recognized this fact. We maintain, further, that the abilities and attitudes required to deal adequately with change are those of the highest priority and that it is not beyond our ingenuity to design school environments which can help young people to master concepts necessary to survival in a rapidly changing world. The institution we call “school” is what it is because we made it that way. If it is irrelevant…if it shields children from reality…if it educates for obsolescence…if it does not develop intelligence…if it is based on fear…if it avoids the promotion of significant learnings…if it induces alienation…if it punishes creativity and independence…if, in short, it is not doing what needs to be done, it can be changed; it must be changed."
Neil Postman
Teaching as a Subversive Activity
1968
Forty two years ago. It really, really begs the question…can it?
"It is the thesis of this book that change—constant, accelerating, ubiquitous—is the most striking characteristic of the world we live in and that our educational system has not yet recognized this fact. We maintain, further, that the abilities and attitudes required to deal adequately with change are those of the highest priority and that it is not beyond our ingenuity to design school environments which can help young people to master concepts necessary to survival in a rapidly changing world. The institution we call “school” is what it is because we made it that way. If it is irrelevant…if it shields children from reality…if it educates for obsolescence…if it does not develop intelligence…if it is based on fear…if it avoids the promotion of significant learnings…if it induces alienation…if it punishes creativity and independence…if, in short, it is not doing what needs to be done, it can be changed; it must be changed."
Neil Postman
Teaching as a Subversive Activity
1968
Forty two years ago. It really, really begs the question…can it?
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Ingenuity: Humans and their Organization a the Crossroads
Why don't things work the way that they used to? Where are our leaders? Why am I working harder and harder while I seem to be going backwards? Why do my children perceive that they will not have as good a life as mine? Why is violence rampant in our streets? Why are schools, business, and government broken? These are questions that we hear over and over again in millions of forms as we grope to grasp the meaning of what's happening to us.
The basic problem is that our models of organizations and of ourselves are out of date. We, as humans, our societies and their artifacts, have evolved. The gap between what is and what we perceive has widened to the point of breaking. We must change our mental maps to reflect the world. And, our organizations must emulate the new mental maps.
We are at a crossroads and we have a choice. We cannot deny any longer the existence of the need for change. And, we cannot waste our energies any longer fighting against change. We must embrace change and move rapidly towards a new state of being, knowing, and creating. We must develop our ingenuity and the ingenuity of our organizations.
MoreBringing Up the Leader Within
We are a nation of pioneers. Our strength is our diversity and our 'can do' attitude. The industrial age was merely a step on our path to achieving our national purpose. However, the impact on us has been the fragmenting of our spirit. We are now at a crossroads, and we must make a decision. Which path are we to take?
We know what we have lost. Yet we do not see clearly what we will gain. We can no longer deny that transforming actions must be taken. Yet it is impossible to go back to past as some urge us to do. We must go back to the past only in order to rediscover our strengths and transform them into our future. The role of a leader is to discover and illuminate our path to the future.
Leadership is now a state of mind, not a position. In this highly interactive age, each of us will find that we will increasingly be in situations that demand the exercise of our innate capability to lead. It is imperative that each of us bring up the leader within. We must all develop our leadership capability to its fullest in order for our organizations and institutions to be transformed.
More
We know what we have lost. Yet we do not see clearly what we will gain. We can no longer deny that transforming actions must be taken. Yet it is impossible to go back to past as some urge us to do. We must go back to the past only in order to rediscover our strengths and transform them into our future. The role of a leader is to discover and illuminate our path to the future.
Leadership is now a state of mind, not a position. In this highly interactive age, each of us will find that we will increasingly be in situations that demand the exercise of our innate capability to lead. It is imperative that each of us bring up the leader within. We must all develop our leadership capability to its fullest in order for our organizations and institutions to be transformed.
More
Friday, June 11, 2010
An Interview with Cheryl Honey
Community Weaving is a grassroots community mobilization strategy that weaves the social fabric of community. This social change methodology incorporates the use of web-based technology to weave the human and tangible resources of the grassroots with the knowledge and skills of formal systems to create new ways of being in community. The approach raises social consciousness and awakens the human spirit to its purpose by engaging people to take responsibility for what they care about to create a more caring, just and civil society. In this networking session, Cheryl will reveal the techniques she used to grow a Family Support Network across the U.S. This transformative community building approach weaves a multi-cultural community tapestry of connections within communities, across organizations and around the world. Community Weaving is a cutting-edge methodology featured in the new Change Handbook, 2nd Edition. You don't want to miss this incredible opportunity to learn simple tips on how to grow your networking potential exponentially.
Cheryl Honey, C.P.P., of Bothell, WA, is president of Excel Strategies, Inc. and pioneer of Community Weaving, a social change methodology. She founded Family Support Network, Int'l and developed web-based technology to weave fabric of community within community systems around the world. Cheryl spearheaded a national movement by engaging citizens to take responsibility to creating a more caring, just and civil society. She is an advisor to the Alliance for Human Empowerment and member of the American Creativity Association. She received a B.A. in Liberal Arts & Transformative Community Building from Antioch University, Seattle. She authored Community Weaving in The Change Handbook 2nd Edition, and published numerous articles on community organizing and volunteerism. Communities tap her expertise to develop innovative approaches to build and bridge social capital. She's an Ambassador for Peace, and recipient of the Excellence in Leadership Award and the Giraffe Award, for sticking her neck out.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Friday, September 4, 2009
A Simpler Way
A Simpler Way
Margaret Wheatley & Myron Kellner-Rogers
Berrett-Koehler, 1996
This is a beautiful book with beautiful pictures and mental images. It is a hopeful book, and it is a profound book. Its mission is no less than to change our paradigm from competition to collaboration in how we perceive, think and act in all that we do. The authors' opening line is "We want life to be less arduous and more delightful. We want to be able to think differently about how to organize human activities."
