#5 Conversation in complexity: to access the multiple perspectives required to grasp the system

Tags

complexity, multiperspectivalism, perspectives, system

If the world’s largest cooperative scientific program, the CERN accelerator, tells us anything, it is that the dominant paradigm of scientific thought has resulted in us most valuing the direction of thought from the micro to the macro: from our sense that the particles that result from our analytic activity are the most sure things. Feeling that we have found certainty from the bits, we move on to the whole, and that is how we have sought our explanations.

The reverse flow – the macro informing the micro – has been diminished – as a capability, and in societies value. In education, the disciplines that work in wholes, art and poetry, have been treated as entertainments, not serious knowledge enterprises.

Cars are complicated. Not complex.

But in Complexity the whole is not the sum of the parts. Emergent properties are not arrived at by aggregating parts, nor understood by decomposing into parts. So what are we to make of our preference for parts over wholes? In complexity, studies of natural and human systems are explained by both kinds of analysis – micro (or analysis of the parts) and macro (or holistic analysis).

“Interventions are seen to be context dependent – we cannot explain the micro functioning without understanding the macro context. The health of a community or organization impacts the well-being of the individuals within them. Complexity provides us with the opportunity to look at problems with multiple perspectives, studying the micro and macro issues and understanding how they are interdependent.” (1)

So we must look at the macro, the whole. But in complexity this is not like looking at the “whole” of a car that comes off an assembly line. An intriguing feature that emerges in complex systems is in a sense obvious, but it is worth a second look. It is obvious that if something is complex, by definition we can’t reduce it to single dimensions. (If we could it wouldn’t be complex, merely complicated, like the car.) Indeed, we can only ever see a part of a complex system, based on where we stand as observers.

a) It is therefore smart to relinquish the urge to find a single reductionist frame, which would necessitate us missing key information – and instead become deliberate (and eventually skilled) in viewing complex systems through multiple perspectives.

b) Each perspective will be all the more robust and useful if we harness it to the fuzziness of language, to connotations, not denotations. For example, if we try to look at complex systems via rich metaphorical aspects: see a new business as a kingdom, a farm, or a garden, not as a choice between a hierarchy or a matrix.

Perspectivalism- accessed in conversation – becomes foundational, an imperative, because of this phenomenon.

“Complex adaptive systems, because they cannot be accurately predicted, can give rise to unintended consequences from planned interventions. Unintended consequences are often negative consequences. They can never be eliminated but through a strategic approach, involving multiple perspectives and extrapolation of time, they can be reduced.”(2)

(3)

It occurred to me while thinking about this “obvious” (but alien to us) need for perspectivalism that there was another whole issue between grasping complex systems and the role of perspectives.

The laws of physics are constant everywhere, but perceptions of what is objective, and measurements of what is “real” are specific to each observer.

• You observe that are sitting still in a train going forward

• An observer on the train looking at you sees you sitting still

• An observer on the train looking past you out the window sees you moving forward

• An observer on the platform sees you going forward

• An observer on a train moving faster than you in the same direction may see you going backwards, and then as their train slows, see you start to go forwards and overtake them.

If we take this last frame from physics and apply it to complexity, we get an insight as to why complexity theory is so hard to define. It is because it is, in its nature, a bunch of observer perspectives. This is generally true of human cognition about systems: “A system is a way of looking at the world” (4) But it reaches a crescendo in the context of complexity theory.

The frequently referenced features of complex systems – sensitivity to initial conditions, strange attractors, self-similarity or fractals, self-organisation, emergence at the edge of chaos, and the formation of fitness landscapes – are not so much invariant features of every complex environment, as features that emerge repeatedly. When we use them as windows on complex contexts, some show these features prominently, even archetypally, while others are less evident.

“Where to draw a boundary around the system depends on the questions we want to ask” (5)

Is this a problem? A source of embarrassment? In the context of talking about using different kinds of system modelling, Michael C Jackson observes:

”a diversity of approaches, therefore, heralds not a crisis but increased competence in a variety of problem contexts.”(6)

What Jackson calls pluralism, my hermeneutics Prof preferred to call “multi-perspectivalism” – to acknowledge complexity that transcends our finitude, and deliberately develop a competency to circle around messes using different perspectives: and thus continue as agents in a world full of messes.

