The Future of Organization

Overview!


Today, I want to give enough of an overview of the system, process and strategy so as we can each better understand how to engage ourselves in the process, and then use that engagement in our own directives.

What Is This "Organization of the Future"??


The OofF is a working title for what is a broad based philosophy, system, process and strategy for understanding, adapting and leading the way at the individual or organizational level for the challenges and opportunities the near and long term future brings.
As such, it is heavily based on living systems and complex adaptive systems.
Dedicated engagement and practice of the system will give a decided edge in keeping individuals and organizations ahead of the curve. To use evolutionary parlance, to keep individual and organization "fit" and "adaptive" to its environment.
It is based on the belief we both shape our environment, and are shaped by our environment, and that this is a dynamic, non-linear ongoing process. Our efforts and engagement dictate how much we shape, and how much we're shaped by the environment. A nuanced position here is leaders shape, followers are shaped, and to optimally lead or follow, those roles reverse and are dynamic. Living systems thrive on cycle dynamics, of which this is just one. This also shapes our mental models where concepts like "bottom up" and "top down" are blurred into an endless dynamic cycle.

Vision and Philosophy--A Sketch.


Vision and philosophy sets context, and as we will continually see context is everything.
Vision helps us shape where we want to go, vision helps us shape the world we would like to move towards, rather than the world that moves towards us.

Vision is also how and what we see. 


The greater context that shapes our vision is we are in the midst of one of the worlds major paradigm shifts, morphing from what was the industrial revolution based on mechanics to a 'digital' revolution based on biology and living things. This shift is being being shaped by the most significant advent of information communications in human history, the internet.

This shift away from the mechanical basis to that of a biological basis creates an entirely different way of understanding of the world, as much of the models that the industrial economy used to shaped the world were based on mechanical systems and physics, along with political ideology that each have their philosophical roots from 200 plus years ago.
These ideologies and the institutions that have been built up around them form the barriers to growth for a healthy transformation to an emerging digitally networked economic ecosystem. This provides us with both significant challenges, and significant opportunities.

Our Vision and Mission is to be the leaders and leading organizations in creating and growing an econosphere and ecosystem based on living systems and the health of that system is measured both by the health of the individual unit (that you, I, people!!) and the ability of the environment to support the social economic activity of these people.
This very basic sketch provides us with a pallet on which we can all paint, creating a shared vision of a radically different, and very exciting future. This also shapes our philosophy in subtle ways, helping us be leaders in creating constructive bridges across ideological divides, divisions that currently have us on a precipice, divisions that have us divided against each other, rather than united towards a future where our individual potential is enhanced, and our relationship with the whole more clear, neither the whole or the individual trumping the other.
This is in keeping with networks, the biology of cooperation and competition (coopetition!!), and the winning logic of non-zero sum relationships.
This is also an important fundamental shift in human organization, as zero-sum, warring strategies have played a role in bootstrapping humanity to this point (life is an arms race), that strategy now is decidedly sub-optimal in relationship to globalization, technology and interdependence of trade, along with a growing need for a global response to environmental stresses that potentially nine billion people will put on a planet.

Model and System


Describing biological systems is inherently difficult, so lets look instead at the functionality of what I call the "three pillars" of highly adaptable organizations, Systems Thinking (Living systems), Organizational Learning, and Social Technologies. Each of these 'pillars' (bad metaphor, I know!!) are like trunks of a tree (better?) that re-enforces the other in a continuous dynamic loop. Fully understood and engaged, this system also shapes and informs an individuals and organizations "social media strategy", and naturally creates "overgrowth" on the traditional silos and boundaries of the traditional model based on neoclassicism.
Leadership in these styles of organizations take on a much different dynamic to fully utilize the power and energy that has been dormant in the system. Traditional models stifle individuality, personal engagement, desire, creativity and the massive amounts of dormant social and intellectual capital that resides in most every organization.
With leadership styles shaped to the living system organization, overall vision is greatly enhanced, along with its ability to "sense" its environment, that is to touch, hear, see, smell and taste. The extent as to how much this is mere metaphor as to how much this actually extends the cognitive reality of the organization depends on the ability of its individuals to reshape their own mental models.
This is not a trivial distinction, as this will significantly shape also how the organization "sees" data, models data, and uses data. More importantly how it extends trust with that data, along with transparency. This all together helps form the foundational basis for the "social business" strategy of an organization. This properly attuned and engaged strategy will give the organization a very distinctive advantage over its peers in any given arena.

What is not immediately obvious, is that the full engagement of this model and system leads naturally to the ongoing innovation any organization will need to not just adapt to the ever shifting environment, but give it optimal conditions to spawn and speciate. Put more plainly, to create new products and services that are the key to its survival, its leadership in its arena, or if necessary, morph into a different environment altogether.

Lets look briefly under the hood.

Living Systems Thinking
How Organizations and Individual See and Experience the World


I can not stress enough this is not mere metaphor, but a mental model. I also can not stress enough this is a significant shift in how we think and see the world. But it is also manner of thinking best suited to live, lead and adapt in complexity. Much of traditional schooling does not do well to prepare us to think and see this way, for that matter it is an effort to overcome the traditional schooling, training and training. Again, massive opportunity. As individuals, we've likely been exposed to a lot of the different sciences that have established and extended on the concepts of organizations and economies as living systems and complex adaptive systems, however my experience has been there is also much more to learn, and better yet, much much more to learn and do in transforming our organizations as such, and learning how to lead within them.

We not going to learn much in this blog post, this is a life long journey. But to give us an idea, lets look to our own brain/bodies (there is no dualism!!) for inspiration, which are themselves 'complex adaptive systems'.
We used to think of the brain, and a part of the brain as having an "executive function", this centralized unit of control that was the mastermind behind our day to day actions. We know now that is false. Our systems take in enormous amount of data of which our 'conscious' (our interface with the outside world) is only partially aware of, around 5%. We know that data is organized behind the scenes, in a highly distributed, complex way which is more emergent than 'planned'. (the more we explore this relationship, the more we will see a cycle, rather than linear "planned economy" of our mind) This is self organized at blinding speed, and presented to ourselves milliseconds before we "act".
While we may think we have this elevated executive function, this is a false sense of reality. What we are is a living complex adaptive system that is highly attuned to an environment.
While there is a rich body of work in how we can achieve higher conscious (meditating, etc) as an individual, there is much more than can be extended towards how we reshape our thinking of ourselves and our organizations, and how we interact and shape our environments.
The organization brings in enormous amounts of data, and for fun, lets assume its only aware of around 5%.
Even a subtle shift in our mental models can open ourselves to a lot of unused data, information, knowledge, wisdom within our organization.
That's our "internal conscious".
The relationship with our external environment can be where enormous "personal growth" is possible.