They question the "survival of the fittest" paradigm for evolution and our mechanistic view of the world. "The mechanistic image of the world is a very deep image, planted at subterranean depths in most of us. But it doesn't help us any longer."
The authors pose the question, "How could we organizes human endeavor if we developed different understandings of how life organizes itself?" They have six beliefs about human organizations and the world in which they come into form:
"The universe is a living, creative, experimenting experience of discovering what's possible at all levels of scale from microbe to cosmos.
Life's natural tendency is to organize. Life organizes into greater levels of complexity to support more diversity and greater sustainability.
Life organizes around a self. Organizing is always an act of creating an identity.
Life self-organizes. Networks, patterns, and structures emerge without external imposition or direction. Organization wants to happen.
People are intelligent, creative, adaptive, self-organizing, and meaning seeking.
Organizations are living systems. They too are intelligent, creative, adaptive, self-organizing, meaning-seeking."
They argue that life has a natural and spontaneous tendency towards organization. "Whatever chaos is present at the start, when elements combine, systems of organization appear. Life is attracted to order - order gained through wandering explorations into new relationships and new possibilities."
The central part of the book is organized around a poem by A. R. Ammons:
"I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in
so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:
I look for the forms
things want to come as
from what black wells of possibility
how a thing will
unfold:
not the shape on paper - though
that, too - but the
uninterfering means on paper:
not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours."
The authors write, "Life is creative. It plays itself into existence, seeking new relationships, new capacities, new traits. Life is an experiment to discover what's possible."
They believe Darwinism has led us to believe that life wasn't supposed to happen, that it was an accident, and that life has to fight to continue to exist. In their view, "Life is about invention, not survival. We are here to create, not defend."
They point out that all of us are trying to describe our reality to others. But reality outside of us, in an absolute sense, evades us. "We peer out through our senses, describing our experiences of what we think reality to be. We choose images to convey our expereince. We create metaphors to connect what we see. We explore new ways of understanding what seems to be happening and what we think it means."
Peering out at the world, they describe seven principles of life's process of creating:
"Everything is in a constant process of discovery and creating. Everything is changing all the time: individuals, systems, environments, the rules, the processes of evolutions. Even change changes. Every organism reinterprets the rules, creates exceptions for itself, creates new rules.
Life uses messes to get well-ordered solutions. Life doesn't seem to share our desires for efficiency or neatness. It uses redundancy, fuzziness, dense webs of relationships, unending trials and errors to find what works.
Life is intent on finding what works, not what's 'right'. It is the ability to keep finding solutions that is important; any one solution is temporary. There are no permanently right answers. The capacity to keep changing, to find what works now, is what keeps any organism alive.
Life creates more possibilities as it engages with opportunities. There are no 'windows of opportunity', narrow openings in the fabric of space-time that soon disappear forever. Possibilities beget more possibilities; they are infinite.
Life is attracted to order. It experiments until it discovers how to form a system that can support diverse members. Individuals search out a wide range of possible relationships to discover whether they can organize into life-sustaining system. These explorations continue until a system is discovered. The system then provides stability for its members, so that individuals are less buffeted by change.
Life organizes around identity. Every living thing acts to develop and preserve itself. Identity is the filter that every organism or system uses to make sense of the world. New information, new relationships, changing environments - all are interpreted through a sense of self. This tendency toward self-creation is so strong that it creates a seeming paradox. An organism will change to maintain its identity.
Everything participates in the creation and evolution of its neighbors. There are no unaffected outsiders. No one system dictates conditions to another. All participate together in creating the conditions of their interdependence."
"There is no ideal design for anything, just interesting combinations that arise as a living thing explores it space of possibilities", Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers write, a combination of words that could be used to describe how an organization innovates.
Their assertion is that "life tinkers itself into existence". "It tinkers toward order - toward systems that are more complex and effective...Almost always what begins in randomness ends in stability...generates systems that sustain diverse individuals." But they conclude, "Life seeks order in a disorderly way."
"All this messy playfulness creates relationships that make more available...," they write. "Who we become together will always be different that who we were alone. Our range of creative expression increases as we join with others. New relationships create new capacities."
"Life invites us to create not only the forms but even the process of discovery," they conclude. "The environment is invented by our presence in it. We do not parachute into a sea of turbulence, to sink or swim. We and our environments become one system, each influencing the other, each co-determining the other." Living systems they believe create more possibilities and more freedom for individuals.
In this systems behaviors emerge. "Science writer Kevin Kelly describes these systems as a 'messy cascade of interdependent events ...What emerges from the collective is not a series of critical individual actions but a multitude of simultaneous actions whose collective pattern is far more important'."
