Weltanschaung – definition: “wide worldview”

Introduction of Dave Snowden – Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge – KM for many years, co-founder of IBM Centre for Organisational Complexity, leading thinker about advances in the use and “management” of knowledge

Focus on effective system design and project management – a look at existing methods and also emerging methods

Forecasting systems – often require high degrees of human intervention

Cadbury Schweppes forecasting – Two-Bin Replenishment (not so long ago)

Case study – depot managers … wary of “perfect” black box systems that forecast perfectly … have and hold secret stocks that can be pulled out to replenish in emergencies

Co-creation of human intervention and functioning-of-systems to arrive at optimal overall functioning

Dave moves into a story (he often conveys his messages via stories that demonstrate extremes of poor sense / logic countered by good sense (and vice-versa)).  The story is about the “good ole days” of It and linear thing .. to set up his core message today about cvo-evolution

The brain and language have co-evolved (brain structures have changed and evolved over time as a function of language .. and of course language changes and grows over time).

No deep structures in language … The brain does not have a grammar gene.  And brain chemistry has also shown us that we never remember things quite the same way twice

Key concepts

- “everything”" is fragmented (summaries often made too shallow and general)

- RSS feeds are fragmented raw material

- Why in KM are we trying to put more and more summarized material into portals

Pattern-based decisions (humans are pattern-recognition animals)

- only machine like, linear and logical humans that process information in linear, logical ways are autistic

- most of us are “messy” .. in the ways we do things, the ways we navigate and use information

- most of us work in cycles between mess and order (which Snowden suggest is a very effective way to structure one’s life .. provides the means of refreshing to meet current context and conditions)

- example of choosing a new RSS reader to match current way of thinking and working (rather than being forced to use what IT thinks it is best for you to use)

Complexity & constraint

Children’s party story … (Summary here from last year’s Snowden keynote blogged by Stuart Henshall … “Looking at a children’s party story. Imagine organizing a party for 12 year old boys. My notes are a little cryptic on the description here. First how will you manage? A chaotic approach buy drugs and alcohol so they can go on a journey and so what if the house is destroyed. A social approach will have a mission statement, a project plan for the party , and clear milestones.. and the senior adults should start the party with a video and then use ppt to demonstrate their personal commitment etc. so it will conclude with an after action review and mandate future….

Let’s approach it as if we create an environment that we know has both good attractors and bad attractors. We can create an environment and see what they play. Then we have to have a scanning capability to see what happens. If you manage an ecology you can amplify and disturb but you most stand aside from the system and watch. You cannot have a fail-safe design approach. You must take a safe-fail approach. This is very similar to serious play and prototype to action and beta type approaches.”

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Boundaries and safe-fail systems, amplify what works and manage for emergence, dampen what doesn’t work or is offering negative outcomes … manage the emergence.

Another example of daughter’s 16th birthday party … setting of boundaries and design constraints (Dave used on-loan British government-supplied electronic surveillance system)

Scanning is critical in complex environments … need to be able to see the patterns emerging

Move from fail-safe design to safe-fail experimentation

Distributed cognition (add layers of meaning to existing content) 

Natural Numbers (5, 15, & 150)

- 5 … natural limit of what someone can remember (actually, 5 plus-or-minus 2)

- 15 … maximum number of people who can trust each other simultaneously (correlated with size of nuclear family in society in which you grow up) … dave introduces age-stages of neuro-plasticity

- 150 … Dunbar’s number – maximum size of social grooming effectiveness (number of people you can have some kind of effective relationship with)

Existing Methods

Narrative-based capture methods 

- after two or three interviews, massive problem with cognitive bias from those first interviews

- meaning not contained in the content, but in the metadata associated to the content

- Dave mentions “fitness landscapes”, a key capability of his Sensemaker suite of software

Cross silo self-forming teams 

Managing Emergence

Emerging methods

Crews

- establishing clear roles based on patterned behaviours, in order to set, manage and work from expectations

- crews can delegate authority without loss of status

Coherence Mapping

- capture user requirements in narrative capture form, and then go and capture all capabilities in existent software, and the merge / compare / contrast to identify patterns that suggest where there are matches and coherence.

Cynefin model

Formal – waterfall, time and resource -based project management (nothing wromg with this in complicated but known situations )>150

Expert – expert-based research, prototyping, testing and modelling, <150

Informal (complex) – SNS, reward to solve problem, parallel working (approx. 15)

Crisis – rapid assembly of SWOT teams (< 5, Crews can be used here)

Lincoln – “We need to think and act anew”

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