Key concepts here.
Conscious, five senses, empathy, untapped energy and potential.
Relationships are dynamic, non-linear. Environments are complex, always shifting, we shape and are shaped by our environments. Control is illusionary. Attraction and engagement brings in and amplifies resources.
Synthesis of expertise. Generalists.

Organizational Learning
Adaptive Information, Adaptive Learning


If living systems thinking is how we see and experience the world, then organizational learning shapes how we learn about the world.
Lets again use the mind/body as a metaphor, with each person within the organization both representing a neuron of the mind and a nerve ending in our central nervous system.
We don't have to explore the organization very deeply to see enormous amounts of untapped potential here to both vastly improve the "intelligence" of the organization, and its ability to sense and understand both its external and internal environment.
Organizations that do not understand it kill these cells and nerve endings. Everybody reading here likely knows what I mean--the disengaged employee who after having all their corners rounded off, do just enough to do what it takes to get the paycheque.
This, understandably, is costly in ways that extend well beyond the border of the organization itself. It is unhealthy. It is no wonder that so many organization look and feel "cancerous" to both management and employees--its because they are.
The learning organization changes all that. Each node (person!! Bob!! Sally!! Tim!! Jane!!) is seen as a highly valuable neuron and nerve ending in what is a highly engaging and energized living system. Each one fully engaging their own senses and capabilities that harmonize the interests of the whole and
their own interests. Themselves and the organization interact in a dynamic, interactive harmony that dramatically enhances both, exploding the potential of the individual and the whole.

This dynamic creates a learning environment. That seems simple enough, but it is what it learns, what each person both already learns, and is inspired to learn that makes this such a dynamic force.
Because it is synthesized with the mental model of the living system, we now have a living breathing body of energy that is actively learning about its external and internal environment! 
What that information and knowledge might is of course highly contextual depending on numerous factors, but one universal thought pattern is everyone is learning to think in terms of living systems.

Key concepts.
All living systems have ways to process data and sense their environment, we as people can highly amplify that dynamic.
What you do affects others, what others do affect you.
More so than ever, environments are constantly shifting, the learning organization can be much better suited to understanding, adapting and leading in those environments.
Being highly valued for your role in the organization inspires more learning both for your own interests and that of the whole, creating engagement and value driven actions and systems. Win win for all involved.
Note: I'll leave it separate from here, but for the advanced organizational intelligence, we have a specific framework to radically enhance organizational learning and intelligence. That framework also dovetails with the social technologies and social media strategy. I leave it separate as the system can work independent from this framework.

Social Technologies
Social Engagement


If living systems is how we think of the world and see the world, and organizational learning is how we inform ourselves of that world, and enhance our intelligence and five senses towards the world, social technologies is how we engage and interact with the world, and the world with us, and how we ever refine our senses.

Social technologies not only are radically changing how you and I are engaging in the world, they are more radically altering how the organization engages in the world. Social technologies are also radically (and already have of course!) reshaped how information flows. 
From an evolutionary standpoint, this has created a Cambrian Explosion.

Again, we can barely scratch the surface of potential here, as the potential is shaped by the mental models of the living system mind, and the organization's willingness to learn and engage.
That there are so many barriers here, both psychological, mental, and organizational only amplifies the potential for those who can fully adapt and engage the three pillars system, and develop organizational models based on biology and living systems.
Fully engaged models will have both very rich information flows, but also high degrees of trust and engagement with all the individuals who ultimately are part of an organizational 'system'--management, employees, customers, investors, suppliers, citizens, and the living breathing environment of life itself--our ecosystem.

Keys:
Social media, socially engaged employees, socially engaged customers, and the freer flow of information and relationships are radically altering both the organization and the environment it operates in. Static adherence to the status quo is not an option.

The Whole
 Winning Combinations


For every person and organization, there are hundreds of ways to combine these three pillars in to a highly robust system. Many of course already are. Context and leadership is the key towards winning combinations. 
To fully comprehend this, we need to have a wide and deeply distributed and engaged sense of our shared "current reality" along with a wide and shared understanding of our "shared vision".
This is why the Community of Practice (CoP) is essential to fully utilizing the potential of this model and system.
Without getting into the entire buffet of learning engagement strategies and processes (which I cover extensively on my Google Plus stream), these shared realities and visions give us the context and purpose that fills our value system, our desire to create and sustain something that will have an enormous positive impact as to how we organize our economies, the kinds of products and services the people will need to live sustainable lives, and as the individual and their health is at the heart of the organizational web, the values of those products and services become self apparent.

The winning combinations are patterns that emerge from the dynamic relationships we and the organization forms with all its components upon which its survival depends. This sets its leadership style, its incentives programs, and the type of resources it attracts. Resources that intimately include the management, employees, customers, investors, suppliers, citizens and the environment into one organism that whose strength is dependent on the quality and value created in these relationship webs.

This extends well beyond what would be traditional called the internal of the organization, out into a vast web of win-win relationships that shape further our political environment and economic system to what we will come to understand as the Sentient Econosystem. 
The winning combination are self aware enough that greater trends of environment and climate, plus resource management will need high value webs to insure the entire system upon which everything depends survives.
This is not an ideological position, this is the inherent logical of the sentient organization, the result of highly attuned awareness, of leaving the narcissism of the organizations of the past behind.

Next Steps
Developing the Community of Practice for the Development of the Organization of the Future. 


As we should know by now, this is a journey, as shared journey.
As perhaps is obvious by now, this is not a system that can be employed via tradition top down roll outs, etc.
It is also one that needs a community of practice to develop the skills and knowledge, the art and the practice to fully engage and develop the benefits.
Because of its very nature, the CoP we're developing around this system, model and engagement lends itself to both high trust networks and the massive potential for innovation within.

With this in mind, how we engage, and practice the model and system.
Again, this is a cycle. The more we get to know you and your purpose, your goals for being here, the more we can help you get there, and the more you understand the model and system, the more you learn, the more you can give back and the more potential we all have for "spontaneous collisions" from which all manners and matters of innovation can arise.
Not just products or services, but models. Networks. And how to attract the resources.

We already have an amazing combination of knowledge and experience, cutting across lines from the science of networks, synthetic biology, finance, business and business systems, social media, community management, reputation systems, just to name some, all of which can be combined and morphed into the novel combinations which can amplify in ways that can change the game.