SO WHAT

Multiple perspectives are not the accustomed way of thinking for managers. Management has chased the ideal of science, and the manager has chased the role of the scientist – one who pursues a single perspective as an objective observer, one who “gets to the bottom of things”, unearths the truth, comes to final conclusions. It is amazing that such a human discipline as management could have succeeded in suppressing the truth that different stakeholders have utterly diverse opinions about even the enterprise context they are involved with!

Menger recommended a “law against miserliness”: “… the methodological tool that is needed is not a razor but a prism resolving conceptual medleys into the spectra of their meanings…“(7)

So off you go. Go find some other people’s perspectives on your situation. But don’t forget to consider that conversation itself might be a perspective you could use!

(1) Begun, J. W., Zimmerman, B., Dooley, K. Health Care Organizations as Complex Adaptive Systems 2003

(2) Body, J. Design facilitation as an emerging Design skill: A Practical Approach www.dab.uts.edu.au/research/conferences/…/DTRS8-Body.pdf

(3) Drawings from http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikekline/. Thanks Mike

(4) Gerald M Weinberg Introduction to general systems thinking

(5) Donella Meadows, Thinking in systems

(6) Systems thinking: Creative holism for managers p280

(7) Menger, K. (1961) A counterpart of Occam’s Razor in Pure and Applied Mathematics Ontological Uses, Synthese, 13(4)

David Jones

Changing the ways people talk to get work done.

New work? New conversation! Change Conversation.

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#2 Conversation in complexity: to bring the “organisation” into being

Tags

change management, complexity, emergent, sense-making, social impact

So here’s today’s question: If conversation constructs the organisation, and innovation is key to survival, can you afford not to take responsibility for the conversational habits that make up your enterprise?

One of the most useful tricks of the human mind is to take things for granted. It is very restful to treat sitting and watching television or sitting in a car on a freeway, or sitting 10,000 feet in the air as normal. But none of these things had been experienced by any human 100 years ago. Now at any point in time there are a million humans in the air!

How do we do such things?

By conversation. By the private conversations in our minds we call thinking. And by the conversations in which we coordinate our behaviours to collectively conceive, design, develop and deliver our built reality.

As with the taking for granted of flying, we take for granted the relationship arrangements

· the pooling of effort

· the subordinating of ourselves to others and to purposes

· the trading of money and goods for labour

that make up organisations.

But those relationship arrangements were only ever made in language – they only ever came to be because of people talking. Organisations themselves only ever eventuate because of conversation, and are only perpetuated and maintained by conversation. That means we are making the places we work – and that means we can re-make them as places that are more fit for their environment.

Organisations arise through conversation:

1. Because as human activity systems they cannot fail to reflect the way language works

2. By the explicit construction of new entities through purposeful talk

3. By the everydayness of talk being the way we get things done

The first one is the most foundational, but also as you might expect, the most technical to explain. So instead of my readers bailing out now, what if I deal with these in reverse order? Perhaps the mood of a thrilling countdown will keep you till the end!

#3: Organisations arise through conversation just because talk is the way we get things done

Its 20 years now since Alan Webber wrote in HBR: “Conversations are the way workers discover what they know, share it with their colleagues, and in the process create new knowledge for the organization. In the new economy, conversations are the most important form of work … so much so that the conversation is the organization.” (1) And if this was the only reason, it’s enough to warrant leaders paying far more attention to what goes on in language.

(2), (3)

#2: Organisations arise through conversation by the explicit construction of new entities through purposeful talk

The phenomenon of “organisation” in economically viable human activity systems – of being in a state of recognisable coherence in the face of complexity , is only ever a product of conversation.

As radical as it sounds in a world of mega-structures and mass computerisation, what my friend Anne Deane said back in about 1995 is still true: “All there is, is people and conversations.” In more technical terms,

“Social structure is shared, repetitive and enduring values, beliefs, traditions, habits, routines and procedures. These are all social acts of a particular kind. They are couplings of gesture and response of a predictable highly repetitive kind. They do not exist in any meaningful way in a store anywhere but, rather, they are continually reproduced in the interaction between people.” (4)

This is a constant process in history. Where you head out the door to “work” in the morning, how long has your role existed? Your kind of job? Your kind of firm? Your kind of industry? Well, all those ways of organising had to be invented.

Right now, complex environments are seeing new forms of organisation arise. Take the organisational structures for “collective impact”, and the new organisational forms such as the “backbone organisation”. The term “collective impact” only took on currency in the public arena with the November 22, 2010 publication of a post bearing that title by John Kania, and Mark Kramer in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (5), and as of today, it still “only” has 257,000 references in Google. Yet the headlines of one of Kania & Kramers subsequent posts (Jan 21 2013) make the case: “Embracing Emergence: How Collective Impact Addresses Complexity. Collective impact is upending conventional wisdom on how we achieve social progress.”

