Dave Pollard's papers on business innovation & knowledge management

	Monday, October 19, 2009

Invitation to KMWorld 2009 I'm not sure whether, since I'm retiring soon, I'll be invited to present at Knowledge Management conferences from now on. So if you're able to make it to KMWorld 2009 in San Jose November 16-19 this year, I'd love to see you. I'm running a half-day workshop, Introducing Web 2.0 to Your Organization: A Practical Guide, on Monday, November 16. Then on Tuesday November 17 I'm doing a presentation on Risk Management: A KM Approach, as well as serving on a panel later in the day. The links above are to my Slideshare presentation decks for the workshop and presentation, which you can download if you want to assess whether they're worth attending. Always the best part of these conferences is the networking between the sessions, though. More on the conference here. Full brochure here. 11:16:59 PM  trackback []  comment []

	Thursday, October 15, 2009

Sustainable Work, Sustainable Life Earlier this month I wrote about the possibility of developing a Finding Your Sweet Spot Workbook to accompany my book Finding the Sweet Spot. I proposed a schema of nine types of what might be called Natural Work, that might help people hone in on their Gifts (what they're uniquely good at doing) and their Passions (what they love doing): Explorers, whose work is study and research, and whose work-product is discovery and insight Interpreters, whose work is mentoring and facilitation, and whose work-product is understanding Inventors, whose work is imagining, and whose work-product is ideas Designers, whose work is crafting, and whose work-product is models Generators, whose work is creating and building, and whose work-product is 'goods' and services Nurturers, whose work is cultivating, and whose work-product is well-being Menders, whose work is sustaining, and whose work-product is regeneration Actors, whose work is re-creating, and whose work-product is fun Connectors, whose work is distributing, and whose work-product is cross-pollination I also proposed to take the various published lists of 'green' jobs and jobs that meet real needs of the 21st century, and classify them into these nine categories, to help people identify their Purpose (what's needed in the world that they care about). Quite a few readers of the book have told me that, while they love the concept of the three circles and the Sweet Spot where they intersect, they have two practical problems using the model. First, they say that the exercises in the book to help them find their Gifts, Passions and Purpose don't 'work' for them -- they're too conceptual and require more self-knowledge and more knowledge of what the world needs than they, or the average person, can be expected to have. Second, they assert that most of what they think fits in their Sweet Spot (work that they love doing and are good at, and which meets a real need) is not 'valued' highly enough for them to make a decent living at it -- either it's something (art, literature, software, music, design etc.) that so many people do (or which is so easy to copy) that the market price for such work is nearly zero, or it's something (e.g. legitimate, practical health, mental health, and geriatric health products and services, and healthy, unpolluted foods) that their desperate customers are too poor to afford. As I thought of this, I began to realize two things that I should have noticed earlier: People learn (including learning what they love doing and are good at doing) by doing things, not by thinking or reading lists of ideas or types of jobs. The entire economy is shifting, fairly quickly and radically, from the unsustainable Industrial Economy to a post-industrial Natural Economy characterized by high prices for scarce materials and low prices for labour. [At a conference of financial forecasters I attended yesterday, I heard that this will be a long-term trend. That means lower prices (as in free) for non-commodities and services, and hence an increasing struggle for entrepreneurs (anyone who isn't subsidized by government handouts, payoffs and bailouts)]. Learning-by-doing is in fact how most Natural Entrepreneurs I know discovered their Sweet Spot. So, my workbook will be light on intellectual exercises (like thinking about what tasks in your life you've been most praised for, or most relished taking on) and heavy on real-life adventures (like going and observing and talking with the owner of a small, local business you admire, with a list of questions to talk with them about, or taking up a new hobby or volunteer role you've always wanted to do, or at least thought you did). My hope is that, just as my friends Paul and Grace had their aha! moment about their Sweet Spot (helping the world eat better) after they made an excursion to Tibet, encouraging people to just get out and try stuff they've never thought of doing, might help a lot of readers really discover their Gifts and Passions, those they might never have considered if they'd stayed inside the confines of their house and workplace. Another thing my Workbook will offer is a way to take some of the research activities discussed later in my book, and apply them earlier in the process