The keys here are:
--Numbers, generally 150 to 300 is ideal. Why? Social capital.  Network spread. Because of the rich potential we already have, but constrained due to nature of each our own limited time and resources, to bring together the teams that can put into action individual projects we need a fairly deep and wide pool of social capital. Also, for the kind of business and social intelligence we want to have, we need at least that many eyes, ears, voices and inputs. Too few people puts too much strain in too few people. We don't want to burn out, we want to build energy.
--Methods and Practices. There is a lot to learn here, as it is a very rich field as to how to best use and develop collective intelligence, smart swarming, crowd sourcing, collaboration, smart teams, project development, much etc.
--Outputs and Inputs. Practical engagement will be a key here, that is how quickly can we put something together that you can most readily use for your own advancement, and advance the community itself. To repeat, the more we know of your purpose, strategy etc, the more the "room" can help. Conversely, the more you'll learn how to put back into the system. Like all economic systems, the more you put in, the more we all get out. We can't starve the system.
--Where.
Where does this all "take place"? We all know what a great open engagement place G+ is, or even FB, LinkedIn, or even Twitter is.
But they're not great for the kind of community building this needs to make it work.
I know the Caucus Conferencing System well, its been home to Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms for 14 years, and is particularly well suited for the CoP we'll be developing. It has a rich history, and several members of our tribe have belonged to it for years, and there also comes with it very good collaborative alignment potential and resources.
I have the bare bones of four conferences awaiting for us to grow from, with enough of the framework to get us to where we want to go.
It gives us a very secure environment (it is not web searchable) to develop the trust we need to do what we want to do.
I must also stress this is part of my own consulting strategy for building organizations of the future. If this concerns you in any way, I am more than happy to explain further this dynamic, and how it enriched the potential for us all, and how we use this to extend into the organizations we may be a part of already.

Thanks for reading. This may have been a bit dry, and not reflective of my enormous belief and enthusiasm for the potential of this model and system. The more we all catch this belief and enthusiasm, the more this will form massive connective collective energy and radiate back out through each of us in our projects and engagements!!

A Worthy Manifesto for Any Organization

This cuts right to it. While I can preach these sorts of cultural guidelines, coming from a guy who has run one of the world most successful hedge funds gives this a functional credibility that can't be brushed away.
Hat tip to  The Big Picture and to Farnam Street . The Farnam link will take you to the full piece.

Management Lessons from Ray Dalio

Ray Dalio, the sixty-one-year-old founder of Bridewater Associates, the world’s biggest hedge fund, offers the following management advice. Dalio says “Taken together, these principles are meant to paint a picture of a process for the systematic pursuit of truth and excellence and for the rewards that accompany this pursuit. I put them in writing for people to consider in order to help Bridgewater and the people I care about most.”

Ego
“Two of the biggest impediments to truth and excellence are people’s ego’s and organizational bureaucracy. Most people like compliments and agreement, and they dislike criticisms and conflict. Yet recognizing mistakes and weaknesses is essential for rapid improvement and excellence. In our culture, there is nothing embarrassing about making mistakes and having weaknesses. “

“We need and admire people who can suspend their egos to get at truth and evolve toward excellence, so we ignore ego-based impediments to truth. We have a different type of environment in which some behaviors discouraged elsewhere are rewarded here (like challenging one’s superiors), and some behaviors encouraged elsewhere are punished here (like speaking behind a subordinate’s back).”

Think and act in a principled way and expect others to as well“all outcomes are manifestations of forces that are at work to produce them, so whenever looking at specific outcomes, think about the forces that are behind them. Constantly ask yourself, “What is this symptomatic of?”

If you don’t mind being wrong on the way to being right, you will learn a lot
“I once had a ski instructor who had taught Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, how to ski. He explained how Jordan enjoyed his mistakes and got the most out of them. At the start of high school, Jordan was a mediocre basketball player; he became great because he loved using his mistakes to improve. I see it all the time. Intelligent people who are open to recognizing and learning from their mistakes substantially outperform people with the same abilities who aren’t open in the same way.”

I have tended to point to fear as the biggest barrier to the kinds of necessary changes so many organizations need to go through, but ego and bureaucracy are highly related.
There is more here as well. Bridgewater--Culture and Principles

For those who are interested in joining our tribe (more on this to come), this is required reading!

News Flash! Canada Needs to Cultivate Innovation

Wanted: Culture of Innovation

Innovation doesn’t happen in the abstract – corporations have to manage for it. Successful innovation happens in four distinct areas.

Product innovation: The capacity of a firm to introduce new products and services ahead of competitors, to anticipate consumer needs or even to create them.

Market innovation: The capacity of a firm to decide to change its market, whether it’s geographically, virtually or creatively.

Process innovation: The capacity to change how goods and services are produced and delivered to reduce cost, improve efficiency and increase convenience for customers.

Organizational innovation: The capacity to convert creativity, market and customer knowledge and technology into marketable innovations.

I believe the organization is where we can best leverage our individual abilities to be part of a groundswell surge of innovation. The nexus of it is, we don't have to belong to business organization, or any specific organization to invest our social or intellectual capital. Rather, we can be part of a network that extends itself within the organization, where you, me, we can collaborate to create value and innovation.
I will be extending on this very theme in the coming days, weeks, months.
The question is, how can we create a solid enough network where we can further our skills, knowledge, connectivity in way that enhance the group, can extend itself within networks in collaborative ways where both parties benefit, and sustains itself?

Power Corrupts

Power, corruption, exploitation. Holdovers from the twentieth century, and the centuries that preceded it. And the very antithesis of what is going to get us through this century.
Where is currently one of the worst examples and practitioners of power, corruption and exploitation? You might be surprised.

The Shame of College Sports.

Its a very long piece from The Atlantic, but should be required reading for all of us who want to relegate this kind of organizational abuse to the history books. The practices of the NCAA and big business universities of college football and basketball in the U.S. have no place in a modern society.

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.

Don Curtis, a UNC trustee, told me that impoverished football players cannot afford movie tickets or bus fare home. Curtis is a rarity among those in higher education today, in that he dares to violate the signal taboo: “I think we should pay these guys something.”
Fans and educators alike recoil from this proposal as though from original sin. Amateurism is the whole point, they say. Paid athletes would destroy the integrity and appeal of college sports. Many former college athletes object that money would have spoiled the sanctity of the bond they enjoyed with their teammates. I, too, once shuddered instinctively at the notion of paid college athletes.

But after an inquiry that took me into locker rooms and ivory towers across the country, I have come to believe that sentiment blinds us to what’s before our eyes. Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes. 

Creating a 21st Century Organization

This is my big audacious dream. An organization that networks together investment management, capitalist enterprise, investors, management, workforce, venders and suppliers, customers, community.
The culture, the management philosophy and tools, the technology, the need all exist right now to make this possible.
With the right leadership, drive, determination and desire to become the model, the leader, in what an organization can be and what it can do, we can and will create this organization.

