Free Yourselves from the Tyranny of the Document Metaphor!

By admin | August 31, 2010

(My title comes from a former colleague who buried this bon mot in a client deliverable – if she wishes me to name her, I shall. Else, know this headline gem is just something I wish I’d written.)

I interjected myself into a listserv conversation last week, stating “documents present a barrier to knowledge – We need to move beyond the document metaphor if we’re trying to cultivate knowledge.”

I was asked to explain myself, as this is considered by some a contrarian view. I first waited a few days while those more eloquent took up the cause – but here is what I responded this morning. I believe a reasonable response is to roll one’s eyes at such talk – I don’t offer a useful alternative to documents (yet), so why attend? Simple: I am trying to shake us free from the belief that improving documents will improve somehow knowledge flows and understanding. If you’ve already begun focusing on enabling conversations rather than uploading more documents to your portal – you have the message.

One friend offered that documents are not barriers but constraints. Here is where I part company: the document may be intended as a constraining frame, but when so much of the ’system’ is omitted, this framing becomes cropping (as in image cropping). Constraint becomes distortion. The brain itself tells us why documents are cropped images of knowledge, not sufficient frames.

The brain knows spatial and temporal patterns, and predicts patterns in its environment. Language shapes expected patterns, and predisposes the brain to predict in certain ways. The marvelous thing here is that our media distinctions such as images, sound, written language, spoken language, emotion, physical response – are blended in memory. In addition: these memories are not stored as blended, but are blended at the point of recall. What is stored are fragments – all knowledge is fragmented until the point of use. An author uses her knowledge to create a document, which – if well crafted and discovered and interpreted well – will form one input for the learner.

For documents from this morning’s email to early religious texts – the context lost between author and reader is significant and meaningful. Even the term ‘context’ seems to me to be a false reference to content metadata. For the brain, context is content. This is why we know more than we can say, and we say more than we can write down. (Polanyi, Snowden.)

{ The photo below is of neolithic ‘art’ from Newgrange in southern Ireland. The meaning for these carvings is utterly absent now, as eons washed away all metadata, culture and context. }

But more than this, our brains make use of our bodies in ways we are only beginning to understand. The Bride and I sat sipping wine on the deck last night, during a difficult conversation. At one point, her reassuring squeeze on my forearm conveyed a silent message that got me thinking about haptic memory, pattern expectations, and the “non-verbal” communication that characterizes some of this transfer. (I compared this favorably to the times she kicks me under a dinner table, the forearm message was much clearer – or perhaps I was “listening” this time.)

Research into everything from micro-expressions to mirror neurons shows us that face-to-face conversation is the richest knowledge transfer experience. Given the flow of information, both conscious and not, during a conversation – the notion that a document can capture the richness of this flow is laughable. For simple problems, documents can be sufficient: (my most recent data point being the bookcase I successfully assembled from instructions penned in China, all the more remarkable if you know how useless I am at such tasks).

The reason I say documents are a barrier, then, comes from their omission of so much context/content – but also from our mistaken confidence in their ability to transfer knowledge of any depth. So long as we believe improving document structures or access will increase knowledge transfer – we will continue to erect barriers to true knowledge transfer and maintain the high error rate that we all swim through each day.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

How Are You Clumping?

By John | August 8, 2010

“Human beings are social animals. We come together two by two in friendships and marriages; we form families and teams and the larger aggregations of practices, communities, societies, and nations. These groups assemble to achieve distinctive aims and to provide the satisfactions of sociability…Management thinkers, influenced by economists, have been slower to see the importance of social groups in organizations. They have looked at official organizational units over less formal structures, or have focused on individual workers rather than the groups they belong to.”1

If you look closely at this quote, you’ll see who is blame for the bulk of the silly in our lives today:  It’s those economists again.  Why do economists always seem to factor in humans as if Taylor’s Scientific Management ruled the Earth?  An esteemed colleague once explained:  “Economists have always had physics envy.  They avoided the social sciences as soft and squishy, preferring the publication possibilities and Nobel prizes in the ‘hard science field.’”  That is, until Behavioral Economics came along and discovered that the social sciences actually may offer valid descriptors of messy, incoherent human behavior.

