Conclusion These three simple principles of narration, transparency and shared power should provide enough guidance to motivated leaders in an organization. Implementation depends on the specific context of each organization and the ability to keep things in what I call, “perpetual Beta”. Power-sharing and transparency enable work to move out to the edges and away from the comfortable, complicated work that has been the corporate mainstay for decades. There is nothing left in the safe inner parts of the company anyway, as it is being automated and outsourced. The high-value work today is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems that have already been solved and for which a formulaic or standardized response has been developed. One challenge for organizations is getting people to realize that what they already know has increasingly diminishing value. How to learn and solve problems together is becoming the real business advantage.

In looking at the predator-prey dynamic in organisations, it becomes interesting; especially using metaphor tools such as Arthur Shelley’s ‘Organisational Zoo‘. If predation is the regulating dynamic in organisations then what impact does that have on variety? Is it a simple case of survival of the fittest? Do individuals adapt, become more agile or dynamic, in order to survive the environment (gazelles, using Arthur’s metaphor)? If the population of dynamic, agile individuals increases then, according to Allesina & Tang, so will the number of predators (lions in Arthur’s organisational zoo metaphor). Does this make sense for organisations?

“Interfaces and devices are providing more and more power and functionality to people, and in many cases this additional power is accompanied by increasing complexity. Although people have more experience and are more sophisticated, it still takes time to learn new interfaces, information, and interactions. Although we are able to learn and use these often difficult interfaces, we increasingly seek and appreciate simplicity. The Complexity Curve describes how a project moves from boundless opportunity and wonderful ideas to requirements checklists and constraints then finally (but only rarely) to simplicity and elegance. Where many projects call themselves complete when the necessary features have been included, few push forward and strive to deliver the pleasing and delightful experiences that arise from simplicity, focus, and purpose.

Like Churchill said, first we shape our structures and then our structures shape us. That’s why I’m trying to change the structures of management, one client at a time. I still think that to be effective, change management means changing management, not just managers.

This book is about complexity science, data structures and algorithms, intermediate programming in Python, and the philosophy of science

Was mir an seiner These latürnich schwer zupass kommt, ist die Tatsache, dass sie mich in meiner Überzeugung unterstützt, dass wir, wenn wir ein "demokratisches" Netz haben wollen, in dem die Produktionswerkzeuge in den Händen möglichst vieler liegen, wir nicht anders können, als die Technologie so einfach wie möglich zu gestalten. Und umgekehrt sollten wir bei denen die komplexe Technologien fordern und fördern, vorsichtig sein, ob sie nicht einen Zentralismus im Netz befördern oder gar aktiv zentralistische Ziele verfolgen.

However, my goal with this post is not to change terms in use, but instead to simply give people an easy way to understand what the concept of adaptive.

When you hear that something is adaptive, think about how muscles respond to use by growing, how exercise is used to increase strength, and how practice is the way to learn to do things.

sechs Ansätze des Komplexitäts- und Ungewissheitsmanagements knapp zusammen. Sie zeigen, dass praxistaugliche Ansätze stets über eine Verhaltensänderung gehen. Gutgemeinte Ratschläge, wie sie z.B. in 6 Ways to Master Entrepreneurial Uncertainty feil gehalten werden, sind in der Praxis wenig hilfreich. Nur Reither macht deutlich, dass die Veränderung eingefahrener Verhaltens- und Denkmuster Geduld und Mühe erfordert.

Social Experience Design with elements of business, strategy and change management

In an earlier column, I wrote about the science of complex adaptive systems (see Nov./Dec. 2008 KMWorld), which is a key piece of underlying theory to help us comprehend the increasingly interdependent and co-evolving worlds of knowledge management, social computing and learning.

“In complex systems there is no answer as to what you are supposed to be observing” - Robert Sapolsky - Chaos and Reductionism (via clothedinsky)

I love coming to the comments to see people sparking ideas, and knowledge off of each other. I knew a very tiny bit about the topics here, sometimes its complete news to me,(I sometimes do take some of this with a grain of salt) and to come to the comment section and to see people connect the dots is just a really amazing thing to see, I really enjoy this “underground” news broadcast where 40 percent of the news is from the comments people write in. Links to other sites on the topic at hand etc. Now imagine if they censored this site and the internet as a whole… where would we meet up to talk about this kind of news? Maybe its time to start talking about a plan b?