For myself, I am driven by a sense of purpose around defining what capitalism can be in the age of networks. A capitalism that can spread it's creative awards to those who participate.
A capitalism that not only rewards its core participants, but also looks forward to be part of solving society's most pressing problems.
A capitalism that can help create the vibrant, healthy social and economic society the future wants, the future needs. A win-win capitalism.

We're at the beginning. We're a seed. To grow, we want to attract the attention of those that can give this concept energy. Their social capital, their intellectual capital, their financial capital. Those that can understand the concept, and contribute their experience, their skills, their minds to make it better. To seed that culture of constant, never ending learning and improvement, a culture of growth.

A concept I am looking for feedback on right now is the idea of creating a investment fund, I am calling the North American Capitalism Investment Fund. I believe I have sound ideas around this, but it needs the expertise of fund managers who are looking for a creative edge in their investment strategies.

The Significance of a Socially Networked Organization

This for me illustrates the necessity for a socially networked, team environment organization. Protecting your top performers:
The Dark Side of High Achievement  (Hat Tip--William Reichard via Google Plus)

 In the movies and on stage, the leader usually fails because “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” a la Charles Foster Kane. Or, as in the case of Macbeth, the leader is tortured by thoughts of a sin for which he can never atone. In real life, however, many managers face similar problems even when they have committed no major sins and when their power is far from absolute. Indeed, becoming isolated and self-obsessed is something every business leader should fear, not just corporate titans but also middle managers and owners of small companies. To the detriment of their firms, their employees, and most of all themselves, many managers cling to the techniques that got them to the top long after those techniques have become obsolete.

One reason for this has to do with the personal attributes that lead to success within an organization, says Thomas DeLong, Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School. Characteristics such as a high need for achievement and a focus on task accomplishment, which are invaluable in precocious new employees, can lead to counterproductive habits once a person has attained a managerial position. High achievers, while intelligent and hard working, are often terrible at taking criticism and examining their own weaknesses. Driven by their need for tangible accomplishments, these people end up managing their professional images at the expense of their core skills and their personal relationships.

Culture matters. A socially networked culture matters more. A team environment is intrinsic to a socially networked culture. High performer sports teams know this. They protect their top talent.

This also illustrates the strength of a learning organization. Today's socio-economic environment is evolving too fast, is too chaotic, too complex for anybody's knowledge, skills and techniques to last long.
A learning organization understands this, and creates an environment where learning is part of the everyday experience.

Back from a Self Imposed Hiatus

It's been six months of digging deep within myself to find what it is I really want to do with the rest of my life. I am 52 years old, I've spent the the last fifteen years of my life studying and learning, developing a role I can effectively play in helping create the kind of sustainable future we need to sustain a growing population of us humans with the resources we have available. Oh, and earning a living being a carpenter.
Out of that learning process, there was no position I was particularly suited for other than a consultant. A consultant of what? is a reasonable question.
The answer comes back (every time I examine it) is I want to help organizations to thrive in any kind of future social and economic environment.
As we cannot predict the future, by the very nature of this purpose organizations have to a certain self awareness, a certain awareness of trends, an aversion to complacency, and what I've learned as two stand out features:
A desire to lead.
A desire to innovate.
While this has always been true, as numerous others have written, it is not easy.
Groups, organizations tend to ossify.

I continually seek out material, seek out the people with the skills that can transform organizations out of complacency, to break free from ossification.

My personal barriers to playing a more active role in developing highly adaptable organizations are working full time in the exciting and demanding field of custom home building, as it has it's own demands of time and energy.
That in itself is not that difficult to overcome. What's more interesting, is my process involves a pretty radical change, and people natural resist change. This is inherent with all those (there are too many amazing people and firms that endeavor to create the changes we need for healthy sustainable organizations) who ply these same waters as I do. Change is hard!
It's exciting for me, as I get to experience the changes I need to continually develop in order to pursue my passion, and learn from those who share this passion.
This is to say, securing willing clients is a tall order.

I also have a passion for creating and building. Essentially, building homes has been a very satisfying way to create and build!
But at this stage of my life I want more, much much more.

The question became this past six months, where and how to direct this energy, this passion? How to best utilize and express my full potential?

It keeps coming back as: Develop and grow an organization that is the full expression of all I've learned to this point in my life.

An organization isn't, of course, a solo unit. It is a company of people with a purpose. As the organization I envision is a capitalist one, a profit is the key output.

To develop this organization, we need a team. That core. This tribe of equally passionate people who want to build the same thing, be part of this mission we are on.

The purpose of this blog, along with my Google+ account, is create this shared vision, and find the people who want to build it.

One of the core values we begin with is win-win relationships. Win-win actions. We win, our workforce wins, our customers win, our suppliers and venders win, our investors win.
This is a key insight into what we are building. We are network of those components. Our whole will be greater than the sum of those parts.

Failure in Complex Systems

These is being touted as one of the best papers on systems failures. I'm dumping it here so I can find it when I need it.

18 Truths--The Long Fail of Complexity

"1. Complex systems are intrinsically hazardous systems. The frequency of hazard exposure can sometimes be changed but the processes involved in the system are themselves intrinsically and irreducibly hazardous. It is the presence of these hazards that drives the creation of defenses against hazard that characterize these systems."

Getting organizations, be they corporate enterprises, or public sector, (etc), to think of themselves as 'complex systems' is a start to implimenting the kind of processes that can create better understanding around 'system failure' and how to get the most out of the event. Learning to be better means better understanding why things fail.

As the 18th 'truth' say;
"

18. Failure free operations require experience with failure. Recognizing hazard and successfully manipulating system operations to remain inside the tolerable performance boundaries requires intimate contact with failure. More robust system performance is likely to arise in systems where operators can discern the “edge of the envelope”. It also depends on providing calibration about how their actions move system performance towards or away from the edge of the envelope."

It's a great paper, a must read as one IT blogger said. There is a lot that could be incorporated in making organizations the kinds of sustainable winning organizations the future needs.

Vancouver 2.0 Initiative

I am also very excited to tell you about my latest project that I am rolling out this year, the "Vancouver 2.0 Initiative"!
My purpose with this initiative is to do for the Vancouver region what I want to do for people and organizations, which in itself will create a lot of cross-purpose and value. I have created a blog to introduce people and organizations to the concept, and create understanding how to be involved and what they can get out of it. Here is what I put on the blog header:

An Initiative to Harness the Skills and Creativity of the People and Organizations of the Vancouver Region to Maintain Vancouver as a Leader in Establishing The Future of Healthy World Class Cities-- Collaboration Create Challenge Change Opportunity

What Vancouver 2.0 will become is a "creation platform" that will exist both in the online world and physical world where the people and organizations of Vancouver can co-mingle and create the collaborative culture to seed and develop innovative projects that insure Vancouver can and will be the leader in evolving the kind of city region that we will want it to be in a rapidly changing 21st century world.
We will create an online community where we can both develop deep understanding of the challenges the world, regions, peoples and organizations will face in the coming years, and also constantly create innovative solutions, projects and transformational change to address the challenges and thrive in the opportunities.