One of the important features of viable living systems is simultaneity. "Simultaneity reduces the impact of any one error. More errors matter less if the actors are not linked together sequentially. The space for experimentation increases as we involve more minds in the experiment, as long as they can operate independently. What links people together is their focus on a needed solution. But in discovering what works, they are not waiting for one another to act."
They very carefully describe the discipline of play required for success. "Playful tinkering requires consciousness. If we are not mindful, if our attention slips, then we can't notice what's available or discover what's possible. Staying present is the discipline of play. Great concentration and focus are required." As a result, "Playful enterprises are alert. They are open to information, always seeking more, yearning for surprises."
Over and over again they stress the role that diversity plays in creation. "Parallel process requires both diversity and freedom. There is more than one workable solution, and these solutions arise from many different forms of self-expression...Life is not driving us toward one solution. The world is interested in pluralism. Only in this way can it discover more about itself...The world's desire for diversity compels us to change."
Systems offer the possibility for more stability. But in a curious paradox, that stability for the system depends upon its member's ability to change. "When individuals fail to experiment or when a system refuses their offers of new ideas, then the system becomes moribund. Without constant, interior change, it sinks into the death grip of equilibrium. It no longer participates in coevolution. The system becomes vulnerable; its destruction is self-imposed...This broad paradox of stability and freedom is the stage on which coevolution dances. Life leaps forward when it can share its learnings. The dense web of systems allow information to travel in all directions, speeding recovery and adaptation."
If systems of life are self-organizing then we don't have to design how they will organize. We live in a universe where we get order for free. "If order is for free, we don't have to be the organizers. We don't have to design the world. We don't have to structure its existence."
And, in a prescription for systems that has a lot to do with an innovation commons, "As we organize, we need to keep inquiring into the quality of our relationships. How much access do we have to one another? How much trust exists among us? Who else needs to be in the room?"
"Stability is found in freedom - not in conformity and compliance. We may have thought that our organization's survival was guaranteed by finding the right form and insisting that everyone fit into it. But sameness is not stability. It is individual freedom that creates stable systems. It is diffferentness that enables us to thrive," they propose.
In writing about self, they suggest, "Life wants to happen. It calls itself into existence. Out of all information and all possibilities, an entity comes into form. An identity emerges. A self has created itself...No externally imposed plans or designs are required. The process of invention always takes place around an identity. There is a self that seeks to organize and make its presence known. The desires of self set a self-organizing world into motion."
Research suggests that we perceive the world based on who we have decided to be, "...at any moment, what we see is most influenced by who we have decided to be...At least 80 percent of the information that the brain works with is information already in the brain." The corollary to this is that "We will change our self if we believe that the change will preserve the self."
In answering the question about what conditions will allow self-organization to flourish, they state "We need to trust that we are self organizing...We live in a world where attraction is ubiquitous. Organization wants to happen. People want their lives to mean something. We seek one another to develop new capacities. With all these wonderful and innate desires calling us to organize, we can stop worrying about designing perfect structures or rules. We need to become intrigued by how we create a clear and coherent identity, a self that we can organize around...Identity includes such dimensions as history, values, actions, core beliefs, competencies, principles, purpose, mission...Identity is the source of organizations. Every organization is an identity in motion, moving through the world, trying to make a difference."
In search of that illusive concept of emergence, they write, "Emergence is the surprising capacity we discover only when we join together. New systems have properties that appear suddenly and mysteriously. These properties cannot be predicted. They do not exist in the individuals who compose the system. What we know about the individuals, no matter how rich the details, will never give us the ability to predict how they will behave as a system. Once individuals link together they become something different.
One of the current quandaries facing free, open collaboratives is compensation. It is very clear that participants benefit in many other tangible and intangible ways from the collaboration. However, in our present form of capitalism, no standard form of monetary compensation has emerged. The authors don't provide much hope of one being developed, "Once systems are called into the world by our individual explorations, it becomes impossible to work backwards. Systems cannot be deconstructed. We can't figure out cause and effect or who contributed what. There are no heroes or permanent leaders in an emergent, systems creating world. There are too many simultaneous connection; individual contributions evolve too rapidly into group efforts."
We often talk about synergy in a group, where 1 + 1 > 2. Their paradigm revolutionizes the way to think about a system, "A system is an inseparable whole. It is not the sum of its parts. It is not greater than the sum of its parts. There is nothing to sum. There are no parts. The system is a new and different and unique contribution to its members and the world. To search backwards in time for its parts is to deny the self transforming nature of systems. A system is knowable only as itself. It is irreducible. We can't disentangle the effects of so many relationships. The connections never end. They are impossible to understand by analysis."
In amplifying their concept that self-organizing systems merge through trust, they write, "Every act of organizing is an experiment. We begin with desire, with a sense of purpose and direction. But we enter the experience vulnerable, unprotected by the illusionary cloak of prediction. We acknowledge that we don't know how this work will actually unfold. We discover what we are capable of as we go along. We engage others in the experiment. We are willing to commit to a systems whose effectiveness cannot be seen until it is in motion...in systems of trust, people are free to create the relationships they need. Trust enables the system to open. The system expands to include those it had excluded. More conversations - more diverse and diverging views - become important. People decide to work with those from whom they have been separate."