Es muss halt immer alles sehr schnell und günstig gehen. So wie Politiker und Manager langfristig entscheiden (mitunter mit todbringenden Konsequenzen), entscheiden Projektmanager auch in Projekten. Da diese Entscheide schlimmstenfalls den Misserfolg des Projekts zur Folge hat, wird darauf nicht weiter Gewicht gelegt. Es wäre klüger, Projektmanager in Komplexitätsmanagement und (psychologischer) Entscheidungstheorie auszubilden, statt sie zu lernen, wie man Gantt-Diagramme zeichnet.

Don Norman, a former Apple vice-president, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, and one of the world’s most influential designers, discusses his new book, Living With Complexity. Norman talks about differences between complexity, something being complicated, and simplicity, and suggests that people who bemoan “technology” don’t actually seek simplicity. He also discusses differences between designing a product and designing a system, using examples of iPods and iTunes, the Amazon Kindle, and BMW’s Mini Cooper — products whose success depended upon the success of larger systems.

In corporations, we have the luxury of control over our userbase...to some extent!:) At the least, we can train them on tools we deem most suitable to perform the jobs we'd like them to perform. We may put a 'heavy' tool in front of them, but that's usually because we need the full functionality. Need may be a strong word, but we've taken the time to do a cost analysis and decide that a Notes client + 3 days training offers us more ROI than giving them a Gmail account and walking away.

the first real undergraduate textbook on networks. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.iq.harvard.edu%2Fblog%2Fnetgov%2F2010%2F02%2Feasley_kleinberg_text_on_netwo.html

eine kurze und knappe Geschichte der Theorie der Komplexität in den unterschiedlichen miteinander vernetzten Disziplinen seit dem Ende des 2. Weltkrieges veröffentlicht: "The theories of complexity comprise a system of great breadth. But what is included under this umbrella? Here we attempt a portrait of complexity theory, seen through the lens of complexity theory itself. That is, we portray the subject as an evolving complex dynamical system, or social network, with bifurcations, emergent properties, and so on. This is a capsule history covering the 20th century."

Design Thinking as a Path to Innovation

Though the subtitle of the book is “How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation,” what Brown is actually proposing in this book goes far beyond offering advice for keeping your business on the leading edge of innovation. He’s talking about a new ethos in how we operate as a society. That concept feels pretty big, so it’s packaged as a business innovation book instead in order to overcome the challenge of getting you to open it. Not that you’re being tricked – it IS about innovation, but it’s extended beyond the scope of designing products and services to encompass the way we design the systems in which we live.

In business, agility means the capability of rapidly and cost efficiently adapting to changes. Agile companies make more money with less resources and lower costs

C.K. Prahalad writes in a Business Week column “In Volatile Times, Agility Rules” Flexible capacity and worker skills are essential, but in a context of strategic clarity.

Over the years managers have developed tools and techniques to overcome challenges ranging from inconsistent quality to stagnant productivity. (Think Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, and just-in-time supply chains.) Now what they need is a system for addressing volatility.

....
n this volatile world, more and more companies will strive to become “agile” where speed of change separates the winners from the losers.

1. Dangerous Complexity. The assumption that when we can't understand an expert, they must be both smart and right.

2. Dysfunctional Internal Competition. This is a big theme in The Knowing-Doing Gap and Morten's Hansen's masterpiece

3. Breaking-up Teams Constantly. American companies often seem to love moving people around constantly, breaking-up teams, giving people new experiences, and so onCollaboration.

Simplexity is at its best when it focus on the general theories and definitions around the connection between simplicity and complexity. For example, the simplest systems are either inert (like a lump of carbon) or highly chaotic (a room full of gas molecules). Complexity emerges when systems fall between the highly static and the highly dynamic - like an organism. Unfortunately, these types of graspable principles are not carried out through the book. I found myself wondering whether Kluger had used the theme of simplicity/complexity as a convenient thread to assemble of number of disparate, but individually interesting ideas.