Join me at Vancouver 2.0 Initiative!!
Anybody can participate, if you have a passion for our city and region, and love the idea of learning and being part of something new and challenging. We'll grow a deep and very rich network of amazing people and organizations in the process!!! It's win-win for all of us!

Getting to Know The Unconventional Consultant

For the last six months, I've immersed this blog in a lot of theory and reference points that support my ideas for creating value and purpose within organizations.
It's exciting stuff to me, but also obscures who I am, what I am about,  why I am passionate about what it is I want to do, and where I am currently at in doing what I want to do.
Today, as part of a shift in how I am developing my consulting practice, I'm going to tell you more about myself, what it is I want to do, why I am doing it!

My long term mission is to play as large a role as I possibly can to create the world we are heading towards. Transforming you, transforming people, transforming organizations, transforming the world is what I have on my business card. It's a large, long audacious journey and that is part of what I love about it!

While I have spent the better part of fifteen years developing, learning, and putting together what I call my 'three pillars' (systems thinking, organizational learning, deep social media) approach to creative adaptive change in people and organizations, I also continued to support myself as a carpenter in the exciting and competitive world of custom home building. As of this day, I still continue to support myself as a carpenter (working for G Wilson Construction one of Vancouver's premier custom home builders).

Developing a consulting practice while building custom homes brings with it a wealth of real world experience that I take with me.
For starters, I know first hand just how difficult it is to create meaningful change. Going from a career as carpenter/home builder to that of a change consultant is a huge step! What keeps me motivated to do so is a very deep seated belief in what I am doing.
When I talk about employee motivation, I understand it from my own real world experiences. Building homes under often difficult climate conditions, with challenging designs and structural issues, with schedules and budgets always in the forefront, for clients and architects that expect the best requires a range of ways to keep the crew on track and in the game. The same challenges most companies and organizations face, on larger scales. 
The roles I have played over the years, gives me deep insight to the nature of challenges for all the different interests involved. Building a home is an orchestration of the efforts and incentives of the general contractor, the carpentry crew, the home owners/clients, architects, engineers, designers, dozens of trades people and sub-trades, thousands of parts and materials, suppliers and even neighbours! While the ultimate goal is the home the clients dream about, keeping all the varying players and interests aligned is much more challenging than many realize.
It's a challenging--and very rewarding--work environment that has provided and proven an invaluable field lab for me to develop my own thinking and philosophies that would become the backbone of my consulting practice ideas.

None the less, taking the steps from the world of home building to that of consulting and creating the kind of transformational change I want to develop in people and organizations have also proven to be far more challenging than I already thought they'd be! It's a constant reminder of the challenges the people and organizations will have that I hope to transform! This creates a beautiful dynamic tension between daunting and exciting challenge!

What Is The Pay Off?

There are few greater joys than standing back with the home owners as you all admire the home you've just completed for them.
While the pay-offs for change consulting might not be as concrete (literally, that is!), with the establishment of clear metrics, we should be able to capture the joys of transformation.
With the astonishing change society and business has gone through and witnessed since the advent of the internet, the disruptions it and other macro trends have brought have created a staggering amount of challenges and opportunity. Just knowing I have positioned myself to help society, organizations and people manage and create the changes they need to adapt and take advantage of the opportunities is a powerful motivator!

What can the outcomes look like? What does the world we want to create look like?
We live in a world where we understand what motivates us, and keeps us interested and productive in the means in which we earn a living. We have meaningful and trusted relationships between the organizations, corporations and governments and the people--your customers and constituents--on which you depend and serve. We live in a world where value is constantly created by the interwoven feedback loops that exist between the consumer and constituents, and that of business and government. We live in a world where people are the greatest assets. We live in a world where we have a deeper and broader understanding of the kind of society and environment we need to maintain the sustainability where business, people, all living things and our governance can thrive. We live in a world where win-win relationships triumph over that of zero-sum strategies and the waste of personal greed.
It's a world where we still crown and admire champions in life, business and sport, and we all win in the process. 

When you fully embrace and engage in the philosophy and practice of systems thinking, the above is not starry eyed ideology, it is common sense. It taps into the intrinsic desires almost all peoples have, while maintaining the competitive and cooperative nature of humans. It is a respect and admiration for all living things, both biological and cultural. It embraces the power of individuality and the cohesiveness of collective endeavors. It weeds out the waste of collective ways, while harnessing the creativity and innovation we all possess.

In creating my own transformation one needs to make decisions. One of mine is to only work and associate with people that want to play their role--no matter how big or small--in creating that world.

My name is Gregory Esau, The Unconventional Consultant, and I want you to join me on that journey.

Order and Chaos--Trust is the Only Commodity with Value

One of the biggest differences between the land of today (our current operating environment) and that, say, of 1980, is the pace of change. Pace of change can be said to be the time and space between order and chaos. If order is predominant, there is relatively little change, at a relatively slow pace. Adjustment or adaptation is relatively easy.
If chaos is predominant, change is dramatic, pace can be instantaneous.

Today's world is more marked by chaos than it is by order. The music and media industries are two arenas of business where this is most noticeable. The avenues of disruption are fragmenting audiences (which affects advertising rates), radical shifts in distribution chains and models (the slow death of the CD as a music vehicle), the rise of consumer as content (barrier to entry of content creation and distribution is continually lowering), and what maybe can be best described as a general lack of trust between the consumer and the producer (producers seeing the rise of empowered consumer as the threat to their business models, which is correct, but seeing and treating them as the 'enemy' is no way to salvage your business).
This is of course by no means an exhaustive missive of the woes of the media world, but it touches broadly on the modes of disruption.

The broader point is this chaos is not going away--that's obvious enough I would hope--perhaps less obvious is where there is chaos there is opportunity. But the attitude to find those opportunities is to create and manage your own chaos, rather than letting it manage you. Being reactive can be effective in times of order, it is all but a fatal strategy in times of high chaos.

The question becomes two-fold:
1)--how much is your business (model) being or going to be affected by the space between order and chaos?
2)--how then do you and your company/organization create and manage our own 'chaos'?

Risk analysis of your own business, it's model, and it's general operating environment is not easy. Especially if times are good (or, for that matter, times are bad). The default assumption here should be that odds are pretty good that your business and model are at risk. Odds are you are leaving opportunity on the table that you cannot see because you are too comfortable in your current model and assumptions you have about it.