of discovering your Purpose. Many people, I've discovered, don't see unmet needs that are staring them in the face and which offer wonderful entrepreneurial opportunities, because they don't know how to look for them, recognize them, research them and ask the right questions to surface them. As I explain in the book, you can't just ask people what they need, because usually they don't know. (I described a product much like an iPod to people in 1971 as part of my university thesis work, and respondents looked at me as if I were from Mars.) Surfacing needs that you can turn into entrepreneurial opportunities is an iterative, emergent process that comes from exploring and prompting and imagining possibilities with the people who will become your customers. The same thing applies to discovering your Purpose. You'll never discover it inside your own head, no matter how knowledgeable and imaginative you may be. So the workbook will take a much more externally-focused, conversational, research-based approach to finding your Purpose, and hence ultimately your Sweet Spot. The issue of how our economy is shifting, quietly but tectonically, from an Industrial Growth economy that rewards wealth, size, ruthlessness and political connections, to what I am calling a Natural Economy characterized by much lower prices (except for scarce resources), generosity, reciprocality, trust, modesty, responsiveness, responsibility, sustainability and the importance of relationships, is staggeringly important, and I'm kicking myself for not recognizing the signs of its emergence earlier. Chris Anderson's book Free demystifies the phenomenon that has delinked price from value and obsolesced hoarding of intellectual capital. The proportion of a car's 'dealer cost' attributable to labour is expected to plummet from 70% to 30% within a decade. Generation Y is justifiably complaining that their wages are subsistence with little hope of improvement, and the returns for fledgling entrepreneurs, no matter how lucky or bright, don't look much better to them. This is a world that no longer pays fair. Unions will wail. Overpaid executives and fat financial industry Ponzi-scheme artists, recently or soon to be laid off, will sell their sports cars and buy taxi licenses. And the poor, working long hours in multiple jobs for pathetic wages, will become even poorer. Not fair, but it's here to stay. Five billion people vying for jobs means labour supply is so much higher than demand that your work is worth next to nothing. What's good about this is that much of what we want and need now will also soon cost next to nothing. Your income will keep dropping, but so will a significant proportion of your costs of living. It's called deflation, and while it's currently being hidden from consumers by price-gouging corporatist oligopolies who are stealing the labour savings as obscene profits and more obscene bonuses, it's only a matter of time before wage-earners run out of money and stop buying products with outrageous markups, opening the way for new providers who will disintermediate the corporatists and offer their products and services for next to nothing. For a short while these may well be Chinese providers, but as oil and commodity and resultant transportation costs soar, the providers will ultimately be mostly your neighbours. We are headed for a relocalized, community-based Gift Economy, with low prices for most things, and low wages. Such an economy will not respond to advertising or hype. It will be based on trust, generosity and reciprocity, and those who try to exploit it will be quickly identified and ostracized. It's already begun, as Chris' book explains. Just as Generation Y has blurred the distinction between work and non-work activities, they are learning that sustainable work is inseparable from a sustainable life. With that worldview, the Sweet Spot no longer identifies just the work you're meant to do, it identifies the way you're meant to live. So, instead of complaining that the work in their Sweet Spot (what they love to do, and are good at doing, that meets a real need in the world) doesn't pay enough, Generation Y is beginning to look at how much they need to earn to do what is in their Sweet Spot, essentially turning my whole model on its head. Some retirees with inadequate pensions are doing the same thing. They are looking not only to find work that is sustainable, responsible and joyful, but to find a way of life that is sustainable, responsible and joyful, of which work is an indistiguishable part. This is part of what Thomas Princen calls The Logic of Sufficiency, and some of us now get it, and a lot more will soon have no choice but to follow. My workbook then, will not just help readers discover the work that is in their Sweet Spot, but help them to determine how much they need to earn, and what they need to do in their non-work lives, to "afford" that work. It will explore, for example, the paradox that often an extra dollar of income can actually 'cost' (in taxes, higher clothing, transportation, child-care, late night fast-food meals, etc.) more than a dollar, and that conversely accepting a lower income can actually increase both your quality of life and your net wealth. The workbook will be, in short, not only a more practical guide to discovering how we can discover the work we're meant to do; it will be a guide to discovering the life we're meant to live. Category: Finding and Creating Meaningful Work 11:33:27 PM  trackback []  comment []