But I digress.  What we are seeing with Gov 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, social media, etc., is nothing less than a celebration of the social over the machine.  We hold conferences, unconferences, ‘Tweetups’ and meetups – all to stay on top of the latest technology, use cases and examples so we can advance the cause in our agencies and businesses.  We argue for openness and access to one another, as a superior organizing principle when you need to gather messy humans into a clump – certainly preferable to the long-lamented organizational chart. (The asparagus photo reminds me of a certain beach in East Hampton, so named because the socializing aspects lead to clumps of people who stand on the beach, eyeing their next friend – no one reclines and enjoys the day passively.)

The next step?  Understand that not all clumps are alike.  The folks on the beach blanket near you are sharing the same environment this long hot summer, are dressed like you and engaging in similar water-worshipping behavior.  Chances are, however, you only look purposefully clumped, at least from the perspective of the pilot in that passing biplane advertising the nearest happy hour.  You have nothing else in common with these folks, and likely do not engage them in conversation.  You do not share a leader, there was no formal training, and you “gathered” in this group without really thinking about it.  (Let’s be honest, you wish you had more personal space and weren’t so clumped.)

You are a group.

Teams: “[A] small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”2 “The group of members evolves into a team by co-generating a shared framework and processes for their interaction and their work. 3

Let’s say you decide to play beach football.  Ok, that’s ambitious.  Instead, let’s build a sand-castle with these people.  You agree on labor division, you set a site that will survive at least one tide cycle, you enlist the nearest children in the endeavor – since what you are really doing is establishing a stable attractor to keep the little darlings from wandering off.  There are processes for molding, moating, and the fine engineering required for the construction of the cupola and gargoyles. (The castle in the photo belongs to my son-in-law, a self-destroying castle with an internal moat. Genius.)

You are a team.

“Firstly, … people are trained in role, and expectation of role instantiating that role with ritual. Secondly … the crew only exists for a short period of time before it dissolves, and then reassembles with different people occupying the roles but with the same expectations. A crew is clearly a formal community which require investment in training and considerable social reinforcement over time.”4

Nearby, an emergency.  Someone wandered too far from the jetty and is in distress.  The lifeguard alerts the nearby medical services, grabs her life buoy and runs to the victim.  The medical team arrives, sets up a perimeter and prepares for resuscitation if necessary.  Every member of the crew has a role to play, and even if they have never met the lifeguard, the information she will communicate to them will be clear, structured and unfettered by language confusion.

You are witnessing a crew.

You have seen this phenomenon among flight crews, on surgical teams, in the emergency room, and among special forces squads or Marines engaged in hostile action.  People have an identity (door-gunner, anesthesiologist, shortstop, nurse, first officer, etc.), often described as part of their identity.  As with teachers or lawyers, members of crews are in professions, with their affiliations secondary to their identity. In a very real sense, the crew becomes part of each individual’s identity.  This does not occur on the team or group level – people speak of part of a cohesive whole, and reunions among crews years later feature more hugs than those that celebrate teams.

Everyone in the crew understands not only their role, but the jobs and roles around them.  The expected interactions are rehearsed and honed.  While not used in business as often as teams, the concept of crews is an extraordinary study in understanding how to recognize and occasionally formalize roles in a team setting.

As we apply social media, information transparency, technology solutions, and process analysis, etc., we should consider the context.  The information needs and process stability for those we serve will vary greatly depending on whether the work calls for a team or a crew – or even whether a group (community of practice) construct is appropriate for the need.  We should also consider how individuals in a community of practice can clump into teams for short-term needs; or even into crews for specialized tasks.

There is room for increased sophistication in how we think about social media.  Let’s not make the mistake of the economist and neglect what the social sciences have to teach us about clumping in social systems.

1 Cohen, D., & Prusak, L. (2001). In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

2 Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. (2006). The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.

3 Beyerlein, M., & Lin, J. (2010). Participation and Complexity in Collaborative Knowledge Generation: Teams as Socio-Intellectual Environments. In A. Tait & K. A. Richardson (Eds.), Complexity and Knowledge Management: Understanding the Role of Knowledge in the Management of Social Networks. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc.

