A
synopsis of a recent breakfast meeting with Dave Snowden, head of the
Cynefin Centre and thought leader on complex systems and narrative and
their application in business.
Last week I attended a breakfast
presentation by Dave Snowden
of the Cynefin Centre in Toronto. He provided us with an entertaining
recounting of his disenchantment with traditional consulting and his
realization why most of what management and experts and consultants try
to do in organizations has no significant, durable impact whatsoever.
As he described his learnings and discoveries about complex adaptive
systems and how pervasive they are in our business and personal lives,
I began to realize that appreciating
enterprises, organizations and systems as (mostly) complex rather than
merely complicated is more than just a basis for re-framing business
methodologies, it is a completely different way of sensing and dealing
with the world. It changes everything. Here are just a few of the extraordinary paradigm shifts that this reframing provokes:
Complicated World
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Complex World
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Assumption of order ("research this to find out if there's a market for it"
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Realization of unorder ("let's explore what might happen if we did this")
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Importance of aggressiveness and charisma to "lead the change"
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Importance of collaboration and humility to participate in the evolution
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Actions driven by authority-based direction
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Actions based on learnings from conversations, consensus and freedom to act bounded by personal responsibility
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Top-down hierarchical communication and knowledge transfer
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Peer-to-peer (networked) communication and knowledge transfer |
Military win/lose competitiveness
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Natural win/win cooperation and coexistence
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Emphasis on action (making decisions quickly and 'expertly')
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Emphasis on paying attention (making decisions continuously, improvisationally)
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Assumption of rational choice ("tell people why they should buy X")
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Realization of entrained behaviour ("study people to discover if they might buy X")
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Primacy of objective reality ("what's happening here")
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Primacy of perception ("what do people think is happening here")
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Changing the way things are
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Understanding why things are the way they are
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Assumption of intention ("why did this happen")
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Realization of meaning ("what do we learn from this")
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Assess causality
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Look for pattern and correlation
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Focus
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Experiment
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Leadership is everything
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Membership is everything
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Strive for stability
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Strive for resilience
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Exploit weaknesses, opportunities, needs via speed-to-market
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Explore weaknesses, opportunities, needs via continuous environmental scan
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| Mechanistic (machine) models of behaviour, relationship, order, connection |
Organic (natural) models of behaviour, relationship, order, connection |
How do we solve the problem
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How do we deal with the situation
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Set "go-to-market" mission, objectives, strategies, actions
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Understand the market and actors' identities and influence the attractors and barriers that bring the market to you
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Market as rational
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Market as emotional
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Here are some of the highlights (to me) of his presentation:
- Innovation today is driven by networkers, not by scientists or marketers
- Networks are only as good as their perceived trustworthiness, reciprocity and quality (personal value of contacts)
- 'Edge Cultures' like Singapore, New Zealand and Canada are
using the networked economy to become highly innovative, both because
they can and because they must
- Management science is finally getting more like real
science, through the use of complex adaptive systems theory, cognitive
science, and anthropology etc.