	Friday, October 9, 2009

Intention to Practice A couple of years ago I posted some mid-year and year-end "intentions", to distinguish them from "resolutions". Intentions are not aspirations; they are things we are in the process of doing, achieving, or becoming. They are what we're meant to do, and who we're meant to be. We have already begun to realize them. They are, as the word's etymology implies, what we are "stretching towards". I later shifted from intentions that are results-oriented (goals) to intentions that are process-oriented (practices), because I realized that all of the things that are worth doing for a lifetime are complex, and can never really be completed. There is no mastery, there is only the practice. More recently, I described the importance of aligning our long-term intentions (what we are meant to do and be for what's left of our lives) and our short-term intentions (what we are meant to do and be right now, today, this week). Until they are aligned, we will continue to live in this unreal space, in the knowing/doing disconnect -- we know we should be doing X (we are good at it, we love doing it, and it is needed in the world), but we keep on doing Y. We do Y because it is urgent, because it is easy, because it is fun, or because we don't think we have any choice. Things are the way they are for a reason, and until we understand what that reason is, we will not be able to change it, or adapt ourselves to it. We will keep on doing Y, and X will never get done. If our long-term intentions are X-stuff, then when we identify short-term intentions that are also X-stuff, that are "stretching toward" the same place, we will see starkly the disconnect between it and the Y-stuff we're actually doing. Something then has to shift. Either we stop doing (some of) the Y-stuff to make time and space for the X-stuff, or we acknowledge that we don't actually intend to do X at all. We're merely dreaming about it, or hoping it will happen magically. Recipe for unhappiness, self-dissatisfaction and a life wasted. If we were able to hear our future obituary, and it was all Y-stuff, would we see it as a life well-spent? And if not, what's holding us back from doing the X-stuff? And if it's lack of time or money holding us back, are we really intending to do X? Example: One of my long-term intentions is to create working models of a better way to live and make a living. I've written a book about how to create sustainable, responsible enterprises. I'm working on a novel/screenplay that depicts what life in a sustainable world 200 years from now might look like, to help us imagine possibilities. Right now I have James Kunstler's book World Made by Hand sitting beside me -- airplane reading as I make my way to visit my father for the Thanksgiving weekend. In this, my long-term and short-term intentions are aligned. Second example: Another of my long-term intentions is to work with others to stop the Alberta Tar Sands. I have a book, Andrew Nikiforuk's Tar Sands sitting beside Kunstler's, but beyond the vague idea of some kind of Open Space event, to brainstorm with others creative ways to disrupt and close down this ecological nightmare, I have no short-term intention stretching towards that longer-term one. Worse, I'm anxious about the longer-term intention: I have no passion for this kind of work (though I have great passion for helping others do it), and I know people whose lives have been devastated as a result of having been arrested, for nothing. No question this is holding me back, and that my intentions in this area, if that's what they are, are out of alignment. This brings me back to practices. It occurs to me that, when I retire (soon), I will be best able to align and stretch toward both my short-term and long-term intentions by allocating specific time blocks to three kinds of practices every day (though I recognize I'll have to be flexible on the times): (a) Reconnecting practices, (b) Capacity-building, activism and model-building practices, and (c) Reflecting practices. Or, put more simply, sensing (mornings), doing (afternoons) and thinking and playing (evenings). Starting with these three blocks of time, I developed the chart below that shows my long-term intentions, the long-term practices that "stretch toward" those intentions, and the short-term, daily intentions (exercises) in alignment with the longer-term ones. The long-term practices tie into the nine steps in my What You Can Do graphic above, and the colour (red, yellow, green) is from my 'scorecard' and shows how much work I have to do on each. Long-Term Intention Long-Term Practices Short-Term Intentions (Exercises & Projects) Hrs/day now Hrs/day intended Reconnecting with All Life on Earth, Instincts & Emotions Appreciation (1)  Presence/Paying Attention (2) Heart-Opening/Letting Go (3) 10am to 1pm: personal/group - Forest/ocean walks - Presencing exercises - Gratitude exercises - 'Breathing through' meditation 0 3.0 Increasing