4 David Snowden, blogging at www.cognitive-edge.com  http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/2007/11/are_you_on_the_bully_watch.php

Posted in Social Media | 4 Comments

You Don’t Know What You Think You Know.

By John | August 4, 2010

Remember the first time you rode a bike without help?  When the steadying hand came off the seat or your training wheels were unscrewed and set aside for a future toddler?   Remember what you were wearing?  For me, it was a tweed suit, with shorts and a cap.  And the hand coming off the seat belonged to a sibling who eased me down a driveway and into the street unattended.  The bike was a black Schwinn RollFast.

Or so I remember.  The tweed suit memory may originate from a picture from sometime during that period, and “my brother pushed me into traffic” is an oft-told story that garners the desired comic effect.  I know the bike is the right memory, as I have corroborating evidence.  The rest is suspect.

Why?

I’m afraid I just played a dirty trick on you.  If you did call to mind your first bike ride just now, you are now re-creating the memory as you ‘re-store’ it.  Your memories are not movies in a vault that you watch from time to time, while not disturbing the film itself. Instead, you interact with long-term memory, and what is then ‘stored’ is the memory as you recalled it, not necessarily the ‘truth of what happened.’  Error is magnified and becomes embedded.  I may have just mucked with a precious memory of your childhood.  Sorry about that.

Our personal long-term memories are recreated when we recall them, often imperfectly.  This all comes to mind as a friend attends a week-long training course in Six Sigma (don’t get me started), and after I was honored to observe a security training course a few weeks ago.  (It is always an honor to sit among the heroes working in the intelligence or warfighting community – these occasions help me remember why I am obsessed with public sector problems.)

What are the implications for training, then, if long-term memories are subjected to this imperfect storage method – and are often triggered by seemingly unrelated stimuli?  (If I smell clove, I am back at a Thanksgiving table, immersed in those memories.)  How do we truly provide “training” that will be remembered, hopefully with some degree of accuracy, long after the PowerPoint dims?  How do we brief colleagues and supervisors without putting them into a poorly lit coma?

For my part, I use methods informed by people like Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte, and John Medina.  For the small group who sat through my Ignite DC talk in February, the charming fellow in the picture above makes them think of “high school diploma.”  I used the auto-associative function of the neocortex to embed the notion that what we hand high school graduates is less than attractive as they proceed to tackle college and life.

I could have used a simple PowerPoint slide with terrifying statistics to get the same point across, but it turns out storing an image with a simple accompanying message is a better way to cement the idea. Each of my slides consists of an image with very few words, since forcing someone to read your slide as you talk ensures they absorb little.  Reading the slides to your audience reduces this absorption rate to near zero.

In education, the field of ‘learning sciences’ is tackling (finally) the problem of education/training with an eye to how the brain actually works.  Perhaps it’s time to bring the ‘learning sciences’ to bear for corporate/agency training.  Perhaps your slides need to be crafted recognizing that your audience is not bored by you, but by a delivery method that ensures inattention.

Realizing we don’t have a wetware version of SharePoint in our skulls is the first step towards crafting training, briefings and conversations that will resonate, excite, and cause our colleagues to store the information more completely.  What they do with that information, as they call it to mind over time, is utterly out of your hands.  And theirs.
Duarte, N. (2008). slide:ology – The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York, NY: Basic Books, Perseus Books Group.

Hawkins, J., & Blakeslee, S. (2004). On Intelligence. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Medina, J. (2008). Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Seattle, WA: Pear Press.

Reynolds, G. (2008). Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery: New Riders Press.

Posted in Decision Science | 3 Comments

In Pursuit of Coherence – Open Government and Thee

By John | July 27, 2010

Perhaps the priority for Open Government is to aim for something beyond Openness. While the journalist may see utter value in openness (and I can talk about them right now, since they are busily crashing Wikileak servers); the citizen may not. To my ear, the Open Government elevator speech often takes more than a few elevators to complete.