The challenge in creating, managing and finding opportunity in chaos is that it is by it's very nature Not Easy! This, I am here to tell you, is The Good News. If it was easy--as I am found of saying in the home building world--everybody would be doing it, and the arbitrage of opportunity would be diluted to the point of meaningless.

What is the take away here? That the power is increasingly going to reside in the consumer. What You Need To Understand is that the chaos is also increasing for the consumer. Be the organization that makes their life easier, and develop the real relationships with them so they will trust you.

When there is chaos, trust is scare. Scarcity creates value.

Cisco Systems Bets on Group Collaboration for Increased Employee Productivity

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/cisco-ceo-chambers-key-risk-running-a-company-on-social-networking/40754

Noteworthy piece in ZDNet from back in October (hat-tip--the social media groups in the Linked-In discusion forums!)

Cisco CEO John Chambers said the company’s two biggest risks are its bet that video will become critical to networks and trying to run his company on social networking.

Speaking at the Gartner Symposium conference in Orlando, Chambers talked about how technology executives need to translate IT terms to productivity. The product risk to Cisco is obvious. Perhaps enterprises won’t bet big on video.

But the social networking comments were notable. We’ve heard through the grapevine that Cisco employees were struggling with Chambers’ penchant for running the company on a collaboration framework. Why is “running a company on social networking” such a risk. One big challenge is cultural. If a business leader is savvy on a social network could she become CIO? Sure, says Chambers.

“The thing that’s about to change for organization structures is that executives will serve on social networking groups and be moved based on function,” said Chambers.

Chambers noted that technology executives can be moved to business functions and general managers can run IT. As long as these executives drive results, Chambers isn’t going to get stuck in some role.

Now some of this is a case of Cisco selling collaboration. Everything from the network to WebEx to the Cius tablet to telepresence is hooked into collaboration. Cisco has to eat its own social networking dog food. However, Chambers noting that collaboration is damn hard indicates that there’s more than just a sales pitch involved.

In fact, when Chambers was asked about what the biggest investment in a non-Cisco product should be. Chambers said that more spending needs to support the “cultural change of technology.”

Simply put, collaboration technology is a lot harder than it sounds.

Other key points from Chambers:

•Enterprises will have to move to support any device. Cisco now does that, but the challenge is finding out how to provide security and support while offloading intelligence into the network. Did Cisco want to support multiple devices? “We didn’t have a choice. We support some laptops more than others, but any device to any content is a must,” said Chambers.

•Cisco bet on the consumer market on the idea that creativity will emerge from social networking, technology and the consumer. “We moved into the consumer market because we thought a lot of what we would learn would go to business,” said Chambers.

•Apple’s iPad is a great business tool, said Chambers. He noted that Cisco “started the Cius before the iPad.” However, Cius will find a role by packaging telepresence, video and integrated communications, he said.

•Cisco will grow employee productivity 10 percent a year over the next decade due to cloud computing, networking and collaboration.

•CIOs need to put technology into business terms.

•IT budgets will grow dramatically over the next five years “if we translate technology into growing productivity and revenue streams.”

•Security and agility are the biggest challenges for cloud computing.

•Are there two customers who care about Cisco’s environmental performance? Wal-Mart and Duke Energy.

•Cisco “will sell anyway you want to buy,” quipped Chambers. He was referring to dealing with CEOs that want to invest for growth or cutting costs.

•On making servers, Cisco said the company “would have never entered the server business as a standalone.” But computing and networking are coming together “not just in the data center, but all the way to your home.”

•Chambers said the company’s UCS data center architecture is the first big change in two decades. Chambers said “we approached the incumbents about doing this, but they weren’t interested.”

•Security is front and center for CIOs. Chambers said security is the biggest risk to business.

•“There’s not a CEO or government leader in this world that won’t invest in new concepts that meet business needs,” said Chambers. “You have to put these technologies in business terms.”

Being slightyl lazy this morning, I just posted the whole piece, but the relevent bits stand out pretty well. The key points being, "Cisco will grow employee productivity 10 percent a year over the next decade due to cloud computing, networking and collaboration." and "Cisco bet on the consumer market on the idea that creativity will emerge from social networking, technology and the consumer".  That's noteworthy. Using 'social media' is more than just another way to extend your brand and viral marketing. It's developing creative platforms where real innovation can occur, cross cultural groups can collaborate, and productivity can be stimulated.

Is it easy? Of course not. It takes leadership, vision, and a willingness to push cultural change. It's a 'bet', a 'risk', sure. But it's a much better bet and risk that holding the course with old world mentality and culture. That's a world we're leaving behind.

Group Intelligence

This is interesting! Groups are smarter than individuals:

Group IQ

The new work is part of a growing body of research that focuses on understanding collective behavior and intelligence — an increasingly relevant topic of research in an age where everything from scientific progress to entrepreneurial success hinges on collaboration. Embedded in a century’s worth of Broadway shows, the interactions of online communities, or the path a ball travels between soccer players, researchers are finding hints about how individual people contribute to make a group creative and successful.

The interest is fueled in part by the Internet, which provides an unprecedented opportunity for people to join and leave groups, unbounded by geography. In the digital age, interactions between people are also creating a huge stream of data, giving scientists new ways to glean precise insights about how complex, aggregated behaviors arise. What they are finding is that groups, as entities, have characteristics that are more than just a summing up or averaging of those of its members.

“Intuitively, we still attribute too much to individuals and not enough to groups. Part of that may just be that it’s simpler; it’s simpler to say the success of a company depended on the CEO for good or bad, but in reality the success of a company depends on a whole lot more,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and senior author of the recent study, published in the journal Science. “Essentially what’s happening as our society becomes more advanced and more developed is that more things are done by groups of people than by individuals. In a certain sense, our intuitions about how that works haven’t caught up with the reality of modern life.”

 Creating online communities for your organization can tap into this group IQ. I'll keep saying it! We have an enormous amount of untapped knowledge and intelligence within our regions and organizations. Lets start tapping into it! We can't afford not to.

The Halo Effect

Great article outlining why fads in business strategies don't work.

http://www.managementconsultingnews.com/articles/rosenzweig_article.php

The most basic problem that I identify is an example of what is known as the Halo Effect. When a company is doing well—when its revenues and profits are up, and its share price is strong—it’s natural to infer that the company has a good strategy, an effective leader, excellent customer focus, and a vibrant corporate culture. When that same company falters, it’s easy to say that the strategy was misguided, the leader became ineffective, the culture became complacent, and the customer was neglected.
In fact, very often the company did not change much at all. Rather, people made different attributions based on its changing performance. Unfortunately, so much that we read about companies—in the business press, case studies, and even large sample research studies—is based on data that are undermined by the Halo Effect. These studies appear to have described the factors that lead to high performance, but are more correctly understood as identifying the ways that high performing companies tend to be described.