We long for meaning in our lives. "Each of us embodies the boundless energies of life. We are creating, systems-seeking, self-organizing, meaning-seeking beings. We are identities in motion, searching for the relationships that will evoke more from us."
Margaret Wheatley & Myron Kellner-Rogers
Berrett-Koehler, 1996
This is a beautiful book with beautiful pictures and mental images. It is a hopeful book, and it is a profound book. Its mission is no less than to change our paradigm from competition to collaboration in how we perceive, think and act in all that we do. The authors' opening line is "We want life to be less arduous and more delightful. We want to be able to think differently about how to organize human activities."
They question the "survival of the fittest" paradigm for evolution and our mechanistic view of the world. "The mechanistic image of the world is a very deep image, planted at subterranean depths in most of us. But it doesn't help us any longer."
The authors pose the question, "How could we organizes human endeavor if we developed different understandings of how life organizes itself?" They have six beliefs about human organizations and the world in which they come into form:
"The universe is a living, creative, experimenting experience of discovering what's possible at all levels of scale from microbe to cosmos.
Life's natural tendency is to organize. Life organizes into greater levels of complexity to support more diversity and greater sustainability.
Life organizes around a self. Organizing is always an act of creating an identity.
Life self-organizes. Networks, patterns, and structures emerge without external imposition or direction. Organization wants to happen.
People are intelligent, creative, adaptive, self-organizing, and meaning seeking.
Organizations are living systems. They too are intelligent, creative, adaptive, self-organizing, meaning-seeking."
They argue that life has a natural and spontaneous tendency towards organization. "Whatever chaos is present at the start, when elements combine, systems of organization appear. Life is attracted to order - order gained through wandering explorations into new relationships and new possibilities."
The central part of the book is organized around a poem by A. R. Ammons:
"I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in
so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:
I look for the forms
things want to come as
from what black wells of possibility
how a thing will
unfold:
not the shape on paper - though
that, too - but the
uninterfering means on paper:
not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours."
The authors write, "Life is creative. It plays itself into existence, seeking new relationships, new capacities, new traits. Life is an experiment to discover what's possible."
They believe Darwinism has led us to believe that life wasn't supposed to happen, that it was an accident, and that life has to fight to continue to exist. In their view, "Life is about invention, not survival. We are here to create, not defend."
They point out that all of us are trying to describe our reality to others. But reality outside of us, in an absolute sense, evades us. "We peer out through our senses, describing our experiences of what we think reality to be. We choose images to convey our expereince. We create metaphors to connect what we see. We explore new ways of understanding what seems to be happening and what we think it means."
Peering out at the world, they describe seven principles of life's process of creating:
"Everything is in a constant process of discovery and creating. Everything is changing all the time: individuals, systems, environments, the rules, the processes of evolutions. Even change changes. Every organism reinterprets the rules, creates exceptions for itself, creates new rules.
Life uses messes to get well-ordered solutions. Life doesn't seem to share our desires for efficiency or neatness. It uses redundancy, fuzziness, dense webs of relationships, unending trials and errors to find what works.
Life is intent on finding what works, not what's 'right'. It is the ability to keep finding solutions that is important; any one solution is temporary. There are no permanently right answers. The capacity to keep changing, to find what works now, is what keeps any organism alive.
Life creates more possibilities as it engages with opportunities. There are no 'windows of opportunity', narrow openings in the fabric of space-time that soon disappear forever. Possibilities beget more possibilities; they are infinite.
Life is attracted to order. It experiments until it discovers how to form a system that can support diverse members. Individuals search out a wide range of possible relationships to discover whether they can organize into life-sustaining system. These explorations continue until a system is discovered. The system then provides stability for its members, so that individuals are less buffeted by change.
Life organizes around identity. Every living thing acts to develop and preserve itself. Identity is the filter that every organism or system uses to make sense of the world. New information, new relationships, changing environments - all are interpreted through a sense of self. This tendency toward self-creation is so strong that it creates a seeming paradox. An organism will change to maintain its identity.
Everything participates in the creation and evolution of its neighbors. There are no unaffected outsiders. No one system dictates conditions to another. All participate together in creating the conditions of their interdependence."
"There is no ideal design for anything, just interesting combinations that arise as a living thing explores it space of possibilities", Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers write, a combination of words that could be used to describe how an organization innovates.
Their assertion is that "life tinkers itself into existence". "It tinkers toward order - toward systems that are more complex and effective...Almost always what begins in randomness ends in stability...generates systems that sustain diverse individuals." But they conclude, "Life seeks order in a disorderly way."
"All this messy playfulness creates relationships that make more available...," they write. "Who we become together will always be different that who we were alone. Our range of creative expression increases as we join with others. New relationships create new capacities."
"Life invites us to create not only the forms but even the process of discovery," they conclude. "The environment is invented by our presence in it. We do not parachute into a sea of turbulence, to sink or swim. We and our environments become one system, each influencing the other, each co-determining the other." Living systems they believe create more possibilities and more freedom for individuals.
In this systems behaviors emerge. "Science writer Kevin Kelly describes these systems as a 'messy cascade of interdependent events ...What emerges from the collective is not a series of critical individual actions but a multitude of simultaneous actions whose collective pattern is far more important'."