Back in 2008, my project team had the opportunity to hear from a European civil minister. The question posed to this individual: “What do you do about the problem of information hoarding?” The answer: “I don’t understand the question. The information is not ours, it is the public’s. The culture in our civil service must be different from yours, when we obtain a new piece of information, the first question we ask is: ‘who else needs to know this?’”

Perhaps open government begins with a coherence “audit.” Ask yourself: Who are your constituents, and who else in government touches their lives? Education Secretary Duncan says that he coordinates with Secretary Sebelius of Health and Human Services – because they are serving the same communities. (This is not to say that program managers are resourced or incentivized to continue this interagency collaboration, there is much work to do beyond Secretary-level coordination.) From the constituent point of view, the Departments of Education and HHS are both ‘government.‘ A coherent approach to government services begins with the constituent and asks: If I am the person at the ‘end’ of this program, who else in Government am I dealing with? How can I make those interactions more efficient / responsive?

What other programs serve your constituent? Reach out to other Agencies, see what efficiencies can be realized by coordinating your efforts. Explore how you can jointly present information to the public, in a conversation centered on solutions rather than your program. Begin a dialogue, and a commitment to information sharing when appropriate.

What does this have to do with Open Government? I don’t mean to imply that you ‘get your ducks in a row’ and then go public in an open government initiative. Rather, do this ‘audit’ with a bow to transparency. Do this interagency exploration, coordination and analysis in public. Let us see the process, and join in if we can help. Place the citizen at the center enhances government awareness, services, and develops increased coherence across an often bewildering stew of programs and agencies.

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On Change, or Why They Hate You.

By John | July 16, 2010

In a recent listserv conversation, someone asked a very reasonable question:  What does the literature say about how change agents are received?  This was in the context of knowledge management (KM), and the inquiry stemmed from an honest attempt to understand the hostility experienced from some in the workforce upon being introduced to KM initiatives.

The notion of ‘change agent’ or ‘change management’ evokes images that may be at odds with how change is reflected in the literature.  An ‘agent’ sounds as if it is one person’s job, even though most understand this person is a modulator within a complex system.  And ‘management’ implies all the behaviors of control and authority that we know run counter to what is needed.  While we are used to hearing about heroic leaders spearheading change through their companies, Katzenbach and Smith find the “inevitability” of teams when an organization is facing major change.  They define major change as reliant on the magnitude of “1) …how many people have to change their behaviors, skills, or values, and 2) the degree of readiness or resistance inherent in what is often described as ‘the way we do things around here.’” (195)

Wheatley finds that change is natural, and the opposition we find to it in organizations comes from how we have come to expect organizations to work.  She found that 75% of change projects fail, or “do not yield the expected results.”  Key word there: Expected.  “Our ideas and sensibilities about change come from the world of Newton.  We treat a problematic organization as if it was a machine that had broken down.  We use reductionism to diagnose the problem; we expect to find a simple, singular cause for our woes…to repair the organization, all we need to do is replace the faulty part and gear back up to operate at predetermined performance levels.”  (138)  So we leave our messy homes, navigate complex traffic patterns, and arrive at our tidy offices – where every process is documented and incentives structured to maintain the smooth operation of the organizational machine.

Wheatley also arrives at a seeming paradox.  While we should work at the level where we appreciate the whole of the system, eschewing a focus on a specific ‘broken part,’ we also work at the component level.  We do not approach change as if mass and acceleration were the only aspects of force, we understand non-linear effects, and how relatively small changes can echo and amplify enterprise change.  We work at the component level, but look to system level effects – because no problem can be understood in isolation.  This aligns with what we are observing in the natural sciences.  Wheatley quotes the former director of the Max Planck Institute; “there is no analytic language to describe what we are seeing at the quantum level.  I can only say that it does not help to analyze things in more detail.  The more specific the information, the less relevant it is.”  (140) So if we accept a naturalistic science approach to social organizations, we need to embrace paradox.  It appears to be the order of things.