A complexity approach removes simplistic hopes of an ordered and controllable existence where, if only we had the right ‘keys’ or ‘tools’, we would be able to fashion a successful organisation. Instead, it offers a way to identify underlying patterns of order and indicators for influencing future sustainable practice; it shows how simple recurrent rules result in complex behaviour and that ‘influential interventions’ do not take a neat cause-and-effect path but may generate unexpected outcomes.

In any natural organization there is a gradient of intimacy and utility. The parts that we use the most are closest.

In reality your life is like that too. So is the life of an organization. You can map your social network along this gradient. Close in will be your family and your best friends. If you take your address book you can map this world for yourself. If you think about your department of organization, you can do the same.

As in the Perma Garden, the outside edge is not a throw away. Here is where again novelty lives. Weak ties are where we find new work, new ideas and new friends. But to reach the edge, we have to have the inner layers too. To optimize our chance of finding novelty, we need as much diversity as we can find in our inner layers.

Don Norman's In Favour of Complexity keynote at UX London 2009 made the case for complexity with order, lucidity and understandability.

... Lehrbuch schließt gleich mehrere Lücken: die wachsende Lücke zwischen aktueller Theorieentwicklung in der Organisationswissenschaft und der Alltagspraxis in den Unternehmen; die Lücke an systemtheoretischer Literatur für die Hochschulausbildung; und die Lücken im eigenen Wissen über die innovative Kraft systemtheoretischer Perspektiven für Unternehmen und Organisationen. In 13 Kapiteln vermitteln die Autorinnen und Autoren die zentralen systemtheoretischen Ideen und Konzepte zur Strategie- und Organisationsentwicklung. Das Spektrum reicht von den Wurzeln der systemischen Organisationstheorie bis zu Fragen von Wissen, Lernen und Kultur in Organisationen. Eine Besonderheit des Buches ist sein didaktischer Aufbau: Am Beginn eines Kapitels wird das Thema kurz zusammengefasst. Am Ende stehen Wiederholungsfragen und weiterführende Literaturhinweise. So kann das Buch sowohl veranstaltungsbegleitend für die universitäre Ausbildung als auch als Grundlage für Selbststudium und Weiterbildung

Our world now presents us with problem systems, not just complex problems, but chaotically interconnected situations of systemically connected problems. Design 3.0 can be seen as a framework, a system of language, that by learning we may be encouraged to dare to take on the problem systems in our own organizations and encounters.

This view of communication sees it as a fundamental aspect of organization. As sitting at its core. It does not look at it simply as a way of dealing with other, otionally more important aspects of organization. As such, although Drucker talks in terms of "from-to" rather than "between", his comments sit four-square with those perspectives (such as informal coalitions), which see organizations as complex social (or responsive) processes.

Innovating is hard work. Perhaps the most difficult aspect is dealing with the anxiety that comes with following a systematic innovation method. The process forces innovators to start with uncomfortable, abstract concepts that seem silly and worthless. These are called preinventive concepts because they occur right before the moment of innovating. Successful innovators learn how to deal with and control the anxiety at this critical moment of invention. But there is a catch: some are better at it than others. Fortunately, there is a way to determine if you are more or less anxiety-ridden from these effects.

The trick to great innovation is to construct preinventive structures that have these properties: Novelty, Ambiguity, Meaningfulness, Emergence, Incongruity, Divergence

Today, Stacey is recognized as a leading and radical thinker on the application of complexity principles to organizational change and performance. De Bono, on the other hand, is thought of primarily as a teacher of lateral thinking techniques and an author of populist books on the subject.

However, in the same way that Stacey uses complexity science as a source of analogy for human interaction in organizations, I believe that de Bono’s early writing provides a similarly rich seam of analogies. For me, the principles of ‘brain dynamics’ that underpin his writing and teaching offer some important insights into the dynamics of organizations, if managers and organizational specialists are prepared to look for them.

Creative people see too many possibilities, often frustrating their co-workers.

Psychology Today: The Creative Personality, 1996-Jul/Aug, from Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated.

