Complexity. The new world between chance and choice
April 10, 2010
Nonlinear dynamics are concerned with complex, messy systems. Examples for these systems are the human brain, the evolution of life itself and the weather. There is not a single science of non-linearity, but there are different streams of research such as chaos theory or the theory of complex adaptive systems. The latter strand takes up an agent- and rules of interaction-based approach to modeling complexity. The first explains the behavior of systems that can be modeled by complex equations where the output of one calculation is taken as the input for the next. These equations are repetitive and iterative.
Chaos theory explains how the parameters in the equations cause patterns in time. These patterns are called attractors. A parameter might be the flow of information or the amount of energy in the system. At low rates the system moves forward displaying a repetitive, stuck behavior. This pattern is called a point attractor. At higher rates the pattern changes. At very high rates of, for example information flow, the system displays a totally random behavior. The pattern is highly unstable. However, there is a level between repetition/stability and randomness/instability. This level is called the edge of chaos. The pattern in time is called a strange attractor. The strange thing with a strange attractor is that the ongoing movement is never the same but always recognizable. The pattern is paradoxically stable and unstable, predictable and unpredictable at the same time. These patterns are spatially called fractals.
Chaos describes a dynamic that is not a synthesis of order and disorder. It is about orderly disorder or disorderly order. The very meaning of these words is transformed.
The weather is normally used as an example of a system that displays this pattern. The overall weather patterns can be (almost) predicted over short periods of time. Over long periods, the behavior cannot be predicted. The long-term behavior of a system like this is determined as much by the smallest changes in the smallest of parts of the system, as it is determined by the laws governing it. The conclusion is very clear. Predictability is always short-term. Long-term predictions would only be possible if absolutely all the variables in the system could be measured with absolutely infinite accuracy. But it is impossible to know all the variables and it is totally impossible to measure all the variables with the accuracy needed.
The smallest overlooked variable or the most minute change can escalate up by non-linear iterations into a major transformative change in the later life of the system. Another conclusion is that from a chaos theory perspective, movement towards equilibrium is always movement towards death. If a system is healthy, successful and alive, it is “at the edge of chaos” where the long-term cannot be seen.
Classical physics took individual entities and their movement (trajectories) as the unit of analysis. Chaos theorists such as Ilya Prigogine, claimed that these trajectories cannot be calculated because of the impossibility of measuring with the precision needed. But there was something even far more exciting going on. Henri Poincaré was the first scientist to identify two distinct kinds of energy. The first was the (kinetic) energy in the movement of the particle itself. The second was the energy arising from the interaction between particles. When this second energy is not there, the system is in a state of non-dynamism. When there is interactive energy, the system is dynamic and capable of novelty and renewal. Interaction creates resonance between the particles. Resonance is the result of coupling the frequencies of particles leading to an increase in the amplitude of motion. Resonance makes it impossible to identify individual movement in interactive environments because the individual’s trajectory depends more on the resonance with others than on the kinetic energy contained by the individual itself.
Every interaction of any particles is thus potentially meaningful and can lead to amplification of the slightest variation. Interactive systems with even the smallest variations take on a life of their own that is under continuous construction. The future form and direction of the system is not visible in the system at any given time. The future is not in the system and it cannot be chosen or planned by anyone.
The scientists at the Santa Fe Institute developed the other strand of research: the complex adaptive systems approach. A CAS consists of a large number of agents. Each agent behaves according to its own intentions and rules for local interaction. Local here means that no agent can interact with the whole population of agents at the same time. No individual agent can determine the pattern of behavior that the system as a whole displays. These adaptive systems display the same dynamics as the chaos theorists found: stable equilibrium at one end of the spectrum, random chaos at the other, and in-between the newly found complex dynamic of stability and instability, predictability and unpredictability, paradoxically at the same time: the edge of chaos.
The conclusions are important for us. Firstly, novelty always emerges in a radically unpredictable way. Secondly, the patterns of healthy behavior are not caused by competitive selection or independent choices made by independent agents. Instead, what is happening, happens in interaction, not by chance or by choice, but as a result of the interaction itself.
The Internet changes the patterns of connectivity and makes possible new enriching variety in interaction. The changed dynamics we experience every day through social media have the very characteristics of the edge of chaos.