One of the important features of viable living systems is simultaneity. "Simultaneity reduces the impact of any one error. More errors matter less if the actors are not linked together sequentially. The space for experimentation increases as we involve more minds in the experiment, as long as they can operate independently. What links people together is their focus on a needed solution. But in discovering what works, they are not waiting for one another to act."
They very carefully describe the discipline of play required for success. "Playful tinkering requires consciousness. If we are not mindful, if our attention slips, then we can't notice what's available or discover what's possible. Staying present is the discipline of play. Great concentration and focus are required." As a result, "Playful enterprises are alert. They are open to information, always seeking more, yearning for surprises."
Over and over again they stress the role that diversity plays in creation. "Parallel process requires both diversity and freedom. There is more than one workable solution, and these solutions arise from many different forms of self-expression...Life is not driving us toward one solution. The world is interested in pluralism. Only in this way can it discover more about itself...The world's desire for diversity compels us to change."
Systems offer the possibility for more stability. But in a curious paradox, that stability for the system depends upon its member's ability to change. "When individuals fail to experiment or when a system refuses their offers of new ideas, then the system becomes moribund. Without constant, interior change, it sinks into the death grip of equilibrium. It no longer participates in coevolution. The system becomes vulnerable; its destruction is self-imposed...This broad paradox of stability and freedom is the stage on which coevolution dances. Life leaps forward when it can share its learnings. The dense web of systems allow information to travel in all directions, speeding recovery and adaptation."
If systems of life are self-organizing then we don't have to design how they will organize. We live in a universe where we get order for free. "If order is for free, we don't have to be the organizers. We don't have to design the world. We don't have to structure its existence."
And, in a prescription for systems that has a lot to do with an innovation commons, "As we organize, we need to keep inquiring into the quality of our relationships. How much access do we have to one another? How much trust exists among us? Who else needs to be in the room?"
"Stability is found in freedom - not in conformity and compliance. We may have thought that our organization's survival was guaranteed by finding the right form and insisting that everyone fit into it. But sameness is not stability. It is individual freedom that creates stable systems. It is diffferentness that enables us to thrive," they propose.
In writing about self, they suggest, "Life wants to happen. It calls itself into existence. Out of all information and all possibilities, an entity comes into form. An identity emerges. A self has created itself...No externally imposed plans or designs are required. The process of invention always takes place around an identity. There is a self that seeks to organize and make its presence known. The desires of self set a self-organizing world into motion."
Research suggests that we perceive the world based on who we have decided to be, "...at any moment, what we see is most influenced by who we have decided to be...At least 80 percent of the information that the brain works with is information already in the brain." The corollary to this is that "We will change our self if we believe that the change will preserve the self."
In answering the question about what conditions will allow self-organization to flourish, they state "We need to trust that we are self organizing...We live in a world where attraction is ubiquitous. Organization wants to happen. People want their lives to mean something. We seek one another to develop new capacities. With all these wonderful and innate desires calling us to organize, we can stop worrying about designing perfect structures or rules. We need to become intrigued by how we create a clear and coherent identity, a self that we can organize around...Identity includes such dimensions as history, values, actions, core beliefs, competencies, principles, purpose, mission...Identity is the source of organizations. Every organization is an identity in motion, moving through the world, trying to make a difference."
In search of that illusive concept of emergence, they write, "Emergence is the surprising capacity we discover only when we join together. New systems have properties that appear suddenly and mysteriously. These properties cannot be predicted. They do not exist in the individuals who compose the system. What we know about the individuals, no matter how rich the details, will never give us the ability to predict how they will behave as a system. Once individuals link together they become something different.
One of the current quandaries facing free, open collaboratives is compensation. It is very clear that participants benefit in many other tangible and intangible ways from the collaboration. However, in our present form of capitalism, no standard form of monetary compensation has emerged. The authors don't provide much hope of one being developed, "Once systems are called into the world by our individual explorations, it becomes impossible to work backwards. Systems cannot be deconstructed. We can't figure out cause and effect or who contributed what. There are no heroes or permanent leaders in an emergent, systems creating world. There are too many simultaneous connection; individual contributions evolve too rapidly into group efforts."
We often talk about synergy in a group, where 1 + 1 > 2. Their paradigm revolutionizes the way to think about a system, "A system is an inseparable whole. It is not the sum of its parts. It is not greater than the sum of its parts. There is nothing to sum. There are no parts. The system is a new and different and unique contribution to its members and the world. To search backwards in time for its parts is to deny the self transforming nature of systems. A system is knowable only as itself. It is irreducible. We can't disentangle the effects of so many relationships. The connections never end. They are impossible to understand by analysis."
In amplifying their concept that self-organizing systems merge through trust, they write, "Every act of organizing is an experiment. We begin with desire, with a sense of purpose and direction. But we enter the experience vulnerable, unprotected by the illusionary cloak of prediction. We acknowledge that we don't know how this work will actually unfold. We discover what we are capable of as we go along. We engage others in the experiment. We are willing to commit to a systems whose effectiveness cannot be seen until it is in motion...in systems of trust, people are free to create the relationships they need. Trust enables the system to open. The system expands to include those it had excluded. More conversations - more diverse and diverging views - become important. People decide to work with those from whom they have been separate."