Most companies and organizations understand at some level they need to change. But they go for quick fixes instead, and do not possess the courage and  will to institute the kind of change that will make the difference long term.
I would rather build a house than work with organizations and companies that do not have the courage and will to do what it takes to institute real change.

Macro Planning--Putting it Together

I am not sure I'll be able to connect all the dots for you here, but what I'd like to do is riff off this brilliant except from Herbert Simon's "Strategy and Organizational Evolution", courtesy of the top notch Farnam Street blog.

It's a longish post and well worth the read. Here's the bit I'd like to riff on:

Institutionalizing intelligence activities

How can a firm organize so that it will scan the horizons with sufficient vigor, identifying potential problems and potential opportunities? It is no accident that the eyes and ears are located on the surface of the body and not in its interior. Intelligence requires continual contact with the relevant environments, and in the case of business firms two of the most relevant and important environments are the end-use (customer) environment and the science and technology (research and development) environment. Other parts of the firm should not be excluded from the search for information, but these are perhaps the two most important in it.
The marketing function is not simply a function of selling and distributing products to customers. It is equally a function of acquiring, through contact with the end-use environment, information about the future of the firm's markets and of markets into which it might enter. Salesmen and sales engineers may play an important role in this intelligence activity, but only to the extent that it is an explicit part of their function, they are trained to do so and they are linked effectively in communication with top management, planning and design units. Specialized units may also provide various kinds of intelligence—products of customer polls, for example. I shall not attempt to describe in detail how one organizes intelligence about the end-use environment, but simply call attention to its importance.

This is a big part of what the three pillars approach is designed to do.
One-- is to create the culture for what Simon calls "institutionalizing intelligent activities".
Two--systems thinking is understanding that all the 'parts' of an organization cross function is a multitude of ways, and in a non-linear fashion.
Three--Organizational and personal learning is an autonomous incentive cycle that creates the organizational intelligence across all boundaries internal and external to the organization.
Four--Social media technologies are very well suited and evolving rapidly for a organization to fully embrace, utilize and extend it's internal and external intelligence.

Unlike a mechanical system approach to organizational behaviour, where the default mindset is everything has to be measurable to discern value, the living systems approach is process oriented where value is an emergent result of the process.
What we really need to remember here is all successful long term enterprises are based on relationships.
Relationships with your employees, relationships with your suppliers, relationships with your customers, and these all interconnect in ways that are increasingly unmeasurable. This is not something that is quantifiable through data.
When we really dig down, it is based on trust! 

To build and maintain trust and relations, any organization must have a culture and system in place to constantly develop and nurture that trust and those relationships. This is the very heart of the three pillars approach.

Extending this further, the days are increasing behind us where the organization, particularly publicly owned corporations, can be thinking of themselves as separate or above the larger socio-economic system. Enterprises that are going to last, and prosper in the rapidly changing environment of the future will noticeably be seen as part of the solutions to today's and tomorrow's challenges.
The internet and the social media technologies it has spawned will make it increasingly difficult to have a disconnect  between the values of the organization and the values of society at large.

Seeing the world from a living systems point of view means recognizing that we are all part of the larger system, and it's long term health depends on the quality of us and our organizational behaviour.

Winning organizations of the future will actively have a culture of macro planning with organizational intelligence where the long term health of the organization and that of the socio-economic environment on which it depends supersedes that of the short term incentives that most humans and organizations are prone to.
This is both a profitable and winning strategy.

Rich Social Media--Third Pillar (Pt Two)

I want to open this post by making a very key point: my strategy for 'social media' only makes sense in the broader context of it as part of my three pillars approach to an organizations operational process and functionality, and that the organization is viewed as a living system operating in an environment of other living systems.
For our purpose here, "living systems" is defined as any and all formal and informal forms of social organization. Economic activity is the result of all "living systems" and individuals pursuit of resources required to maintain life.

If we embrace the idea of systems thinking (how else, I'd ask, would we think of a world that is comprised of a complex networked web of systems??) as how we think of and look at our organization, and we embrace the idea that our organization should be and is a learning organization, then what the internet and social media give us is an amazingly vast set of ways and tools to be a highly adaptive and trusted organization in today's highly dynamic and ever changing world.

One of the most obvious uses is internal social networking. Your organization has an enormous amount of untapped information, knowledge and intelligence than your organization is currently using. A stratified organizational hierarchy is a real damper on motivation and the inherent talent within your organization. Internal social networking can flatten that. If management and executive are threatened by that--get over it. Either they are insecure, incompetent or both. If internal social networking sniffs these sorts of bureaucratic deadweights out, be grateful. They are doing nothing but sapping team spirit and your bottom line. Skilled, competent management and executives can and will use the extra resources to do their jobs better, more productively, more intelligently with greater confidence and decision success rate than before. This exists within your organization--unleash it.

Organizations themselves are inherently complex, nobody can know everything there is to know about it and it's functionality--including you. For that matter, odds are you have an ignorance about a lot about your organization.
A comprehensive list of the array of networking tools available is beyond the scope of this post, but it's quite likely they might exist already within your organization and are being under utilized.

Externally, the dynamics of networking increase exponentially. The list of examples of companies and organizations that have tapped into and connected with their customer base, supply webs, and the randomness of network connections is legion. Your organization may already be tapped into it.

Developing the full potential of your organization using techniques and tools enabled by the internet and social media take courage, vision, and a change of leadership style. In today's socio-economic climate, this isn't an idle choice, it's becoming a necessity.

Why? Because the environment in which your organization operates is morphing daily. To grasp it, it takes things like a distributed intelligence to better comprehend it. That intelligence lies both internally and externally to your organization. If you are developing strategic paths without at least an awareness of what that intelligence has to offer, you are missing pieces of the picture. You are flying blind into an increasingly complex future.

Leading organizations that want to be the winners of today and tomorrow understand this. 

Rich Social Media--Third Pillar (Pt One)

Let me start this right off by saying I am not an expert on social media. I barely exist on Facebook, I do not as yet have a Twitter account, I blog but only to a very small and intended audience.
And this is partially the point--I don't have to be. In today's operating environment, we can't be everything, know everything, do everything. We are continually being broken down into, or fragmented into two very broad categories--specialists and generalists. It will be of interest at some point that I draw many of my functional uses of those two terms from my many years in the home building industry--but this is for posts further down the road.
I am in the generalist category, a synthesizer of specialists, you might say.