Capacity & Competency (Personal and Collective) Understanding How the World Works (4) Capacity-Building (6)  2pm-6pm: learning/exploring: - presentation/conversation skills - demonstration skills - creative writing exercises - SSUQIOC exercises - balance and empathy practices 1.0 1.0 Dismantling Civilization Activism (7)  2pm-6pm: - Open Space: Stopping the Tar Sands - Open Space: Ending Factory Farms 0 1.5 Creating Models of a Better Way to Live and Make a Living Model-Building (8)  2pm-6pm: - novel: The Only Life We Know - film: Earth 2200: A Travelogue - workbook: Finding Your Sweet Spot - unschooling: personal practice guide 0.5 1.5 Joy, Understanding Self-Knowing (5) Being Myself (9) 8pm-12pm: - reflection/questioning exercises - blogging - play: drawing, photography, with animals (original play) 3.5 4.0 (activities not directly related to any of my intentions -- my Y-stuff) other hours: - self-care (sleep, exercise etc.) - networking; serendipitous reading - self-management (gardening etc.)  19.0 13.0 What I discovered in putting this chart together was that (a) many of the things I do today, things which take up most of my day, really don't contribute at all to my intentions, and (b) when I reallocated time in my day to these three blocks of time (right column), it required a lot of thought, imagination and work to come up with a list of short-term intentions (exercises and projects) with which to usefully fill that time -- exercises and projects that would stretch toward the long-term intentions. And even with retirement, I suspect "freeing up" six additional hours a day for intentional work will be a challenge -- it will mean less time on e-mail and casual reading, for example (i.e. getting away more often from this computer). The third column of this chart is new and tentative and incomplete, but it's also for me a personal breakthrough. I am not sure whether this is the solution, for me, to the knowing/doing disconnect and the tyranny of the urgent over the important -- the real formula for Getting Things Done. But I intend it to be. With practice. Category: Getting Things Done 9:18:48 PM  trackback []  comment []

	Sunday, October 4, 2009

A 'Finding the Sweet Spot' Workbook? Since my book Finding the Sweet Spot was published, I've been thinking about how to make it more useful. I did set up a companion website, but I was far too ambitious in its design, and was naive in the expectation that people could/would actually compare ideas, Gifts, Passions and Purposes with others online, and that there would be anough traffic on the site to create a self-organized 'market' of ideas and potential partners. Lately I've wondered whether it might be possible to create an online workbook to accompany the book, one that would include exercises to discover your Gifts, Passions and Purpose, and find the Sweet Spot at their intersection. Rather than starting with the industrial classifications, the way most career counselling guides do, I thought it might be more appropriate to start with the types of activities that go on in a Natural Economy and Natural Society. My first attempt to delineate these (which was part of the research for my novel) is illustrated above. Nine "meta-careers" are identified: Explorers, whose work is study and research, and whose work-product is discovery and insight Interpreters, whose work is mentoring and facilitation, and whose work-product is understanding Inventors, whose work is imagining, and whose work-product is ideas Designers, whose work is crafting, and whose work-product is models Generators, whose work is creating and building, and whose work-product is 'goods' and services Nurturers, whose work is cultivating, and whose work-product is well-being Menders, whose work is sustaining, and whose work-product is regeneration Actors, whose work is re-creating, and whose work-product is fun Connectors, whose work is distributing, and whose work-product is cross-pollination I developed this framework in the context of essential work of a post-civilization society. These are all things that are needed in a community, and which we offer to others (because no individual is self-sufficient), to make the community self-sufficient. They cut across all of the modern, specialized 'disciplines' that have become our modern economy's strait-jacket: we think of disciplines like 'sales representative' or 'engineer' or 'musician' or 'athlete' as the only way collective effort can be divvied up and parsed, because it is the only way we have ever seen work categorized. So, for example, the work of a scientist can entail all nine of the work categories listed above, as can the work of an artist or a programmer. My belief is that our natural affinity is more for one or a few of these nine work categories, than it is to a modern 'specialty': People who are good at designing could be as useful designing shirts as designing recipes. People who are good at mending people (e.g. doctors) could be as useful and passionate about mending trains (e.g. mechanics). So I think it might be useful to think about what we are meant to do using these nine meta-ways of being of use, that draw on similar natural Gifts and similar Passions. In thinking about my own Sweet Spot, I