Watch the video above to hear about what “planned serendipity” really is (you can’t plan to win the lottery, alas), how Steve Jobs literally architected good luck into Pixar and Apple, how luck plays into Amazon’s current status as a tech product hit factory, and how even rank-and-file employees can “storm the gates” to make their companies more open to success.

patterns as a way of making sense of group behaviour (and I'd say emergent phenomena galore)

"People should feel empowered by the idea of a science of team building, The idea that we can transmute the guess work of putting a team together into a rigorous methodology, and then continuously improve teams is exciting. Nothing will be more powerful, I believe, in eventually changing how organizations work."

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.

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.

Was haben ein Ameisenstaat, das Finanzsystem oder gar die Evolution gemeinsam? Sie alle können als Selbstorganisationsphänomene betrachtet werden. Die Theorie der Selbstorganisation erfährt gerade heute in verschiedenen sozial- und medienwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen eine Art Comeback.
Wichtige Erkenntnisse für diese Theorie lieferte der österreichisch-amerikanische Kybernetiker Heinz von Foerster, der - vor 100 Jahren - am 13. November 1911 geboren wurde. Sein Verdienst ist es, immer wieder auf die unvermeidlichen blinden Flecken des wissenschaftlichen Beobachters aufmerksam gemacht zu haben.

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.

The discussion turns interesting when he touches on “directed collaboration” and “structured activities”.  Here I believe he is struggling with the same thing that the authors of “Mastering the Unpredictable” did.  Many people see collaboration in the office place as being a pre-defined process, and this is even commonly called a “structured process”.  Yet, as I have discussed many times here, much of the most interesting and valuable work is not predictable or predefined, but rather “emergent” as proposed in adaptive case management.

Speaking about Capabilities (I think it's pp. 26-33), they separate relational capacity from engagement capacity; and that seems correct to me. This COP experience I mentioned involved the de-institutionalization of people with disabilities here in the US in the early 1990s. It was related to a sense of seeking justice for people and it was very easy for people to be highly engaged in that effort. This is also a theme of Umair Haque (His blog is here: http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/ ). He usually speaks of organizational engagement with customers as a 21st century imperative, but I believe these ideas are relevant to employee and COP engagement too! I think the core issue is for management to find the space for people to engage.

So my answer to the Enterprise 2.0 leadership question should be fairly clear by now. It really takes a village, or more properly, an forward-looking organization that is trying to recalibrate itself around the way that the way that the world seems to be shifting. That shift, the fast-moving and global world of sharing, participating, and openness that is social media at its finest, is one in which smart organizations will pull together their best internal leaders to proactively make themselves better.

Technology Grassroots -- sourcing a new technology, platform, tool, or application -- via the Grassroots is an exercise in confusion and frustration. You end up with multiple solutions, all competing for attention. End users are sent to lots of different destinations, apparently for no good reason. There's little or no integration with existing applications or data flows. Users don't know which tools will survive and which will die. IT is concerned about security, performance, and stability. Organizational silos are reinforced, not diminished. Worst of all from a social networks standpoint, the company's attention is fragmented across multiple tools, each of which struggles to achieve critical mass.

 Most concepts of collaboration are unfortunately very document and workspace centric. We tend to think of communication as something divorced from "joint work". We tend to think of communication as "not collaboration" even though communication is what often enables the cognitive context and situational awareness necessary for all participants to work jointly together over time and space. Secondly, there has been a tremendous focus on "process" lately in E2.0 circles.

Im Vortrag zum Thema “Wie viel Struktur benötigt ein Wiki? – Fallbeispiel wikibasiertes Intranet” wurden typische Fragen bei der Einrichtung von Wikisystemen beleuchtet und Herangehensweisen für die Strukturierung eines Intranetwikis aufgezeigt.

some do's, don'ts and also the grey areas ...

So. In summary. The Power of Pull is a masterful book, bringing together many disparate strands of thinking over the years, placing them in a grounded, measured manner within the context of the institution. It helps us move from the decreasing-returns transaction-costs hierarchical closed model of the enterprise to an increasing-returns abundance-economy networked and open model. It helps us understand the move from stocks to flows, how the boundaries of the firm must change as a result, what will happen to firms that don’t. How the right talent is attracted, how serendipitous value is created by that attraction and consequent spiking. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fconfusedofcalcutta.com%2F2010%2F04%2F25%2Fof-push-and-pull

Harold Jarche schreibt nicht nur programmatische Texte über das Trainings Department von morgen (z.B. hier). Eines seiner Steckenpferde ist Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) und hier versucht er sich an einem Modell, das Wissensarbeit in drei zentrale Bausteine zerlegt. Hinzu kommt etwas, das Jarche “enhanced serendipity” nennt

You might want to look at my 2008 coauthored article with Eisenman in the Administrative Science Quarterly. The results of our theory development case study suggest that the long-term waves detected by Barley and Kunda may be fashion trends resulting from the accumulation of shoter-term management fashions.

