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.