generally identify "reflecting" and "imagining possibilities" (category 3 activities) and "writing" (a category 4 activity) as being what I'm meant to do. I am passionate but not especially gifted at facilitation, conversing and demonstrating (category 2 and 9 activities). I am competent but not especially passionate about research (category1 activity). And I am neither competent nor passionate about category 5-8 work, though I recognize their great value and would not start an enterprise that didn't have partners who were both gifted and passionate about such work. When I look at wild creatures, I see evidence of learning and practice of all nine of these categories of essential work. The need for us to be social, to associate and collaborate and, together, to do all nine types of work effectively, transcends history, geography and species. Another thing I like about this categorization of essential work is that it demonstrates the uselessness of a lot of the work that is being done today by millions of highly-paid people, and hence might give pause to young people drawn to these 'professions' simply because they're easy and lucrative. Lawyers, stock-brokers and insurance agents come to mind, for example. None of these professions produce anything of essential value. They are parasites of the current, unsustainable and dysfunctional industrial economy. The post-civilization world will not need anyone to do these things. So if I were to develop a Finding the Sweet Spot workbook, to help people discover the work they're meant to do, I would be strongly tempted to use this nine-category classification of essential work as the basis for doing so, and to re-cast the exercises about discovering your Gifts, your Passions, your Purpose and your Partners (those with complementary Gifts who share your Purpose) accordingly. So, for example, in listing the dozens of possible and needed 'green' careers in Roberts and Brandum's book Get a Life! I would reorganize them into the nine categories above. I'd welcome your thoughts on this plan. Is this way of discovering what you're meant to do too conceptual for most people? Does it require a degree of self-knowledge and the workings of an economy (Natural or Industrial) that is beyond most people's capabilities? Is it counter-intuitive? Although the book has not been a popular success, I still think it could be very valuable to young people about to embark on their careers, boomers about to 'retire' from their first careers, and frustrated and underemployed workers of all ages. I'm just trying to figure out how to make it accessible and useful enough that it gets the attention it deserves. Category: Finding and Creating Meaningful Work 11:38:50 PM  trackback []  comment []

	Sunday, August 23, 2009

Resilience is Futile (Adapt and Improvise Instead) I've been using the word resilience to describe the capacity -- of individuals, communities and organizations -- to improvise, to respond well in the moment. But I think resilience is the wrong word -- it is from the Latin meaning "springing back". Humans try to be resilient, acting as if everything is temporary, or cyclical, and as if it will always eventually possible to go back to the way things were before a challenge arose. That's why so many of us live in misery, in false hope. While we aspire to move back to the way things once were -- after the desertification, after the forests and fish have gone -- the rest of all-life-on-Earth is moving on, forward. What we try to do instead of adapting to the changes in our environment, is to try to change the environment to suit us. We've become very good at this, but it's unsustainable. What we've created in human-made environments is fragile, shabby, and ineffective. Much of human employment today is fixing all the human-made things that constantly break, and break down. Much future employment will be cleaning up the mess we've created with the human-made, non-biodegradable broken stuff we've thrown away. We try to be resilient, and to force changes in our environment, because, after learning that our cultural "software" can adapt very quickly (in as little as a generation), we discovered too late that our biological "hardware" adapts over millions of years, not decades. Today we're racked with epidemic rates of diseases of maladaptation -- notably immune system diseases, cancers, and mental illnesses. Our bodies just can't adapt to stress, the malnutrition of the modern processed monoculture food system, and the toxins in our air, water, soils and foods. They're still designed for life in the uncrowded, abundant and unpolluted rainforest. Alas, there's nothing we can do about our bodies, nor is there anything sustainable we can do to our environment. Resilience is, in fact, futile -- we cannot expect things to change back to what they were so that we can bounce back to what we were. And in Darwin's sense we cannot evolve either -- at best we can unschool our descendants to acquire the capacities that we lost, or never had -- like the ones depicted in the charts above. We're probably too late, those of us over 30, to learn them all effectively ourselves now. What we can do, however, is adapt and improvise. Evolution and adaptation are not about