Now, while there are many ways to effectively use social media for both personal and business use, in this post we want to look at it as part of a broad strategy of integrating it as part of a three pillars approach as an organizational operating system.

To start, if we are running an organization, we are thinking of it as a living system. A living system can be guided, but not controlled. As a living system, it consists of web of sub-systems. Very broadly, those are going to be employees, your supply webs or networks (supply chains is so last century!), your customers and/or constituents, if publicly owned, your shareholders and/or stakeholders, if publicly owned, the media and social media including analysts. Every organization will be slightly or very different, but you get the idea.
First thing we need to understand is these are already networked in ways that can't be mapped or understood. They are also networked in ways that can be mapped and somewhat understood. (Valdis Krebs for example, provides a service and software for social network analysis)
All these sub-systems are made up of individual actors, each with varying motives. Each individual actor now has the means to connect and communicate with any of the other actors. This also needs to be understood. 

To be clear, all these sub-systems that are part of the web that is your organization are networked in ways that can and cannot be mapped and understood.
This is important to realize. It's also part of why if we're running an organization we have to change our perceptions of control. We can guide, we can lead, we can not control.
If the sub-systems are connected in formal and informal ways, they exchange information and knowledge. This is both good and bad. You need to understand this. You also need to understand that it is unlikely that you know whether it's good or bad.
Ignore this dynamic at the peril of you and your organization. This dynamic exists whether you like it or not.

In the world that is now, this is both the good news and bad news. It's probably salient to point out now that in today's world it's best if you can hold those opposing points of view in your mind at once. This is part of systems thinking.

The dynamics that are the internet and the social media it enables are working both for and against your organization as we speak (so to speak). By now, I hope you realize you are not controlling that dynamic.
This said, it's not unlikely that your organization does have some kind of social media strategy. You may even have a social media guru of some sort in your employ. It's likely you have some kind of social media branding strategy.

What I want to do is develop a deeper understanding for you and your organization that there is much more to be gained via the internet and social media.

That is what we'll dig into in the next post (which, in blog style, will appear before this post. )

Rich Social Media--Context

If we are creating an operating program for organizations to be more adaptive to the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century with the explicit goal to be a leading, winning organization of the 21st century, the question here is:
How does 'social media', or as I call it, "rich social media" play into my three pillars approach for creating such an operating program?


To fully understand the role that so called social media plays, we need a quick overview of the environment in which it operates.

All organizations, private or public, profit or not, operate in an environment and compete and/or cooperate for resources.
For much of the industrial era economy, this environment was relatively stable. Or, to be more accurate, the perception of the time was that it was stable. (a retrospective look would reveal it wasn't as stable as the perception.) The production of goods and services was mechanized, standardized, the input and output was measurable (or so it seemed), business cycles were long (the horizon was distant), management and organizational processes, systems, culture and psychology reflected the times in which it operated in.

With the advent of the computer and subsequently the 'knowledge economy' (or 'information economy'. these are subjective terms to try describe something that is broader, deeper than we can conceptualize, but serve the purpose of distinguishing the modern economy from that of the old industrial economy.) we have been leaving the mechanized industrial economy behind, and have entered an economy that is much more fluid, dynamic, non-linear, chaotic and unpredictable.
Operating in such an environment necessitates an entirely different mindset (mental model) and operating system, one that reflects biology and living systems. It is very important to understand this is not analogous or metaphorical. We are much more defined by living systems than we are mechanical systems.

Accepting this reality means giving up our idea of what is knowable, what is manageable, what is controllable along with the conventional wisdom of how to operate in an environment such as the one that exists now. We need to think more in terms of leading, rather than controlling, inspiring rather than constraining. 
In the industrial economy human capital was considered and treated as parts of a machine, and as a cost. While not strictly conceived of that way today, human capital is not considered with an open mind as to it's massive potential, a potential any organization needs to fully embrace to compete in today's operating environment.

For organizations to adapt, thrive, and remain relevant today, there are three main tenets that need to be understood and accepted:
One--life is comprised of countless interactions among living systems (enhanced by mechanical and socio-technological systems creating a web of systems that is unknowable. This is complexity.
Two--knowledge and information are what separates those that survive and those that do not.
Three--communication and media have forever been transformed by the internet.

These are pretty incontrovertible. If they are, you probably should not be reading this blog, you should close your browser, and move on. I can't help you in any way, shape or form. :) There are people and organizations that may live outside the bounds of those tenets, but they're also unlikely to be relevant in the future.

Accepting these, it becomes inherently logical for people and organizations:
One--to have a conceptual and operational understanding of living systems with a functional systems thinking mindset.
Two--to have a culture of organizational and personal learning to facilitate the acquisition and spread of knowledge and information.
Three--to have a conceptual and operational understanding of the nature and use of the internet and social media.

A tidy little overview like this makes it sound all so simple!! It isn't. Not at all. Why? That answer is simple--we're humans. As individuals, we're complex, and an aggregate and organized, we're even more so.
If this was easy, I'd have no prospects, and I'd be better off sticking to the sensible profession of home building.

Okay! We have a brief and I hope succinct bit of context here, in the next post I'll look at the concept of social media and the internet in more detail.

Social Networking

I've not addressed this aspect of my approach to organizational and personal adaptation to the change and challenges we're facing, and over the next few weeks I want to address this deeper.
For today, however, I want to post this quote:

 “If you don’t have a social strategy, you better go get one,”

That from here: http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/21/the-kleiner-perkins-sfund-a-250-million-bet-that-social-is-just-getting-started/

That in turn from this very encouraging post here at Andrew McAfee's blog. (Which is on my blog roll to the right)

Tag-Why Few Organizations Adopt Systems Thinking

Tidy little paper by Russel L. Ackoff on Why Few Organization Adopt Systems Thinking

Key points, one I touched upon below in my previous post:
--the cover your ass principle endemic in most organizations.
--systematic punishment of failure
--accounting practices and principles that cannot account for the value output of systems thinking
--very little inter-organizational communication...the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing
--jargon that makes sense to those learned in systems thinking but is incomprehensible to lay persons

Missed in the paper is the personal responsibility aspect, which, near as I can tell, most systems thinkers miss.

Hat tip for this piece goes to the LinkedIn discussion boards on Systems Thinking.

Coming from the ground up as I have, with no formal training or academic grade education, I perhaps have a more intuitive touch in getting people I talk to to grasp systems thinking. It's not that difficult. But! It takes time.
Adopting systems thinking is another matter. That is in large part to our culture of individualism, and not having a means of continuous education and practical application.
My goals for Transforming Organizations and Transforming People are to help address these shortcomings, but there are many boulders to roll up hill before I/we get to that point.