But this isn’t news. In our off-duty lives, we do embrace paradox and change.  We expect it.  Children are born, people die, fortunes change, vacations take unexpected turns, we suffer illness and experience serendipity.  In time, our children become parents while they remain our children.  We expect our personal lives to be messy and we adapt.  By and large, we expect change.  We are not surprised by the quoted Heraclitus:  “everything changes and nothing remains still.”  This expectation of change leads us to see cycles and we begin to predict our response.  We live amidst expected change.  “We anticipate the change and respond, or we can predict what will occur.” (Bellavita)

Further, in Eastern traditions, the whole is always considered.  Wheatley quotes a Buddhist teaching story that reminds us how everything is related and interdependent.  You cannot consider a leaf without also appreciating that its existence required “earth, water, heat, sea, tree, clouds, sun, time, space.” (142) When you ask an audience to select the “one that doesn’t belong” from the grouping of cow/chicken/grass – the response from a Western mind may come from a reductionist background (grass), while an Eastern-trained mind may respond ‘chicken’ – as the cow has a relationship with the grass.  Those of us with Western-trained minds are attracted to this approach that respects relationships and interdependencies; even as we live and teach according to the reductionist scientific tradition.  It feels more natural to us somehow, as if some deeper truths are hidden in the Eastern tradition.

When we come to the workplace, however, we are told we are part of a machine, with established processes and goals.  We step into a world that encourages an external locus of control – everything meaningful happens outside our office. We are not in control of our environment, and we are left to focus on a part of the whole.  The ‘whole’ is someone else’s job, likely a flag officer or executive.  We don’t like it, it feels unnatural, but we adapt our expectations accordingly.  We change what we expect, and take on an identity of isolation.  Over time, this is how we work.  Our identity is shaped, at odds with what feels natural during our time with our families.

Along comes the change (KM) agent.  Telling us to share with others.  Understand and respect the whole.  Take responsibility for helping others know what we know.  Appealing to the naturalist in us; telling us to embrace change, consider interdependencies, and live amidst paradox.

But.  Our workplace hasn’t changed.  Performance reviews remain focused on predicted goals regarding our isolated function. Success metrics are not obviously tied to whole system performance. Incentives do not encourage relationship, but competition at the expense of the whole.  The change agent hasn’t been able to change core aspects of our environment, and we feel as if we are asked to grow a leaf with no heat and insufficient water.  Our anger is not directed at the faceless organization to which we’ve adapted our expectations – but the person asking us to apply skills we use to live outside the workplace to improve the organization.  It is appealing on an emotional level, but we cannot see its feasibility “here.”

Bellavita offers some perspective that should inform any prospective ‘change agent,’ observing that our response to change depends on the temporal aspect.  For change that has occurred: we adapt and adjust.  For change that is occurring: we have (hopefully) the opportunity to initiate action and influence events, to shape the change that will affect us, our organization and our environment.  For future change: we anticipate and plan for what will occur. (112)

Katzenbach and Smith find “the most effective efforts simultaneously provide top-down direction, bottom-up goal achievement and problem-solving actions, and cross-functional system and process redesign.” (209)  (As an aside and caution, I heard Jon Katzenbach speak a few years ago and he said if we were writing the book now, it would reflect more the “wisdom of networks.”)

Recommend:

Accept the conflict, the people resisting change are both encouraged and depressed by your work.  The resistance will feel personal, and may even be expressed in personal terms.  Use anecdotes and stories that link our natural skills at change management, paradox, and holistic thought to the workplace challenges.

Place the change in temporal context.  If past, provide tools for adjustment.  For current – press your leadership to allow for broad participation to influence how the change occurs.  For future, same:  provide for broad participation in planning.  Heckscher (228-230) provides a case study of the IBM Values Jam, where thousands of voices were heard in developing the new corporate values.

Help the leadership understand its role.  Heckscher offers that a leader’s job in change is to build a shared purpose and build the network.  This is counter to their training, most likely, and requires a leader who is able to understand the changing notions of control and authority.  “Yet this is also an immensely creative context within which to work because the absence of certainty, security and a sense of belonging is of itself a source of inspiration in terms of exploring new ways to reach out and engage others in dialogue about how it and we might go on together.” (Williams, 72)

My wife observed that, in our personal lives, ‘there is no one else in charge.’  Perhaps the definition of ‘being in charge’ needs to change, as people develop new expectations regarding their role in the workplace.  If people know how to navigate their messy existence, perhaps it is time for us to leverage those adaptation skills in the false machines of the workplace.