The emergent architecture approach is best summarized as "architect the lines, not the boxes, which means managing the connections between different parts of the business rather than the actual parts of the business themselves," Gartner says.

... "The traditional top-down style worked well when applied to complex, fixed functions -- that is, human artifacts, such as aircraft, ships, buildings, computers and even EA software," Robertson said. "However, it works poorly when applied to an equally wide variety of domains because they do not behave in a predictable way. The traditional approach ends up constraining the ability of an emergent domain to change because it is never possible to predict -- and architect for -- all the possible avenues of evolution."

some resources on the subject of Evolutionary Architecture and Emergent Design (which is closely related to refactoring, restructuring and reengineering).

With paper mind mapping it’s too easy to let go and simply focus on the core ideas of whatever it is your mind mapping.

With software mind mapping though, software vendors have given us all these bells and whistles that allow us to layout and design our mind maps. It’s quite distracting really. I know some software have brainstorming modes that allow you to quickly enter ideas, but I don’t think they go far enough.

To treat anything in a “taken-for-granted” way can, at worst, be terminal and, at best, stifle creativity and innovation. This is not a matter of trying to ‘do away with’ these assumptions or to ‘design them out’ in some way. They are a natural dynamic of organization - formed, reinforced and potentially changed through the ongoing conversational process of shared sense making. But it is important for managers to raise their awareness of the patterning process. And to take responsibility for their own contribution to the patterns that emerge, as role models (good or bad!) and 'organizational symbols'.

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.

Eclau members fall in two categories: “membres fixes” (”fixed” members, who have their own desk) and “membres volants” (”flying” members, who hotdesk). Some “flying” members are here very often, whereas some “fixed” members are seldom in the office — so it doesn’t really equate to “full-time” or “part-time”. Right now, I’d say we are running at about 50 percent capacity.

We don’t really have any drop-ins yet, but maybe the monthly eclau breakfasts will bring us some.

Employees invent work-arounds to clear hurdles such as poor user interfaces, broken business processes, and ill-informed business policies that exist in nearly every large organization. The use of public social media by ever growing numbers of people within companies can be attributed, in large part, to the effectiveness of those tools at helping employees work around barriers to productivity.

And that is why your business must adopt enterprise social software. Not because it provides a level of control over sensitive information, although it does do that. The real and compelling reason to deploy enterprise social software is because helps employees do their work.

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

“Selbstorganisation im Sinne der Selbststeuerung und der Selbstbestimmung ist eine Herausforderung, die eine ganze Reihe kognitiver Fähigkeiten, Vorwissen, Interesse, Wille und Strategien voraussetzt, die man sich erst einmal aneignen muss.” In diesem Zusammenhang ortet Reinmann auch die Gefahr, dass Lernen im Web 2.0 zu einem Elitekonzept werden könnte: Wer nämlich privilegiert ist und die Möglichkeiten hat, die personalen und situationalen Voraussetzungen für das Lernen zu schaffen, hat einen klaren Vorteil gegenüber anderen.

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.

tinkering as a way of knowing following a recent conference on the same topic. It is highly recommended reading:
“You can define tinkering in part in contrast to other activities. Mitch Resnick, for example, talks about how traditional technology-related planning is top-down, linear, structured, abstract, and rules-based, while tinkering is bottom-up, iterative, experimental, concrete, and object-oriented.”

