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What If Everything Ran Like the Internet?

May 27, 2013 By Collaboration, Leadership, Learning, Organization, Philanthropy One Comment

Inspired post by Dave Pollard today on  the challenge of scale and the confusion of control.  Complicated systems require few connections in order to be manageable:

It is because business and government systems are wedded to the orthodoxy of hierarchy that as they become larger and larger (which such systems tend to do) they become more and more dysfunctional. Simply put, complicated hierarchical systems don’t scale. That is why we have runaway bureaucracy, governments that everyone hates, and the massive, bloated and inept Department of Homeland Security.

But, you say, what about “economies of scale”? Why are we constantly merging municipalities and countries and corporations together into larger and ever-more-efficient megaliths? Why is the mantra of business “bigger is better”?

The simple answer is that there are no economies of scale. In fact, there are inherent diseconomies of scale in complicated systems. When you double the number of nodes (people, departments, companies, locations or whatever) in a complicated system you quadruple the number of connections between them that have to be managed. And each “connection” between people in an organization has a number of ‘costly’ attributes: information exchange (“know-what”), training (“know-how”), relationships (“know-who”), collaboration/coordination, and decision-making. That is why large corporations have to establish command-and-control structures that discourage or prohibit connection between people working at the same level of the hierarchy, and between people working in different departments.

Why do we continue to believe such economies of scale exist? The illustration above shows what appears to happen when an organization becomes a hierarchy. In the top drawing, two 5-person organizations with 10 people between them have a total of 20 connections between them. But if they go hierarchical, the total number of connections to be ‘managed’ drops from 20 to 8. Similarly, a 10-person co-op has a total of 45 connections to ‘manage’, but if it goes hierarchical, this number drops to just 9.

This is clearly ‘efficient’, but it is highly ineffective. The drop in connections means less exchange of useful information peer-to-peer and cross-department, less peer and cross-functional learning, less knowledge of who does what well, less trust, less collaboration, less informed decision-making, less creative improvisation, and, as the number of layers in the hierarchy increases, more chance of communication errors and gaps.

But, what about complex systems?

So back to the purpose of this post, to answer these questions: 1. What is it about the ‘organization’ of the Internet that has allowed it to thrive despite its massive size and lack of hierarchy? And: 2. What if we allowed everything to be run as a ‘wirearchy’?

To answer the first question, the Internet is a “world of ends“, where the important things happen at the edges – and everything is an edge. “The Internet isn’t a thing, it’s an agreement”. And that agreement is constantly being renegotiated peer-to-peer along the edges. If you look at the diagram above of the co-op with the 45 connections, you’ll notice that the nodes are all at the circumference – around the edges. There is no ‘centre’, no ‘top’. And the reason the organization isn’t weighed down by all those connections is that they’re self-managed, not hierarchically managed. The work of identifying which relationships and connections to build and grow and maintain is dispersed to the nodes themselves – and they’re the ones who know which ones to focus on. That’s why the Internet can be so massive, and get infinitely larger, without falling apart. No one is in control; no one needs to hold it together. It’s a model of complexity. And, like nature, like an ecosystem, it is much more resilient than a complicated system, more effective, and boundary-less. And, like nature, that resilience and effectiveness comes at a price – it is less ‘efficient’ than a complicated system, full of redundancy and evolution and failure and learning. But that’s exactly why it works.

via What If Everything Ran Like the Internet? « how to save the world.

Time and creativity

May 26, 2013 By Collaboration, Flow, Improv One Comment

Nice little video which demonstrates factors which enable creativity and those which impede it.

Teaching the five Cynefin domains using physical exercises

May 21, 2013 By Art of Hosting, Emergence, Facilitation, Learning 2 Comments

 

Here at the Art of Hosting in Chicago working with 70 people fromthe restorative justice field and the early childhood education world.  Inspired by a design from Tenneson Woolf and an invitation from Teresa Posakony, my new friend Anamaria Accove and I hosted a lovely exploration of the Cynefin framework using movement and physical embodiment to help people understand the difference between the domains.  The exercise went this way:

We taped the framwork on the floor, which is the standard way I teach it.  Before we talked about it at all, we invited the group to divide into four groups and follow our instructions.

The first exercise was a simple challenge: to arrange the group by height.  There were different ways this was accomplished but everyone settled on a linear shape with the tallest at one end and the shortest at the other.