Bellavita, C. (Ed.). (1990). How Public Organizations Work: Learning from Experience. New York: Praeger.

Heckscher, C. (2007). The Collaborative Enterprise:  Managing Speed and Complexity in Knowledge-Based Businesses. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. (2006). The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.

Wheatley, M. J. (1999). Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Williams, R. (2006). The Experience of Leading Public Sector Organizations in a Performance Management Regime. In R. D. Stacey & D. Griffin (Eds.), Complexity and the Experience of Managing in Public Sector Organizations. New York, NY: Routledge.

Posted in Leadership | 3 Comments

Hawk Method of Management

By John | June 30, 2010

Let’s face it. You cannot truly measure employee output, once you are managing people who are not producing or processing widgets per hour – people we call, erroneously, “knowledge workers.”  People who are useful and productive because of the relationships they maintain, the external sources they consult to solve problems, and the imagination they bring to the workplace.  What measure informs us regarding the appropriate number of relationships, how many external sources they should monitor (how many subscriptions or journals do you provide for them?), and how many hours they should spend free-associating, daydreaming, or otherwise ‘bring creative?’

An extreme focus on process metrics will lead to such things.  Since you are hard-pressed to measure outcomes, (and if outcomes occur it is difficult to measure your product/service’s role in the outcome), it becomes easier to ruthlessly measure compliance with desired processes.  You read up on what works after attending a leadership conference, then enforce compliance with the steps that ‘get us there.’ If management is about herding employees to compliance, how else do you measure the manager’s worth?

Admit it: If you could, you would hold your employee’s hands, stand over his shoulder, and direct every keystroke.  Only then could you be assured the employee’s time was being spent productively.

Yesterday, I watched as a hawk floated on a thermal updraft, expending very little effort as he surveyed his domain below.  I marveled at how he was able to float above the high pines, yet maintain an awareness of movement below, sufficient to suit his needs.  A short while later, frankly after I had much forgotten the hawk above, I heard a small bird chirping.  I don’t speak bird, but this didn’t sound like a song I’d heard before.  It was a high, insistent, repeated bark.  I looked up to see the hawk, no longer circling effortlessly, but flying figure eight’s in the sky, its legs out straight below it.  With its claws wrapped tightly around a small chirping bird.

This went on for some time.  The small bird was still technically in flight, and still able to sing its song, although I suspect the lyrics conveyed a new urgency.  The small bird was flying higher, likely, than it ever intended, surpassing its parents and peers.  Yet, the scene was not about making the bird more efficient, except as food.

Over coffee this morning, I imagined the metaphor which is now obvious – and which may not be working for the reader, to be honest.  Controlling the bird’s every movement was critical to the performance metric for the hawk – but only because the bird was not meant to produce anything more than its corpse.  Awareness of the complex environment below was made near effortless by harnessing a peculiarity of the environment – thermal updrafts. The hawk adapted its wingspread and became more glider than flier.  Deciding to engage in a one-on-one with the small bird cost the hawk, although not as much as it cost the small bird.  Engagement with a single actor in the environment expended much more energy, and – not to be lost – denied the hawk any further input regarding the rest of the environment for the last minutes of the small bird’s life.

The metaphor works for me, to a degree.  I find myself engaging in repetitive conversations with those who cannot consider any method of management that diverges from predictive control mechanisms. For some, loyalty to hierarchy seems preferred to experimentation or dissent. A leader’s network and practices optimized for a previous work assignment are applied without modification to new positions and teams.  It is useful to consider the agendas at work in most conversations – but especially when people insist on compliance to process at the expense of outcome.

That last sentence seems evident to the worker, and represents much water-cooler (a.k.a. Twitter) talk.  The chirping on Twitter (and the metaphor takes an unfortunate turn) regarding leadership or management practices often sounds as if people are flying figure eights in the sky – much against their will, and towards an uncertain end.