The sciences of complexity change our perspective and thinking. Perhaps, as a result we should, especially in management, focus more attention on what we are doing than what we should be doing. Following the thinking presented by the most advanced scientific researchers, the important question to answer is not what should happen in the future, but what is happening now?
Our focus should be on the communicative interaction creating the continuously developing pattern that is our life.
Thank you Stu Kauffman and W Brian Arthur. Based on Ralph Stacey and Doug Griffin.
Lessons from the early adopters of corporate social media
March 15, 2010
The mainstream approach to management places a heavy emphasis on the formulation of plans and intentions and then communicating them as actions to be implemented by the organization. The starting point for change involves conceiving a picture of the future that is somewhat different from the picture of the present. After the content side is taken care of, the focus is then on providing tools for the process of change.
The approach that is made possible through enterprise social media is very different. The question that is now asked is: “How can people participate in such a way that things develop and change over time?”
The strategic focus of the early adopters of corporate social media is an ongoing continuous movement that is open-ended, and always incomplete. The strategic logic has been temporal rather than spatial. When following a spatial metaphor, there is a territory that can be explored and understood, but here the territory is seen as being under continuous development and formation by the exploration itself. “It is impossible to map an area that changes with every step the explorer takes.” People inhabit a world of emergence, uncertainty and responsive change.
Themes such as communities, social network analysis and social graph underline a fairly strong sense of definable relationships and a sense of “us”. Our studies, however, show that social media create a dynamic and shifting sense of groups one belongs to. Conversations always follow from previous conversations and move on involving others, often as a result of responses from outside the corporate firewall. Work utilizing social media has much less clear and managed beginnings and endings. There is, typically, no pre-conceived design for the pattern of work: it evolves live.
Corporate life is improvising together
Physical meetings in organizations are often more or less orchestrated and planned in advance: “You should come prepared. There should be a clear goal for the meeting.” Following this thinking, there is no true sense of creating the future together. It is much more likely that people construct what they have always constructed. When people use social media to connect, they experience the potential inherent in communication, depending on how they express themselves, and how they respond. “Social media create the experience of acting into the unknown, creating the future together, improvising together.”
By linking improvisation to a group, like in theatrical improvisation, we get to what is in fact happening in social media. All of us with our differing intentions, hopes and fears, are acting in corporate plays that are very close to improvisational theater. We are self-organizing in shifting social configurations in the responsive interplay of different players.
We are fellow-improvisers in corporate ensembles constantly constructing the future, and our part in what is happening, in responsive interaction. The idea of improvisation is often associated with notions of unrehearsed, unintentional action. However, the more skilled we are, the better we can improvise. The better we have planned, the more flexible we can be. The more intensely we are present, the more responsive we can be.
The real time web is creating a real time company
The most important outcome is that social media focus attention more on what people are doing in the present than on what they intend to do in the future. The focus is on communicative interaction, the next tweet and the latest blog post.
The pattern of relating also becomes very clear: “We get to see who is talking and who is silent? Who is invited to join and who is excluded or opts out?” The focus of attention is on the processes of participation and the life stream as the narrative of progress.
A senior manager in a very large multinational corporation explained the impact of social media: “Since I moved away from thinking that what I do is manage the corporation through communicating with the whole corporation, I have started to pay attention to my own participation with the people I meet or should meet, and my responses in everyday interaction. Through asking different kinds of questions and through pointing to different kinds of issues, through changing my own participation, I have in fact changed my company.”
Thank you Keith Johnstone, Srikumar Rao, Patricia Shaw and Doug Griffin
Productivity and mobile devices
February 24, 2010
Lenovo unveiled their new tablet-capable business laptop last Monday. The company made a conscious decision not to bring out an iPad like tablet PC. They said customers don’t want it. “The feedback was that for our customers it would not work because of the need to have a physical keyboard.”
The discussion around a virtual or physical keyboard caught my attention. The purpose of a keyboard is fairly straightforward: to get words onto the recording medium. The ability to capture a symbolic representation of spoken language for storage or transfer frees information from the limits of individual memory or location. But do we need a physical keyboard for that?