Knowledges, Capacities and Learning for Development: Insights from Complexity approaches

Ich erlebe diese „unsichtbare Macht“ von Open Source bei fast allen Kunden, die ich treffe – überall gibt es Communities, deren Mitglieder sich ihrem Arbeitgeber gegenüber verpflichtet fühlen und die eigene Produktivität sowie die von Kollegen sehr ernst nehmen. Diese Communities lösen Probleme – innerhalb einzelner Unternehmen, aber auch branchenübergreifend – ohne dass die Einkaufsabteilung eingeschaltet wird (wobei Richtlinien in Bezug auf Datenschutz, geistiges Eigentum und Softwarelizenzen streng eingehalten werden). Sie tragen also zweifellos zur Wertschöpfung bei

while many companies have no shortage of innovative ideas, they face challenges bringing them to market in large part because predicting the ideal market for a truly novel idea is no easy task. The ideal approach we advocate is typically an emergent strategy, a process that allows flexibility and rapid learning around finding the right market without exhausting a company’s resources.

could be labeled as the demise of 'command and control' approaches to KM. This is sometimes referred to as the rise of 'emergent collaboration', which is linked to so-called 'Enterprise 2.0' web technologies

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.

mal beobachten

The guiding vision or values that had to be translated into tangible outcomes. This thinking has many overlaps with our developed framework of emergent innovation, especially with the concept of enabling spaces

In essence we are putting the raw nuts and bolts behind the concept of a social network in place to let the community find each other

Heute besteht die Notwendigkeit, Systeme zu bauen, die stören. Denn: Die Komplexität und Dynamik innerhalb eines Systems muss mindestens so groß sein wie die Komplexität und Dynamik am Markt

Methode für Grossgruppen: Open Space ist eine lebendige Konferenzmethode, bei der zu einem Rahmenthema bzw. einem Problem selbstgesteuert und selbstbestimmt Lösungsansätze erarbeitet sowie Veränderungsprozesse in Gang gesetzt und bewältigt werden.

This is what I felt when I was using del.icio.us with a lot of tags, as if del.icio.us database was a predictive market.

Folksonomy helps to enlighten patterns, IMHO, and common tags and their evolutions make trends visible.

Bohmte, a town in Germany, has abolished road signs in an effort to reduce accidents. Sounds a bit like a wiki-style approach to sharing the road, don't you think?

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

On simplicity driving adoption of social tools - great metaphor too - From an architectural standpoint, software that’s simple on day one, and highly extensible with plugins & extensions is at the heart of this principle because people can always begin

If you focus on giving people access, guidance, and motivation vs. rules, consequences, and quotas, they’ll deliver a stunning amount of success

a great overview of the state of understanding and research in and around complex social systems. I found this a good foundation for deeper digging, particularly understanding what happens in some of the social networks on the web as they scale

dass er auf Selbstorganisation statt Vernetzung mittels Sensorik setzte. Denn im Prinzip ist jeder Verkehrsteilnehmer bereits seine eigene Sensoreinheit. Die funktioniert offenbar dann besser, wenn sie nicht durch ausgeklügelte Verkehrsleitsysteme eingel

it's critical for leaders to be clear about when they're imposing structure and when they're letting it emerge. And considering SOA and Enterprise 2.0 to be somehow parallel philosophies, [...] is a great way to lose that clarity.

Transplanting those experiences inside the boundaries of the organization is no simple task. What works at the scale of the public internet may not generate sufficient momentum within the confines of a single organization.

Second, the organization is flexible. With a tool like MS project, a team will spend a lot of time creating a single hierarchy to govern project tasks. Then they are mostly stuck with it.

make the technology accessible and less restrictive. This leads to viral acceptance pattern.

Problems with folders and metadata – that’s a closed system, somebody else define the taxonomy. Theory of entropy proves itself when the closed system of folders and metadata goes into a complete chaotic mode.

The impact on a large company from using Blogs, RSS and Wikis is not significant when the real guts of the business is locked into legacy ERP, SCM and CRM systems. These companies were built to deliver mass produced products for mass markets, whereas the

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.

a knowledge strategy should be designed for emergence: it should both encourage and cope with unpredictable things happening ... So what should you (ideally people within the organisation with some guidance from people like me) examine in a knowledge envi

I believe that emergence is central in explaining the power, novelty, and potential of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0; it’s what keeps large repositories of digital content from becoming hard to navigate, analyze, and use.

talks about "collaborative intelligence," which enables teams to think and maneuver more adroitly

felix schwenzel .. hehe ... besonders faszinierend und das eigentliche erfolgsgeheimnis der ameisen: niemand trägt die alleinige verantwortung.

In der aktuellen Kompetenzdebatte fallen immer wieder die Begriffe “Komplexität” und “Selbstorganisation”.

A single ant or bee isn't smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots.

For a company looking to enter in the social computing domain, there are lessons we can learn from nature. The ability to harness social computing and mass collaboration requires opportunity but also individual assessment.