Posted in Leadership | 1 Comment

Controlling the Invisible

By John | June 26, 2010

Recently, I was engaged in a listserv conversation (remember those?) regarding the balance between standards-based enterprises and the need to engage creative talent who may bristle at standard processes. The conversation moved to the question of new processes and standards that respected the nature of complex organizations (rather than early 20th century bureaucracies), and I offered the rather offensive idea that we don’t know enough to ponder the appropriate intervention strategy.

Expanding a bit here:

An organization I observed had a tenuous and negotiated balance between horizontal teams and client-focused divisions.  This balance was negotiated constantly, as new actors and situations questioned the flexible structures.  While the negotiations resulted in oscillation, the situation “worked,” and value was created and delivered.

Over time, new leadership came on board, and began their due diligence to understand the “horizontals.”  Using time-honored MBA tools, however, they could not grasp immediately the nature of the relationship.  As is appropriate, they established new financial and reporting controls for “visibility.”  These collected data, however, did not reflect the negotiations or relationships – as classical business measures rarely do.  Thus armed with (incomplete) data, this new leadership determined new directions for the horizontal teams.  One can write the ending to this tale.  New directions meant new managers, who lacked the relationships that were invisible to the financial and reporting controls.

Management science has yet to catch up with the notion of networks and relationships that drive business value.  There is some early work regarding complexity-informed leadership for organizations (one compilation I’m slogging through is referenced at the end of this post), but few tools to inform the praxis.  Private sector firms are experimenting with various open models, to some success, and proving the theory: experimentation is critical to finding the ‘right’ set of standards and processes for a particular organization at a particular time. I was reminded this week of Gell-Man’s caution:  The only valid model for a complex system is the system itself – we know to despise the notion of “cookie cutter” solutions, but lack alternatives, particularly in the public sector.

So how to proceed? We know we need accountability at every step, and we know experimentation is an unwelcome leadership tool in most agencies.  How do we evolve the practice of public sector leadership to recognize what we already know:  people are not fungible, the relationships they bring to the workplace are as important as their knowledge and skills, and what matters is often invisible – even when using a balanced scorecard.  How do we control the invisible?

A remarkably relevant Ted talk from Chip Conley:

Ref: Hazy, J. K., Goldstein, J. A., & Lichtenstein, B. B. (Eds.). (2007). Complex Systems Leadership Theory:  New Perspectives from Complexity Science on Social and Organizational Effectiveness (Vol. 1). Mansfield, MA: ISCE Publishing.

Posted in Complexity, Complexity and HR, Governance | 1 Comment

5 Minutes Regarding U.S. Education

By John | March 6, 2010

I was privileged recently to present at an “IgniteDC” venue, an interesting format where you provide 20 slides for a five minute talk. The slides are automatically advanced every fifteen seconds. The results can be interesting, occasionally disjointed, and occasionally memorable.

I don’t know where mine landed, frankly, but it led to great conversations afterward – and I was doubly privileged to meet a few teachers in the audience who thanked me for the presentation. It is sobering to have heroes thank you just for talking about the challenges that define their careers. They are the ones who must be thanked.

Nevertheless, the state of U.S. education is somewhat dire. There are a few bright spots coming up this year: federal dollars tied to innovation and accountability; a new film that spotlights the needs of our most under-served children; graduate degree programs focused on leading a new education system, rather than navigating the current broken one; and more.

My hope was to begin the conversation, and trust we would have a more noble exchange of views than has characterized other public policy initiatives lately.

UPDATE 5/3/2010 – the video has been posted to Blip.tv and iTunes – embed below:

Posted in Education System | 6 Comments

How Will The IC Harness Magic?

By John | February 22, 2010

In reading about innovation, we have many marvelous examples where successful firms incorporated technology by changing their business model.  Rather than digitizing paper, they considered the intersection of organizational imperatives and technology and considered how the business may be done differently.Magic Book

Some firms (and Agencies!) went a bit far.  I am still haunted by the story of the Senior Executive at the Department of Defense who saw his secretary replaced by a computer.  The professional assistant who knew why papers were filed a certain way, who knew the history for those files, and who maintained an informal network among other assistants that provided the best intelligence operation in existence.  Shunted aside (Or kicked upstairs so she could print out some SES’s email) because some Executives now had new, mystical, magical machines that would connect the human to all the information he could ever need.  This is an example of transforming the office ad absurdum.