The patent for the typewriter was awarded in 1868 to Christopher Sholes. An early problem of the typewriter was the jamming of the type bars when certain combinations of keys were struck in a very close sequence. As a solution to the problem, Sholes arranged his keyboard in such a way that the keys most likely to be struck in close succession were approaching the type point from opposite sides of the machine. The keyboard is actually configured to minimize speed of input. At the time, reducing the speed of the typewriter was the best way to prevent it from jamming. The QWERTY keyboard was designed to accomplish a now obsolete mechanical requirement. It can be claimed that it is very unproductive to use a keyboard as an interface to productivity tools. The situation would of course be different if we all used ten fingers and did not need to look at the keyboard as we type.
Mobile phones are still mainly associated with communication, not productivity software. As a result a knowledge worker needs two devices: a laptop and a mobile phone.
No mobile phone has created as much of a buzz as the Google Nexus One since Apple launched the iPhone. As in other Android-based mobile devices, there is no physical keyboard. Text input relies on a virtual keyboard. But there is also a voice-to-text input functionality. We could use our voice and video instead of a keyboard! And additionally the camera is paving the way towards augmented reality!
The third device category is tablets: bigger than mobile phones but smaller than laptops – and often without a physical keyboard. The critiques claim that tablets like the iPad are just laptops without keyboards, while others are really mobile phones with proper-sized keyboards, without any definition of a real market need. At least the Lenovo customers don’t want them. Hopefully the Lenovo case is not a matter of history repeating itself, as when Ken Olsen was explaining that DEC customers didn’t want PC’s.
The question here is not only how we think about the means of input. In the corporate context, it is even more about how we think about productivity and what kind of software can be called productivity software.
Productivity is a function of interaction
Instead of thinking about productivity as if it were associated with certain types of documents, it is closer to experience to think that productivity emerges or does not, in people’s interaction with each other and in interaction with the devices we use. Productivity is a function of interaction. Interaction is the content of social media! Therefore, it may not be a very good idea to bring the old document-based productivity software to mobile phones, or use Lilliputian keyboards.
The key productivity focus should be on widening and deepening interaction and reflection. This leads to a new perspective on information-related practices and productivity tools. Rising productivity requires changes in the way we communicate. Can there be a richer and easier way to use our devices? This, by the way, is the main sales argument behind the iPad.
The fastest immediate increase in productivity comes from either learning touch typing or using voice and video as means of input. Perhaps the keyboard of the future is speech combined with transcription? Anyway, the productivity software of tomorrow needs to be interaction-based. The most efficient productivity suit of tomorrow may well be a combination of Twitter, blogs and Facebook.
You only need one mobile device! The decision as to whether the device you need is a mobile phone, a tablet or a laptop may not be the most important one what comes to the quality of interaction. An artist friend of mine said that when he paints, he does not interact with the canvas, “the recording medium”. He interacts with the world beyond the canvas.
Thank you Kuutti Lavonen
Background
On cognitive and social presence
February 22, 2010
Have you ever wondered why you don’t see anyone reading a book when you visit companies? We associate reading with finding information and learning, but we also involve qualities such as contemplation, solitude and mental privacy when we think about books.
There is a mental framework that is used when dealing with books, and another distinct mental framework regarding information related practices in the corporate world. Basically, you are not allowed to read a book but you can read a document.
Documents and word processing are part of the mental framework of management today. Documents were born from the needs of a hierarchical, systemic approach to management. Information flowed down from the top in the form of PowerPoint slide decks containing vision statements, Excel sheets with goals and Word documents explaining corporate procedures. Information, which flowed up from the bottom, was used mainly to provide reports and data for managers, helping them to keep their employees accountable and to ensure the smooth operation of the business process.
The framework of computerized word processing is associated with terms like information flows and the sharing of information. This is not something you normally talk about when discussing a book. While a book provides a view of the contemplative mind, documents create a view of controlled content. Do you still ask why you can read a document but you are not allowed to use Facebook?
Instead of predictive process flows, knowledge work in practice follows a very different logic. A senior executive in one of the most successful multinational corporations in the world explained what was going on:
- There may be a triggering event that needs to be explored.
- The exploration is performed most efficiently through transparency, wide area engagement and a communal process of distributing the cognitive load of the case.
- People don’t perform job roles. People participate in tasks. You don’t delegate, you invite!