We long for meaning in our lives. "Each of us embodies the boundless energies of life. We are creating, systems-seeking, self-organizing, meaning-seeking beings. We are identities in motion, searching for the relationships that will evoke more from us."
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs?
BusinessWeek
From kurzweil.net
The root of the current lack of new, high-quality job creation is the massive scaling back of science and engineering research, which has in the past made enormous contributions to science, technology, and the economy, including the creation of millions of high-paying jobs, says management consultant Adrian Slywotzky.
Here's what's needed to get that model back on track, he suggests:
• Clear national goals in two or three key areas, such as carbon-free energy and preventive medicine.
• Government commitment of $10 billion a year above and beyond spending for national agencies to jump-start new industrial research labs.
• Government tax credits for corporations that commit to spending 5% to 10% (or more) of R&D on basic research.
More
I have some mixed feeling about this article. Most of my life I would have agreed strongly with the sentiments of the author. I am a graduate of 30 years with IBM as a technologist, technology manager, internal entrepreneur and cultural change agent. And, now 20 years as a futurist and consultant. My instinctive reaction would have been "right on". But, now I'm not sure.
For years we have worshiped at the altar of economic value created for the stockholder. In business this means the rationalization of all its operations to achieving that goal. And, with that, and globalization, comes the stockholder's short term perspective. Investment in research with uncertain and long term payback gets reduced or cut off.
Unfortunately we've adopted a parallel belief system in education. So, we can't depend upon our universities to provide the research either. And, as we continue to inflict more measurements on education all the way down through public schools, we emphasize short term payback.
The change described in the article is either cyclical or its structural. If it's cyclical, then all we have to is wait for the economic flowering when big companies are awash in profits, and in their wisdom, they will invest these profits in research for the future.
If the change is structural, then "big research" is gone forever. There are numerous indications in many different industries that the trends of decentralization, disintemediation, openness and fragmentation are real and structural. If that is so, then what would research look like? How would it work? What kind of research could be done in a fragmented, disintermediated, open and decentralized way?
I don't know. And, I've not heard from anyone that does know.
But, isn't time that we begin to look at this issue head on. If not, and someone else does, we'll really suffer economically in the future.
It's like Morgan Freeman's character said in The Shawshank Redemption, "Get busy living, or get busy dying."
From kurzweil.net
The root of the current lack of new, high-quality job creation is the massive scaling back of science and engineering research, which has in the past made enormous contributions to science, technology, and the economy, including the creation of millions of high-paying jobs, says management consultant Adrian Slywotzky.
Here's what's needed to get that model back on track, he suggests:
• Clear national goals in two or three key areas, such as carbon-free energy and preventive medicine.
• Government commitment of $10 billion a year above and beyond spending for national agencies to jump-start new industrial research labs.
• Government tax credits for corporations that commit to spending 5% to 10% (or more) of R&D on basic research.
More
I have some mixed feeling about this article. Most of my life I would have agreed strongly with the sentiments of the author. I am a graduate of 30 years with IBM as a technologist, technology manager, internal entrepreneur and cultural change agent. And, now 20 years as a futurist and consultant. My instinctive reaction would have been "right on". But, now I'm not sure.
For years we have worshiped at the altar of economic value created for the stockholder. In business this means the rationalization of all its operations to achieving that goal. And, with that, and globalization, comes the stockholder's short term perspective. Investment in research with uncertain and long term payback gets reduced or cut off.
Unfortunately we've adopted a parallel belief system in education. So, we can't depend upon our universities to provide the research either. And, as we continue to inflict more measurements on education all the way down through public schools, we emphasize short term payback.
The change described in the article is either cyclical or its structural. If it's cyclical, then all we have to is wait for the economic flowering when big companies are awash in profits, and in their wisdom, they will invest these profits in research for the future.
If the change is structural, then "big research" is gone forever. There are numerous indications in many different industries that the trends of decentralization, disintemediation, openness and fragmentation are real and structural. If that is so, then what would research look like? How would it work? What kind of research could be done in a fragmented, disintermediated, open and decentralized way?
I don't know. And, I've not heard from anyone that does know.
But, isn't time that we begin to look at this issue head on. If not, and someone else does, we'll really suffer economically in the future.
It's like Morgan Freeman's character said in The Shawshank Redemption, "Get busy living, or get busy dying."
What Does Technology Want?
Tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly asks "What does technology want?" and discovers that its movement toward ubiquity and complexity is much like the evolution of life.
Kevin Kelly has been publisher of the Whole Earth Review, exec editor at WIRED, founder of visionary nonprofits, and writer on biology and business and "cool tools." He's admired for his new perspectives on technology and its relevance to history, biology and religion.
Perhaps there is no one better to contemplate the meaning of cultural change -- bad? good? too slow? too bold? -- than Kevin Kelly, whose life story reads like a treatise on the value of technology. Whether by renouncing all material things save his bicycle (which he then rode 3,000 miles), founding an organization (the All-Species Foundation) to catalog all life on earth, or by touting new gadgets in WIRED, Kelly hasn't stopped exploring the phenomena of technical and biological creation.
In articles for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among others, he has celebrated scientific breakthroughs, and at the Long Now Foundation, where he serves on the board, he champions projects that look 10,000 years into the future. Today Kelly is at work on a book that asks what appears to be his life's core question: "How should I think about new technology when it comes along?"