The second exercise was for people to arrange themselves by age and year of birth.  A complicated problem for sure, and there was a variety of good solutions that emerged.  Of course in order to do this you need a little analysis, both of the data and a good model fro representing it.  But having arranged themselves, each selection was accurate and useful.

In the third exercise we asked people to arrange themselves by place of origin.  This wasn’t a particularly complex task, but it did result in an experience of emergence.  Again it required conversation, story telling and some meaning making (like, from my mother’s womb?  From my hometown? From the place I left this morning?).  What emerged were several interesting ways of representing the data, but we honed in on one of the two maps.  By asking one or two people where they originated from we were able to predict where the rest of group was from with startling accuracy.  What emerged was a map of the United States that came with its own information and data.

For the fourth exercise we asked people to arrange themselves like five year old children at a birthday party right after the cake had been eaten.  Utter chaos.

Finally we posed a question from the realm of disorder.  We asked the group to arrange themselves by temperature.  “What?”  This really helped to show that disorder was not the same as chaos.  Disorder invites us to lean in and figure out what is going on before we see if this is a simple or complex task. In that sense it is the opposite of chaos, in that disorder itself is a container.  This is such an important domain to understand and to understand especially how we default to assuming how to solve problems without first defining the scope of what we are looking at.

After running this exercise we taught the Cynefin framework but naming the domains, explaining the cause and effect relationships and explaining the decision making schemes for each domain.  Many people reported that they understood it at a deeper and more practical level and especially in the domain of disorder which gets a short shrift in the wider world.  Folks that were familiar with the framework but who had not groked the concept of disorder got it this time!  That is partly down to me learning how to teach it better as well, by characterizing the disorder domain as one that present problems that stop us in our tracks and force us to say “WTF?”  WTF has now been translated by the group in this context as “Where’s the Family?” which is actually a pretty good strategy for dealing with disorder!

 

 

 

 

Why Managers Haven’t Embraced Complexity

May 19, 2013 By Emergence, Leadership, Organization 2 Comments

Richard Straub writes in the Harvard Business Review, on a great piece about what stops managers from adopting complexity views:

Complexity wasnt a convenient reality given managers desire for control. The promise of applying complexity science to business has undoubtedly been held up by managers reluctance to see the world as it is. Where complexity exists, managers have always created models and mechanisms that wish it away. It is much easier to make decisions with fewer variables and a straightforward understanding of cause-and-effect. Here, the shareholder value philosophy, which determines so much of how our corporations operate these days, is the perfect example. Placing a rigid priority on maximizing shareholder returns makes things clear for decision-makers and relieves them of considering difficult tradeoffs. Of course we know that constantly dialing down expenses and investments to boost short-term margins inevitably damages the long-term health of the company. It takes a complexity approach to keep competing values and priorities and the effects of decisions on all of them in view – and not just for management, but equally for investors, analysts, and regulators.

In the short term, a reductionist mindset is most useful for winnowing away externalities so that you can show that what YOU did had real results in the real world, thus justifying your value to the accountability chain and the shareholders.

via Why Managers Havent Embraced Complexity – Richard Straub – Harvard Business Review.

Inappropriate action planning makes me sad

May 17, 2013 By Conversation, Facilitation, Learning 4 Comments

Last year in Slovenia, a group of Art of Hosting practitioners gatherd for a week at a well loved 17th century manor to be together.  I suppose you could call it a “conference” but we all called it a “Learning Village.”  And it was a learning village.  The agenda we set was for a five day Open Space gathering.  there was music and local wine drinking and a learning journey on the land, and the teenagers cleaned out an old stone chapel that hadn’t been dusted for 300 years.  We talked about our work, did tai chi and aikido, played football and made art.  Our kids fell in love and broke up!

It was a village, and there was tons of learning.  And no action plans, no next steps, no commitments, no necessary reports.  A few months later there was a harvest document lovingly stewarded by a few people.  This is all appropriate and good.

And sometimes, there are gatherings where next steps and action plans are important and necessary and are the reason why we are gathering.  But always?  No.

I have begun to notice that when I see conference agendas with “next steps and action plans” attached to them (and especially attached to the end of the last day when everyone is tired and most people have left), I become sad.  Actually and emotionally a little sad.  i think it is because doing this unconsciously reduces the pure experience of being together and intenstly learning into something “productive” in order to justify doing it.

So please, think really carefully about whether or not you gathering needs action steps, especially if you are planning a conference where the purpose is for people to simply be together learning and connecting.  That alone is significant action.  Do we really need to justify it any further?