- People from the whole community should participate through voluntary self-organization as widely as possible at the same time, not sequentially.
- The industrial process was long, sequential and divided. The knowledge based process is short, parallel and interactive.
- As many people as possible with applicable skills should contribute, each spending as little time as possible.
- Finally, the contributions and comments that are received should integrate into a modular solution than can be iterated.
Knowledge work is about a community-based cognitive presence. But cognition is just part of the answer. Work today is even more about social presence. To manage is to participate in the live conversations.
There cannot be management without a social presence.
A dramatic shift is needed in the mental framework of information, communication and work. Without this changing mindset, no efficient implementation of social media can be made in the corporate world. Work is communication. Conversations and narratives are the new documents. Conversations cannot be controlled. The only way to influence conversations is to take part in them. The most meaningful conversations are the ones where customers voice their views. Those conversations take place outside of the firewall in the new world of mass communication.
As much as we need to associate Facebook with work, we need moments of slower pace. We need to combine the qualities of contemplation, solitude and mental privacy with work.
Thank you Walter Ong. The photo is of an interior detail of the Alvar Aalto architecture in the Academic Bookstore in Helsinki
The Google lesson for management
February 13, 2010
Eugene Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information in 1960. His pioneering work was in citation indexing. This allows a researcher to identify which articles have been cited most frequently and who has cited them. Garfield’s studies demonstrated that the number of citable items, i.e. the number of papers, together with the frequency of their citation, meaning how many scientists link to the paper, is a good measure of scientific success. Nobel laureates write more papers than other scientists and these papers are more linked to than other papers. The system effectively measures quantity and quality at the same time.
Links on the Web are also citations, or votes, as the founders of Google realized. The whole Web is a densely interconnected network of references. It is no different to the age-old practice of academic publishing and citation indexing.
The observation of Larry Page and Sergey Brin that links are citations seems commonplace today, but it was a breakthrough at the time Google started on September 7, 1998.
What Google did was essentially the same as had been done in academic publishing by Eugene Garfield. At this time, relevance and importance were measured through counting the number of other sites linking to a Web site, as well as the number of sites linking to those sites. The PageRank algorithm includes other variables as well, but the measurement of links is still the core functionality of the system.
What Google has proved to managers is that people’s individual actions, if those actions are performed in a transparent way, and if those actions can be linked, are capable of managing unmanageable tasks.
Collaboration and collective work are best expressed through transparency and emergent, responsive linking. The mainstream business approach to value creation is still a predictive process designed and controlled by the expert/manager. This is based on the presuppositions that we know (1) all the linkages that are needed beforehand, and (2) what the right sequential order in linking and acting is. Neither of these beliefs is correct any more. The variables of creative work have increased beyond systemic models of process design.
It is time to learn from the Web.
By relying on the uncoordinated actions of millions of people instead of experts/managers to classify content on the net, Google democratized scientific citation indexing. To be able to manage the increasingly complex organizations of today, the same kind of democratization needs to take place in the corporate world. Companies are transforming themselves from industrial mass production to creating value in wide area networks of mass communication. The transparency of tasks is the corporate equivalent of publishing academic articles. Responsive linking, rather than predictive linking, acts as a measure of relevance and is the guarantee of quality. This has served the academic community well. It made Sergey Brin and Larry Page billionaires. Now is the time to do the same in the corporate world. Complex, creative, knowledge-based work requires new approaches. The Google lesson for management is, that the more work is based on responsive processes of relating and the more organizing is an ongoing process in time, the more value we create!
Thank you Jeff Howe and Ralph Stacey
On the importance of the Tweet
February 12, 2010
Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin to replace the laborious hand cleaning of cotton in 1794. James Watt invented the steam engine in 1769 to solve the problem of pumping water out of British coal mines. Most inventions however, are not responses to voiced needs. In many cases the work of the inventors produce a solution that needs to seek a problem.This is still the case today. Inventions in search of a use are the norm when it comes to most technological breakthroughs. When Thomas Edison built his first phonograph in 1877, he suggested ten uses to which his invention would be suited. At the top of the list were preserving the last words of dying people and announcing the time of the day.
Music was not on his first list of uses. As historians write, It took twenty years for Edison to reluctantly admit that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music.