Nevertheless, careful transformation can mean everything.  Consider the advent of online stock trades.  In a famous case study, Clayton Christensen (“Disrupting Class”) demonstrates that while Merrill Lynch was slow to provide online trading, it did so using the same brokers who were comfortable in the old models, and did so within existing departments.  By contrast, Charles Schwab immediately “created a separate business unit to conduct online trading and made a masterful transition to the computer-centric investment management world – ultimately phasing out its original broker-based business unit…the new unit operated at much higher trading volumes and significantly lower costs than those characterizing the traditional business.” [p.78]  Merrill Lynch used technology to improve their core business – successfully for a time – but failed to transform and adapt.  Or survive, as it turns out.

What does this have to do with the U.S. Intelligence Community?  Eight months ago, I noticed this little video on YouTube.

Note how this idea presents an approach for using technology (in this case a simple wiki, in other examples a “Facebook” for the IC) to transform how intelligence is produced.  Yes, Intellipedia has transformed analyst behavior, and to some degree appears to be chipping at the information-hoarding, publish-or-perish model – but do we want to be Merrill Lynch or Charles Schwab?  Do we want to make the analysts better, or consider transforming how we process and produce intelligence products as a result of this new magic? The true magic of these technologies is the unprecedented opportunity to leverage network effects for faster, better intelligence products in an age that demands them.

What is the strategy inside the Intelligence Community to harness the new magic?  I hope we are learning from successful innovations. One must be careful with magic, after all.

Posted in National Security | 1 Comment

Don’t Connect the Dots, Watch the Noise

By John | January 4, 2010

Keep trying to connect the dots, and you'll remain blind to the future

Keep trying to connect the dots, and you'll remain blind to the future

Originally appeared in Inside Knowledge Magazine 10 Sep 2008, Vol 12, Issue 1.

On 12 September, 2001, I received an e-mail from the CEO of my company (a federal contracting firm located just outside Washington DC). As F-16s continued their combat air patrols over my neighbourhood, I read, paraphrasing: ‘John, yesterday [9-11] was a failure of knowledge management. In the years to come, this will be the critical area for improvement’.

We soon heard about failures to ‘connect the dots’ regarding behaviours among flight school students, an arrest in the Midwest not shared across the FBI, and so on.

Seven years forward and US national security is changing. ‘Need to share’ is the buzzword, hoping to replace ‘need to know’. The director of National Intelligence releases a vision calling for sharing intelligence with law enforcement. The Department of Defense releases its first Information Sharing Strategy. The implication, never explicit: if only we get the right knowledge to the right person at the right time, we can know the future and learn which dots pose a threat.

When then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice stated “I don’t think anybody could have predicted… that they would try to use an airplane as a missile”, she was wrong. Someone in government had actually considered that scenario. There are thousands of scenarios considered daily across the national security system – some will always be seen in hindsight as predictive. While technically incorrect, Dr. Rice pointed up an underlying truth. There are thousands of scenarios considered daily and we do not know which scenario, which threat, which dot deserves our attention before the fact. And if we keep assuming there is a golden thread that, if pulled, will unravel the future – we never will.

Systems scientists, organisational theorists and business leaders are beginning to work in a world where control can be an illusion and adaptation preferred. We are starting to focus on nurturing networks and relationships;a recognition that certain systems are, by their very nature, non-linear, and they change their behaviors based on their starting points and the random events that might ensue, leading to emergent new behaviors that cannot be predicted.

Anticipation replaces prediction. While linear models are generally developed to predict the future; complexity helps us anticipate developing patterns of behavior.

In reforming the US national security system, it is vital that we question assumptions regarding the predictability of our world and instead understand that we connect not to find the haystack needle, but in order to better understand and discern patterns in the noise. The subtitle of the interim report from the Project on National Security Reform is a good beginning: ‘Ensuring Security in an Unpredictable World’. How we apply KM and complexity principles to national security reform will shape our ability to secure the nation’s future.

Posted in Governance, National Security | 5 Comments

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