Kelly discusses the 7th Kingdom at length in the July 18, 2007, edition of Edge.org.
This is a very powerful, insightful and important video. It is not a complete theory of technology. But, it is a start. He introduces a number ideas that should be discussed more. I've picked a few out here either for explanation or elaboration.
The question, “What does technology want?” is derived from the thinking of Richard Dawkins' “Selfish Genes”. He asked the same question for genes and that lead him to a radical proposition: that we are primarily the caretaker of our genes. But not just for ourselves but our children, and people who care for and nurture our children, who house our genes. And, depending upon our conception of what constitutes our genes, we care for our extended family, community, nation, world, or the animal kingdom, as we share some genes with them all. Dawkins also introduced the idea of selfish memes, a meme being a concept or an idea. Our memes propagate through society “infecting” other minds, reproducing and diffusing. Our genes might be unrecognizable in a few generations, but some memes live forever. Jefferson's genes are not visible but his meme that all men are created equal with some inalienable rights lives on.
Kelly equates the question, “What do genes want?” with “What does life want?” He asserts that life wants:
* Ubiquity
* Specialization
* Diversity
* Socialization
I personally believe that life also wants beauty.
This has echoes of Margaret Wheatley's incredible book, A Simpler Way. Both dispense with the concept of the survival of the fittest or strongest, which was a misinterpretation of Darwin's work anyway.
Kelly notes that there are six kingdoms of life on earth. He posits that technology is the seventh kingdom. This is close to Dawkin's idea of memes. Technology is the realization of a meme or set of memes. A technology embodies a system of memes.
He then asserts that technology wants the same things as life.
Kelly states that life hacks its way forward. I personally don't like that connotation. The word “hack” came into common use in software development. The original meaning of a hack was someone who made furniture with an ax, according to Wikipedia. I think life progresses in a much more elegant way. According to the authors of A Simpler Way, "Life is creative. It plays itself into existence, seeking new relationships, new capacities, new traits. Life is an experiment to discover what's possible."
Anther point Kelly makes in this video is that old technology never dies. I think that he is correct on this. McLuhan proposed the four laws of technology, which he phrased as questions as well:
* What does it (the medium or technology) extend?
* What does it make obsolete?
* What is retrieved?
* What does the technology reverse into if it is over-extended?
McLuhan viewed these four laws operating in parallel. All four questions are being answered by technology at the same time, not in sequence. Technology is always extending, obsoleting, retrieving and reversing.
Another important idea is that “culture is an accumulation of ideas.' And since technology embeds ideas, or memes, technology becomes an artifact of the culture that produced it.
Another import idea introduced by Kelly is the concept of an infinite game.
Finite games have a definite beginning and ending. They are played with the goal of winning. Infinite games, on the other hand, do not have a knowable beginning or ending. They are played with the goal of continuing play. An infinite game continues play, for sake of play. If the game is approaching resolution because of the rules of play, the rules must be changed to allow continued play. The rules exist to ensure the game is infinite.
He comments that evolution is an infinite game. The game of life is to continue life. Ubiquity, diversity, specialization and socialization taken together continues life. Life is recognized as an infinite game.
Kelly suggests that technology's role is to facilitate life, to aid evolution.
He ends with the comment that we have a moral obligation to give each person the technology to enable them to fulfill their potential of differentness.
Kelly does not talk about the negative side of technology in the video, but he does write about this in an interview in The Edge, The Technium and the 7th Kingdom of Life. Mistakes of technology, really mistakes of humans, are a lot like evolutionary mistakes. If they don't improve life, they die out. He believes that the technium is becoming more aligned with other six kingdom's of life in all areas except species elimination. He does not believe that technology is sensitive to this problem, which he believes is real.
Great thanks to Natalie Shell for suggesting this video to me.
The following video is a reminder of evolutionary time.
Kevin Kelly has been publisher of the Whole Earth Review, exec editor at WIRED, founder of visionary nonprofits, and writer on biology and business and "cool tools." He's admired for his new perspectives on technology and its relevance to history, biology and religion.
Perhaps there is no one better to contemplate the meaning of cultural change -- bad? good? too slow? too bold? -- than Kevin Kelly, whose life story reads like a treatise on the value of technology. Whether by renouncing all material things save his bicycle (which he then rode 3,000 miles), founding an organization (the All-Species Foundation) to catalog all life on earth, or by touting new gadgets in WIRED, Kelly hasn't stopped exploring the phenomena of technical and biological creation.
In articles for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among others, he has celebrated scientific breakthroughs, and at the Long Now Foundation, where he serves on the board, he champions projects that look 10,000 years into the future. Today Kelly is at work on a book that asks what appears to be his life's core question: "How should I think about new technology when it comes along?"
Kelly discusses the 7th Kingdom at length in the July 18, 2007, edition of Edge.org.
This is a very powerful, insightful and important video. It is not a complete theory of technology. But, it is a start. He introduces a number ideas that should be discussed more. I've picked a few out here either for explanation or elaboration.
