Complexity characterises the behaviour of a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, meaning there is no reasonable higher instruction to define the various possible interactions.
Busy writing proposals today – a series of workshops on leadership, collaboration and culture; an exploration of national attitudes in Africa; and a debate on the role of narrative in defence and military operations. … A perfect piece for distinguishing between the Complicated world, where prediction and analysis apply, and the Complex world, which relies instead on understanding where the emergent patterns of a system might lead next.
Whenever I’m lucky enough to teach (DC next week for anyone who’s interested and Amsterdam in early February), one of the key points we cover on the Cognitive Edge Practitioner Foundations at the moment derives from James Suriowecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”. It’s how when using large groups of experts the average answer is better than any single answer, iff: a) every respondent is knowledgeable about the subject; and b) answers are given independently, without seeing others’ answers.
For example, I sat watching a group looking at intervening in a natural disaster situation – extremely effective, intelligent people coming up with interventions that would be “safe”: funding local villages to find their own water (on the basis that they may know about natural resources, but didn’t have the wherewithal to transport it). … The upshot is that, for all the fear of the “f-word”, safe-to-fail probes are relatively simple to produce: Do no harm Make them low-resource Make them situation-relevant (much easier if you have narrative material coming in) Monitor them Increase the diversity of people looking at the problem
As promised on Tuesday night at the Royal Society, here are my slides from the Marketing Measurement talk… Download Marketing Measurement – Narrate presentation for Cranfield Alumni 8th Oct 2012 As always with my slides – highly visual. You had to be there!
One of the key concepts in dealing with complexity is the need to be indirect in pursuit of our goals. I often refer to John Kay's book Obliquity – but here is the original article from the Financial Times from 2004 on the topic. It suggests an idea that is Read more…
I’ve just seen another article about how social media caused change in Egypt. (I’m not going to link to it – or any of the others – as I don’t want to encourage the causal thinking behind it.) The other element I’ve seen mentioned as important in the Egypt changes Read more…
When we do SenseMaker™projects, one of the things that regularly crops up is the difference between correlations and causation. It’s often the case that people read more into correlation numbers than is appropriate. And I always like having good examples for strong correlations that can be over-interpreted. Up until now, Read more…
It's been a busy couple of months – with a number of things that I'll be putting up here in the coming weeks. Including, excitingly, the next pilots for the Children of the World project… In the meantime, however, some apposite quotes around ways of making changes and the work Read more…
Firstly – thank you to Harold and apologies to others: the link to the slides that I posted on Friday didn’t work. It’s fixed now, so they’re accessible from Capturing an organisation’s narrative.pdf (3573.9K). There’s an excellent new video up at Cognitive Edge’s website and on their YouTube channel: Today Read more…
Friday was an odd start – I’m used to catching the 0430 train to St Pancras for an early Eurostar. I’m also used to clubbers getting off the train on their wasted way home as I get on on my equally wobbly way to work. What I’m not used to Read more…