springing back, but rather springing forward. Evolution is from the Latin meaning "rolling out", but it is worth noting that Darwin avoided the term he is now so associated with, and instead in his books used the term "descent with  modification" (descent in the sense of 'descendants' -- change only occurred with the passing of genes 'down' from one generation to the next). Adaptation comes from the Latin meaning "fitting in" (hence to Darwin "survival of the fittest" was not about strength or intelligence but about adaptability). Improvisation comes from the Latin meaning "[responding to the] unexpected". These are the only effective responses to change in complex systems. Wild creatures have this ability to adapt and improvise: to fight, to flee, to change what they eat, where they live, what they do. They migrate, they hibernate, they adapt to different foods, neighbours and environments, as well as changes to members of their own community. Evolution helps them do this, by selectively favouring that capacity -- those that can't adapt and improvise, perish. So how do we, poor maladaptive and conservative creatures that we are, learn to adapt ("fit in") and improvise ("respond to the unexpected"), and can we help our communities and organizations do so as well? Last week I visited with one of the most adaptive and improvisational organizations I know, one that I profile in my book, called Mountain Equipment Co-op. It's a true one-person-one-vote cooperative, that began with 6 members and which now has millions. Only a tiny proportion actually participate in MEC's decisions, but it's enough to know that if they started doing things the members didn't like, that could change very quickly. They generate only enough 'profit' to cushion them through economic downturns -- any other surplus is returned as a cash refund to members based on their annual purchases. The people I've met like working there, and they really do care about being of service, offering excellent products (made in Canada whenever possible), and doing excellent work. As I spoke with and visited them it occurred to me that, compared to other, profit-for-shareholders companies that sell sporting goods, MEC is culturally more adaptive and resilient in 18 ways: Less dependence on growth: they would thrive in a steady-state economy, because there are no external shareholders looking for revenue growth and 'share appreciation' (each member gets one voting share, which is always worth $5) Fewer levels of hierarchy to connect and move: MEC is a very flat organization, so when something needs to be changed, everyone knows and everyone works on it More distributed decision making: customer-facing workers have the authority to satisfy customers and improve processes without having to go through approval policies Built-in job/supply redundancy: less efficient but more effective: you never hear "that's not my department" at MEC; their people know a lot about everything in the store, so if someone's away there's someone else who knows what they do, and so people get variety in their work and a chance to learn what others do; and if a supplier fails or is unable to meet demand, there's another available to take up the slack Less debt: big corporations take on debt to provide leverage that allows profits to rise faster than revenues (and exposes them to commensurate drops); MEC is not in the business to make profits, so it doesn't acquire needless debts More autonomy in decisions: less dependence on outside investors; the members own the company, and no outsiders have a say in what gets done, or doesn't get done Less need to create demand: MEC responds to real customer demands, rather than advertising and marketing to create artificial ones More connected to members/customers/suppliers: you'll find MEC people on the slopes, on bike excursions, and in campgrounds, where customers show them what they need and they show customers what they have to offer More connected to community: MEC invests extensively in community activities, because it makes sense to do so; for example, a percentage of sales from bike products go for advocacy for more bicycle lanes and facilities in the cities the company is located in Less vulnerable to downturns: when sales drop, the refund to members drops, but everything else continues Less dependent on government largesse: MEC needs no big corporate subsidies or bailouts like the auto makers, the banks, the steel companies, the energy companies, the agribusiness industry, and all the other big, unadaptable, unimprovising profit-for-shareholder giants feeding at the government trough More diverse people: MEC has one of the youngest and most diverse workforces I've seen More collaborative, less competitive: the people I saw there work in teams and are always talking and consulting with each other More "safe-fail" innovation: they test a lot of products with small customer groups first, so they can, as Dave Snowden puts it, "safe-fail" instead of having new products be "fail-safe" More socially responsive and responsible: MEC's decision to pull its popular bisphenol-A laden polycarbonite Nalgene water bottles off the shelves shook the Canadian government and the industry into reviewing all the toxins