The question, “What does technology want?” is derived from the thinking of Richard Dawkins' “Selfish Genes”. He asked the same question for genes and that lead him to a radical proposition: that we are primarily the caretaker of our genes. But not just for ourselves but our children, and people who care for and nurture our children, who house our genes. And, depending upon our conception of what constitutes our genes, we care for our extended family, community, nation, world, or the animal kingdom, as we share some genes with them all. Dawkins also introduced the idea of selfish memes, a meme being a concept or an idea. Our memes propagate through society “infecting” other minds, reproducing and diffusing. Our genes might be unrecognizable in a few generations, but some memes live forever. Jefferson's genes are not visible but his meme that all men are created equal with some inalienable rights lives on.
Kelly equates the question, “What do genes want?” with “What does life want?” He asserts that life wants:
* Ubiquity
* Specialization
* Diversity
* Socialization
I personally believe that life also wants beauty.
This has echoes of Margaret Wheatley's incredible book, A Simpler Way. Both dispense with the concept of the survival of the fittest or strongest, which was a misinterpretation of Darwin's work anyway.
Kelly notes that there are six kingdoms of life on earth. He posits that technology is the seventh kingdom. This is close to Dawkin's idea of memes. Technology is the realization of a meme or set of memes. A technology embodies a system of memes.
He then asserts that technology wants the same things as life.
Kelly states that life hacks its way forward. I personally don't like that connotation. The word “hack” came into common use in software development. The original meaning of a hack was someone who made furniture with an ax, according to Wikipedia. I think life progresses in a much more elegant way. According to the authors of A Simpler Way, "Life is creative. It plays itself into existence, seeking new relationships, new capacities, new traits. Life is an experiment to discover what's possible."
Anther point Kelly makes in this video is that old technology never dies. I think that he is correct on this. McLuhan proposed the four laws of technology, which he phrased as questions as well:
* What does it (the medium or technology) extend?
* What does it make obsolete?
* What is retrieved?
* What does the technology reverse into if it is over-extended?
McLuhan viewed these four laws operating in parallel. All four questions are being answered by technology at the same time, not in sequence. Technology is always extending, obsoleting, retrieving and reversing.
Another important idea is that “culture is an accumulation of ideas.' And since technology embeds ideas, or memes, technology becomes an artifact of the culture that produced it.
Another import idea introduced by Kelly is the concept of an infinite game.
Finite games have a definite beginning and ending. They are played with the goal of winning. Infinite games, on the other hand, do not have a knowable beginning or ending. They are played with the goal of continuing play. An infinite game continues play, for sake of play. If the game is approaching resolution because of the rules of play, the rules must be changed to allow continued play. The rules exist to ensure the game is infinite.
He comments that evolution is an infinite game. The game of life is to continue life. Ubiquity, diversity, specialization and socialization taken together continues life. Life is recognized as an infinite game.
Kelly suggests that technology's role is to facilitate life, to aid evolution.
He ends with the comment that we have a moral obligation to give each person the technology to enable them to fulfill their potential of differentness.
Kelly does not talk about the negative side of technology in the video, but he does write about this in an interview in The Edge, The Technium and the 7th Kingdom of Life. Mistakes of technology, really mistakes of humans, are a lot like evolutionary mistakes. If they don't improve life, they die out. He believes that the technium is becoming more aligned with other six kingdom's of life in all areas except species elimination. He does not believe that technology is sensitive to this problem, which he believes is real.
Great thanks to Natalie Shell for suggesting this video to me.
The following video is a reminder of evolutionary time.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Becoming Your Own Futurist
You are in the cross hairs of change. Demographic, sociopolitical, technological and economic forces are driving significant, maybe even revolutionary, change in your industry. In times of systemic change, you have to ask yourself the question, "Do I need to become a prophet in order to have a profit?" I think that the answer is a resounding "Yes!". In this talk I will establish some steps you will have to take to become your own futurist. I will discuss three steps - how to develop insights about the future, how to use those insights to become competitive, and how to become a futurist. In addition
Paul Schumann is a practicing futurist with expertise in creativity and innovation. He has lived long enough to see forecasts fail and succeed, including some of his own. He had a thirty year career with IBM in three very different arenas - as a technologist and technology manager in semiconductor technology, as an internal entrepreneur creating the first independent business unit within IBM, and as a cultural change agent developing a more creative and innovative culture. Since retiring from IBM he has been consultant as a business futurist with programs in creativity and innovation.
Slides
Embedded Videos
Double Pendulum Demonstrating Cyclical and Chaotic Future
The Cycle of a Day Demonstrating How We Learn About Cycles
Ocean Waves Demonstrating Chaos
Tsunami Demonstrating Complexity
Demonstration of the Communication of a Scenario
Paul Schumann is a practicing futurist with expertise in creativity and innovation. He has lived long enough to see forecasts fail and succeed, including some of his own. He had a thirty year career with IBM in three very different arenas - as a technologist and technology manager in semiconductor technology, as an internal entrepreneur creating the first independent business unit within IBM, and as a cultural change agent developing a more creative and innovative culture. Since retiring from IBM he has been consultant as a business futurist with programs in creativity and innovation.
Slides
Becoming Your Own Futurist
View more presentations from Paul Schumann.
Embedded Videos
Double Pendulum Demonstrating Cyclical and Chaotic Future
The Cycle of a Day Demonstrating How We Learn About Cycles
Ocean Waves Demonstrating Chaos
Tsunami Demonstrating Complexity
Demonstration of the Communication of a Scenario
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