I love the opening quote:

"The social system is an organization, like the individual, that is bound together by a system of communication." − Norbert Wiener (1948, p. 24)

Watch this video of John Seely Brown on using Edge thinking to solve problems in an always-shifting business (or learning) environment

aber um sie zu verstehen braucht man geduld, beobachtungsgabe und -willen und werkzeuge. werkzeuge, die einem helfen sich zu orientieren. werkzeuge, die unsichtbares zutage fördern.

die Rolle von Intuition und Nicht-Wissen im Management - Das erfolgreiche Unternehmen der Zukunft ist ein intuitives Unternehmen; eines, das Nichtwissen zur Ressource macht.

The complex social dynamics of self-organization, emergence, non-linearity and paradox are present in all organizational conversations. These operate continuously; and they cannot be ‘designed out’ in response to a call to "keep it simple".

how insights from complexity science and other writing might usefully inform our understanding of organizational dynamics

social computing brings back these difficult but intriguing topics into the light

The Art of Complex Problem Solving heißt eine Website, die grafisch auf anschauliche Weise die Vorgänge beim Probleme Lösen anschaulich macht

on how technology and organizations interact over time

die erste wissenschaftliche Arbeit, die GTD genauer untersucht. Die ECCO-Wissenschaftler (Evolution, Complexity and Cognition research group) verglichen die Prinzipien, die GTD zu Grunde liegen, mit aktueller wissenschaftlicher Literatur

Farson is a writer more in the tradition of Nietzsche. He is less interested in the six things you need to do tomorrow to become an effective manager and more concerned with provoking you into thought and self-reflection

the social media ecosystem is more often a complex environment than it is a simple one ... By measuring the system we may actually change its state

Complexity theory is a broad church, so here is a summary

Complexity explodes, and there are few strategies for the human brain to cope:
- trial and error
- denial
- modelling
- trivialization
- intutional judgement

The objective of this blog is to offer a forum for the discussion of the intertwined subjects of network analysis and complex systems theory.

Projektmanagement ist eine Organisationsform, die häufig auch zur Strukturierung und gezielten Umsetzung interner Veränderungsprozesse herangezogen wird - zu Recht. Doch die Erfolgsfaktoren, um KULTURVERÄNDERUNGEN in Organisationen wirklich “auf den

warum aufwändige Infrastrukturprojekte meist nicht ohne erhebliche Mehrkosten und Zeitverzögerung beendet werden

excellent ... One of the most popular terms in management is business model. Wallin builds his definition on value-creation ... so do I

Systems thinking mirrors ecological thinking - looking at the context for problems and situations, treating them as emergent rather than isolated. It involves a sensitivity to wholes that is missing in analytical thinking

Unser Leben besteht immer mehr aus Widersprüchen, Spannungsfelder und Paradoxien.
* Komplexität vs. Einfachheit.
* Null-Fehler-Prinzip vs. Zeitdruck.
* Flexibilität vs. Standards.
* Kreativität vs. Struktur.

The Book "The Starfish and The Spider" uses the amazing capabilities of starfish to survive and regrow damaged limbs as a powerful metaphor for leaderless organisations.

komisches blog ... RSS?

Has enterprise software become too complex to be effective? ... auch in Scrapbook

hmmm, yes and no ... “business schools reward difficult, complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.”
the ross perot quote is good indeed

putting wiki adoption squarely into the complex camp, and using patterns to help people make sense of what to do and not what to do, rather than trying to lay out prescriptive answers on how-to implement wikis

In the complex environment of the current business world, leaders often will be called upon to act against their instincts. They will need to know when to share power and when to wield it alone, when to look to the wisdom of the group and when to take the

The reality, however, is that organizations are nonlinear systems with behavior, like the weather, that is hard to predict.

We need breakthrough innovations to enable us to better deal with these increasingly complex organizational systems

dynamic complexity, social complexity and emerging complexity ... dc = nichtlinearität ???

It’s the total fusion of science as art and art as science. And its a far cry from business as usual.

"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them. -Laurence J. Peter".

Lean and Six Sigma that are implemented on the shop floor often do not help because the problem with proliferate and unmanaged complexity begins with the product, not after.

on ricardo semler ..

while MBAs and other similar programs seek to provide people with a basic tool-kit for solving problems, they assume a framework, but “They offer far less guidance on the far more difficult task of framing issues in ways that can be addressed.”

The faddishness of the [knowledge] management field is both fascinating and disturbing. As the boundaries betwen managemet and self-help blurr…managers run from one guru or theory to the next like headless chickens…