It is almost impossible to know beforehand where the primary use for an invention is going to be in the long run. The inventor has in many cases, been totally wrong in his early assessments of where the best combination of a solution to a problem might be. Although James Watt had originally put his steam engine to work in the coalmines, the true revolution of steam power began only after steam had started to be used to propel trains and ships, which he never thought of.
James Watt did not see the future but he saw the past. Researchers claim that Watt actually got the idea for his version of the steam engine while repairing an engine designed by Thomas Newcomen, who had invented it almost sixty years earlier. Over one hundred of these had already been manufactured. Newcomen’s engine was based in turn on the patent awarded to Thomas Savary in 1689. The chain of discovery of the steam engine goes back further to Denis Papin in France, Christian Huygens in Holland and others. Similar histories can be seen in all modern inventions that are well documented.
There are very few isolated geniuses. But there are many bright people who have continued and improved the work of others. There is a need for a new vocabulary for the creative era: all capable people have capable predecessors, who should get the credit they deserve. The key concept in the knowledge-based future is acknowledgment, giving credit, beyond what we have been used to. In a sense, creative people are more remixers of other peoples’ ideas, than inventors. Technology and development are not isolated acts by great independent thinkers, but a complex storyline, where the storytellers, the developers and remixers, are more important than the heroic inventors, if there ever were any. We never know how the story develops, but it cannot develop unless it continues. The new challenge for the creative economy is to understand the importance of attribution and giving credit. The first thing is to acknowledge the vital role of the curator/messenger and the huge importance of the tweet and the retweet.
Thank you @euan @oscarberg @venessamiemis @Lessig and Jared Diamond
Complexity and the importance of links
February 4, 2010
The structures of the brain and the Internet look the same. In the brain there are neurons that link as a result of being active at the same time. This firing together creates a connection, “a wiring together“, that increases the strength of their connection. On the Internet there are servers and people that are linked in temporal interaction, sometimes as a result of being inspired and interested in the same topic, “firing together”. This short-term communication sometimes leads to a relationship increasing the strength of the connection. No neuron links with all the other neurons at the same time. No server links with all the servers at the same time, and no one interacts with all the other people at the same time. So all interaction is always local, whether in the brain, in an organization, or on the Internet. However, local here does not mean spatially local. The nodes in local interaction can be physically located in different parts of the world.
We often think of individuals as independent and self-contained. The view suggested here sees individuals as nodes of the complex networks they form when interacting with others, co-creating themselves and the reality in which they participate.
A complex system consists of a large number of agents/nodes behaving according to their own principles of local, self-organizing interaction. No one agent, or, a group of agents determines how the system as a whole behaves. Self-organization here means the agents interacting locally, following their own principles, rules and intentions, without any steering from outside that interaction. All influence takes place in the local interaction. No one agent in the brain or on the Internet, or in an organization, can be in control of the whole system and how it develops, as it develops as a global pattern.
There is control and there is development, all the time. Both control and development are emergent phenomena of local interaction. The interaction itself constrains and enables the people in the interaction. People cannot just do whatever they want in a relationship. Relationships create stability just because relationships always impose constraints. Relationships that are based on diversity and difference may enable development to take place without a plan for development. There cannot be novelty if people in a relationship are alike. Consensus leads to stagnation. What happens is a complex ongoing process of people relating to each other. This places links, or relationships, at the center of understanding life in organizations. The number of nodes comes third, if even that. The second most important thing is the diversity/quality of the nodes. The most important things are the links; the process of linking: wiring together as a result of firing together, in the brain, on the Internet, or in an organization.
One of the biggest promises of Internet-based work is the way it redefines local interaction, as Doug Griffin puts it. Global participation is possible, beyond anything we have experienced before. Mass production is giving away to short-term mass participation based on mass communication.
The human brain has more than 100 billion neurons. There are around 1.8 billion Internet users at the moment. So we are still far away from the potential of the brain when it comes to possible link combinations of local firing together. But it is high time to visit our beliefs. There can be control without somebody controlling. There can be development without a development goal and a plan as to how to reach the goal on a global level. This is how the brain works. And this is how we work!
Let’s fire together!
Thanks @venessamiemis for being the inspiration for this post. Thank you Doug Griffin for thinking together with me
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