- Taylor's mechanistic view of organizations and markets
dominated management science for a century, and was still evident
recently in the passion for business process reengineering
- Senge et al (learning organization, systems dynamics)
challenged the mechanistic aspects but not the hierarchical aspects of
Taylorism (people were still expected to align themselves to the
strategy, not the other way around); DNA and information ecology
metaphors were first used by this group
<>Then knowledge management challenge the Taylorist model
further (saying people can't be 'reengineered'), but too much of the
initial KM focus was on the futile effort to make tacit knowledge
explicit ("expecting you to learn how to ride a bicycle by reading the
manual"), and because codifying knowledge erases most of its context
("You can teach in three days what it takes three years to write in a
book" (and the context-rich hands-on teaching is more effective)- KM
began to realize that informal networks are far more important than the
ones on the organization chart, and to realize that the most innovative
people are under 25 (few preconceptions on how things should be done)
and over 45 (time and perspective to become aware of alternatives)
- Narratives (stories) are the only effective mechanism for
translating concrete (hands-on) knowledge into abstract (codifiable)
form, and are also very motivating (e.g. power of myths)
- KM has recently spawned a new discipline Narrative Inquiry
to understand through large collections of anecdotes the true nature of
the market (they catch 'weak signals' that questionnaires and focus
groups etc. miss)
- KM has also spawned a new surge in Non-Hypothesis Based
Research, where direct observation with no preconception is used (a
form of anthropology) to acquire learnings
- There is an increasing awareness that dominant companies
lose their position because their cultural filters blind them to much
real knowledge, as happened to IBM when they passed up early adoption
of the PC and the innovations that led to Sun's and Microsoft's
successes (this is entirely consistent with Lakoff's and Lappe's
framing theories, except it is applied to organizations and management
rather than to individuals)
- This use of narrative-based, Non-Hypothesis Based Research
actually costs less than traditional analytical hypothesis-testing
methods, and produces far more innovation opportunities
- Such research can be made even more powerful by the use of
Alternative Simulations, a technique that involves asking people to
imagine what would have resulted if something happened in history that
didn't really happen, and which allows preconceptions and blind spots
to be overcome, so participants can begin to 'think ahead' from the
patterns found in the true anecdotes that come out of Non-Hypothesis
Based Research
- Such thinking is needed to deal with what Dave calls the
impending "demographic time bomb" (far too few companies are thinking
ahead to the needs of a much older market population)
- There is a big difference between creativity and innovation
-- the latter requires starvation because it entails risk and
unorthodox thinking that are rarely tolerated until there is no
alternative (this is consistent with Christensen's observations about
disruptive innovations, which I wrote about on Wednesday)
- The adoption of complex adaptive systems theory seems to be
currently strongest in the pharma, telecom, defence and banking
industries
- The current focus of this theory is on what Dave calls
ABIDE: Attractors, Boundaries, Identities, Dissent, and Environment;
its objective is to get executives thinking about how to have an impact
on complex systems by changing attractors (the people, groups,
qualities and benefits that attract stakeholders) and removing or
changing barriers (the conditions that impede or inhibit stakeholders)
in stakeholders' various personal identities, rather than focusing on
traditional 'complicated' systems approaches like missions, strategies
and objective-setting
Dave uses this story to illustrate why ABIDE works better than traditional approaches in complex situations::
Imagine organising a birthday
party for a group of young children. Would you agree a set of learning
objectives with their parents in advance of the party? Would you create
a project plan for the party with clear milestones and empirical
measures of achievement? Would you start the party with a motivational
video or use PowerPoint slides? No, instead like most parents you would
create barriers to prevent certain types of behaviours ("the bedrooms
are off-limits"), you would use attractors (party games, toys, videos)
to encourage the formation of beneficial, largely self-forming
identities; you would disrupt negative patterns early to prevent the
party becoming chaotic or necessitating the draconian imposition of
authority. At the end of the party you would know whether it had been a
success, but you could not define (in other than the most general
terms) what that success would look like in advance.
If you think the example is unfair because it refers to children, just
substitute 'cocktail party' for 'children's party'. The point is that
we see a complex situation as a merely complicated one, we form an
exaggerated sense of our understanding of the system and what could
happen, our knowledge of all the variables and their causal
relationships, and our control over the situation, and so our behaviour
doesn't 'make sense', sometimes with terrible consequences. In every
situation there are attractors and barriers over which we have some
control and many others over which we have none. So rather than being
presumptuous, making inaccurate assumptions and setting naive
objectives, we should focus on the attractors and barriers we have some
control of, pay attention to
what's happening, what's possible and what's needed, and improvise
sensibly to optimize the situation. As in the party example above, we
often have a lot more control over the initial conditions than we have over eventual outcomes, and we should use that to advantage.
I hope to be able to write about some specific business applications of
this approach soon, and I suspect it will play an important role in the
design and operation of AHA! The Discovery and Learning Centre.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