in plastic containers; they did it without fanfare, and they did it because the members told them it was the right thing to do Less vulnerable to disruptive innovations: the company is so close to its members, who have their pulse on what's happening, what's new and what's needed in their industry, they're unlikely to be caught off guard by competing innovations More risk-adapting than risk-mitigating: big corporations try to mitigate risks by playing it safe with new products, by selling a wide range of different quality products at different prices, by offshoring etc.; MEC constantly monitors what's in demand and what isn't and uses lower more frequent order quantities to adapt to changes, even though this means not taking advantage of volume discounts Better reputation: the company's products are not cheap, since they insist on quality, and they are astonishingly candid (their blog confesses that it's a constant struggle to manufacture in Canada because if manufacturing plants pay generous wages to assemblers and sewers, customers complain that the product prices -- and remember these have no profit margin -- are unaffordable) Here are 10 other things that organizations can do to be adaptive and improvisational, that I've seen some Natural Enterprises (especially cooperatives) do (I don't know whether MEC does any of these, but it would be interesting to find out): Contingency planning: be aware of and assess the risks and sensitivities of the organization, and discuss with everyone what you would do if and when these issues arose Scenario planning: imagine the longer-term scenarios that the organization might face, and explore strategies that will work under multiple scenarios or which can be implemented as soon as there is evidence an unexpected scenario is beginning to come to pass Simulations: run computer or "table-top" simulations or organization-wide "practice runs" that can help you imagine and anticipate unexpected occurrences ($200/barrel oil, 10% inflation or 4% deflation, a collapse in the $US), their impact on your customers and employees and hence on your organization, and how you might respond to them Analyze narrow escapes: the swine flu was, fortunately, not virulent, but studying it can help you understand what would happen if it has been, and what to do if the next one is; what other narrow escapes have you had that you can learn from? Recruit emotional intelligence: find people who have the ability to live comfortably with ambiguity and anxiety, and who know how to achieve consensus and resolve conflicts amicably Study nature's improvisational ability: have someone in your organization who understands how natural ecosystems work and how to use biomimicry to advantage in your organization Stay ahead of the curve: understand and constantly reassess what differentiates you from other organizations in your industry; never stop innovating your processes, products and tools Self-manage: encourage everyone in the organization to self-assess their "sweet spot" (what they do well for the organization that they love doing and which meets a need they care about), their intentions, and their own performance and success on their own terms, and share that candidly with others Early-warning pattern-recognition: encourage your people to be constantly thinking about "what might come next", and what the early indicators of each major change might be; track those early indicators  Manage "on principle": since decisions aren't made on the basis of "maximizing shareholder value", what are the principles that guide you instead when you have to make quick decisions in response to changing circumstances? So much for organizations wanting to be adaptable and improvisational. What about communities and individuals? Communities (small towns, villages, intentional communities and neighbourhoods within cities) are a form of co-operative organization, the only difference being that they have a wider and more essential set of products and services, and have members instead of customers. But many the same principles of adaptation and improvision apply: autonomy, steady-state, diversity, built-in redundancy, non-indebtedness, collaboration, non-hierarchical connection, risk awareness, self-management "on principle", emotional intelligence, biomimicry, contingency planning (including scenarios and simulations), candour and responsiveness. The town I live in tries hard, but they're zero for fourteen on these measures. Individuals are of course part of communities and organizations, but there are also some things we can each do as individuals to be more adaptive and improvisational in our lives: be autonomous (not dependent on those outside your community), live within your means (a life of sufficiency and comfort, not one dependent on tomorrow's income being more than today's), get debt-free, self-manage, build emotional intelligence and other personal capacity, collaborate, plan for contingencies, always be honest, stay healthy, be good to yourself, and be open, attentive and responsive. Whew. That's enough lists for a lifetime. Category: Complexity and Discovery 11:54:11 PM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2009 Dave Pollard. Last update: 10/19/09; 11:17:16 PM.