[OSList] Management and Organization

Daniel Mezick dan at newtechusa.net
Thu Jul 24 04:58:23 PDT 2014 

Harold,

Yes, and more and more work is actually tipping into the complex/chaotic 
state as depicted on the Cynefin diagram. I suspect this trend is being 
powered by increases in the rate of change in the society, driven 
primarily by technology.

Every day, more and more work is complex and chaotic. Loads of change, 
all day, every day.

Maybe the Cynefin diagram needs to allocate more space to complex and 
chaotic work, to depict it more accurately:

Diagram:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Cynefin_framework_Feb_2011.jpeg



Fewer and fewer projects are qualifying for the traditional ABC 
management approach. More and more complex & chaotic work tends to favor 
empirical approaches and may explain the popularity of Agile. It also 
might explain the rise of Open Space as a legitimate tool for 
manifesting high performance in business. "Management" as important as 
ever, is a function of the self-organizing system. It is not a role.

This link explains how Microsoft is laying off 18000 people and 
beginning what appears to be a forced march to Agile:
http://www.tgdaily.com/enterprise/120066-is-microsoft-adopting-a-more-agile-approach

...this, from what was once a very, very successful software vendor.

Ouch.

Are we all being swept along by a tide of relentless change? I see some 
crazy-looking folks way out there, in the water, wearing wet suits, on 
surfboards. They appear to be greatly enjoying themselves.

Daniel

On 7/24/14 6:15 AM, Harold Shinsato wrote:
> Chris,
>
> Thank you for bringing in the Cynefin framework! After hearing about 
> Snowden's framework at an agile software conference, it quickly spread 
> through the Agile community. Agile is even referenced in the wikipedia 
> article about Cynefin. I'd recommend that folks take a look at the 
> article at least for the simple graphic that helps understand the 
> model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin
>
> It's interesting that although Snowden's article was published in 2007 
> in HBR, a good chunk of the useful ideas had been worked on by Brenda 
> Zimmerman and others starting in 1998 after being inspired by the 
> study of chaos theory.
>
> Simple (or obvious) is like baking a cake. (Maybe things don't always 
> go to plan, but following a simple recipe at sea level with good tools 
> and ingredients will usually work).
>
> Complicated is like sending a rocket to the moon. Yes, many moving 
> parts in mission control. Many things can go wrong. But working the 
> plan does most of the work.
>
> Complex is like parenting a child. What you learn raising a child from 
> birth to age six does not give the answers for the next six years, let 
> alone for raising the next one.
>
> Snowden also adds a Chaotic and Disorder domain, and interesting 
> boundaries and relationships between the five domains. What's also 
> interesting about Cynefin is that the focus is on our knowledge or 
> understanding of a system - not really a description of the Universe 
> or piece thereof.
>
> It's a mistake to dismiss the utility of Cynefin as a lens simply by 
> stating that the universe is self-organizing. If anything, this 
> model's utility is mostly in showing how traditional management 
> processes (i.e. command and control) are mostly inadequate for most 
> issues especially in today's environment. Cynefin has been used a 
> great deal to help promote agile practices in organizations, and 
> surely can also be used to promote OST.
>
>     Harold
>
>
>
> On 7/22/14 12:57 PM, chris.corrigan at gmail.com wrote:
>> I seek simplicity in trying to describe where and how Open Space does 
>> it's magic.
>>
>> One of the ways I have had excellent success over the years in 
>> describing this work is derived from David Snowden's work on the 
>> Cynefin framework.
>>
>> The short story is this:
>>
>> We are faced all the time with problems that are basically knowable, 
>> and problems that aren't.  Knowable problems mean that with the right 
>> knowledge and expertise, they can be fixed.  A technical team can 
>> come together and analyse the causes, work with what's available and 
>> craft a solution.  Then they can get an implementation plan in place 
>> and go ahead and do it.  These kinds of problems have a start line 
>> and a finish line.  When you are done, you are done.  Building a 
>> bridge is one of those kinds of problems.  You build it and there is 
>> no tolerance for failure.  It needs to be failsafe.
>>
>> Open Space doesn't work well for those kinds of problems because the 
>> solution is basically already known, or at least knowable.
>>
>> Then there are problems for which no know solution exists, and even 
>> if you did get a solution, you can't really "solve" the problem 
>> because the problem is due to a myriad of causes and is itself 
>> emergent. For example, racism.  Look around and you will find very 
>> few people that identify themselves as racists, but look at the stats 
>> for Canadian society for example and you see that non-white people 
>> are trailing in every indicator of societal success.  Essentially you 
>> are seeing the results of a racist society but no racists anywhere. 
>>  This is an emergent problem.  Racism itself is a self-organizing 
>> phenomenon, notwithstanding the few people that actively engineer 
>> racist environments.  Such a problem didn't really start anywhere and 
>> it can't really end either.  What is needed is a way of addressing 
>> it, moving the system away from the negative indicators and towards 
>> something else.
>>
>> In other words, this is a complex problem.
>>
>> The way to solve complex problems is to create many "strange 
>> attractors" around which the system can organize itself differently. 
>>  Open Space nis the best method I know of for creating such strange 
>> attractors, as they are born from the passion and responsibility of 
>> those that want to create change, and they are amplified by people 
>> coming together to work on these things.
>>
>> It's "post and host" rather than "command and control."
>>
>> And because you can't be sure if things are going to work out, you 
>> have to adopt a particular mindset to your initiative: one that is 
>> "safe to fail."  In other words, if it doesn't work, you stop doing 
>> it.  If it does work, you do more of it.  And all the way along you 
>> build in learning, so that the system can see how change is made and 
>> be drawn towards those initiatives that are currently making a 
>> difference.  Certainly this kind of problem solving is not useful for 
>> building a bridge, as you cannot afford a failure there.  But for 
>> problems with no known solutions, it is brilliant.
>>
>> Harrison has spent decades outlining this simplicity in even less 
>> words than I have now and his writing and thinking is, and continues 
>> to be far ahead of it's time and maybe a little under appreciated 
>> because it is delivered in simple terms like "don't work so hard." 
>>  But ultimately this is the best and most important advice for 
>> working in complex systems.
>>
>> Open Space.  Do it.  Learn. Do it again. Don't work so hard.
>>
>> More than that really starts to build in the delusion that people can 
>> possibly know what to do.  From that place solutions will be deluded. 
>>  That they may work is pure luck.  Open Space offers us a disciplined 
>> approach to addressing complexity in an ongoing way.  Don't be fooled 
>> by its simplicity.
>>
>> Chris
>>
>
>
> -- 
> Harold Shinsato
> harold at shinsato.com <mailto:harold at shinsato.com>
> http://shinsato.com
> twitter: @hajush <http://twitter.com/hajush>
>
>
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-- 

Daniel Mezick, President

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