And of course the technology that allows us to connect in a bewildering array of networked arrangements in so-called “social media” is also wall-to-wall conversation, however much we tend to see the shiny widgets and apps that conduct our presence. “What is transpiring is momentous, nothing less than the planet wiring itself a new nervous system. If your organization is not linked into this nervous system, you will be hard pressed to participate in the planet’s future. To be more specific, amidst the texting and Twittering and Facebooking of a generation of digital natives, the fundamentals of next-generation communication and collaboration are being worked out.”(6)

#3: Organisations arise through conversation just because as human activity systems they cannot fail to reflect the way language works

People talking together is what frames, forms and maintains the conventions and structures that support relationships. Conversational relationships are the only source of possibility for human meaning making (7)

Karl Weick observes: “The image of sensemaking as activity that talks events and organizations into existence suggests that patterns of organizing are located in the actions and conversations that occur on behalf of the presumed organization and in the texts of those activities that are preserved in social structures.” (8)

“Viewed from this perspective, the apparent solidity of social phenomena such as ‘the organization’ derives from the stabilizing effects of generic discursive processes rather than from the presence of independently existing concrete entities. In other words, phrases such as ‘the organization’ do not refer to an extra-linguistic reality. Instead they are conceptualized abstractions to which it has become habitual for us to refer as independently existing ‘things’. ‘Organizational Discourse’, therefore, must be understood, … in its wider ontological sense as the bringing into existence of an ‘organized’ or stabilized state.”(9)

OK, you can leave now if you must. I’ve made the case. You want to be a credible leader in a complex world, you better have a language about language.

But if you want to hold your nose and jump, here is the next layer down of theory about the way organisations are formed by conversation. It comes from the world of sociology. And I’ll let Ralph Stacey do the talking, a helicopter review of George Herbert Mead’s arguments about thinking and language, taken up to address complexity in organisations

“Mead said that humans are fundamentally role-playing animals, by which he meant that rudimentary forms of thinking take the form of private role-playing, that is, gestures made by a body to itself, calling forth responses in itself. It is this private role-play that constitutes mind. Social relationships are, therefore, gestures made by bodies to other bodies and mind is the gesturing and responding of a body to itself. The process is the same in both cases, namely a “conversation of gestures” in significant symbols, that is, the body rhythms of feelings, and they both proceed at the same time.

Mead then argued that the gesture which is particularly useful in calling forth the same attitude in oneself as in the other is the vocal gesture….The development of more sophisticated patterns of vocal gesturing, that is, of the language form of significant symbols, is thus of major importance in the development of consciousness and of sophisticated forms of society. Mind and society emerge together in the medium of language, where mind is private, silent conversation and social is public, vocal conversation.” (10)

“Eventually, individuals develop the capacity to take the attitude of the whole group, or what Mead calls the game. In other words, creatures have now evolved who are capable of taking the social attitude to their actions as they gesture and respond. The result is much more sophisticated processes of cooperative interaction…. There is now mindful, social behaviour with increasingly sophisticated meaning and an increasing capacity to use tools more and more effectively to transform the context within which the interacting creatures live.”(11)

“Throughout this explanation, human society is emerging simultaneously with human minds, including selves. Mead consistently argued that one is not more fundamental than the other; that one could not exist without the other. The social, in human terms, is a highly sophisticated process of cooperative interaction between people in the medium of symbols in order to undertake joint action. Such sophisticated interaction could not take place without self-conscious minds but neither could those self-conscious minds exist without that sophisticated form of cooperation. In other words there could be no private role-play, including silent conversation, by a body with itself, if there was no public interaction of the same form. Mind/self and society are all logically equivalent processes of a conversational kind. Social interaction is a public conversation of gestures, particularly gestures of a vocal kind, while mind is a conversation of gestures between “I”, “me”, “other” and “group” in a silent, private role-play of public, social interaction.” (12)

“What Mead presents in his theory of symbolic interactionism is complex, nonlinear, iterative processes of communicative interaction between people in which mind, self, and society all emerge simultaneously in the living present. Elias’ theory of process sociology presents processes of power relating in which social structures (habits, routines, beliefs) emerge at the same time as personality structures (ways of experiencing ourselves). Both Mead and Elias are concerned with local interaction in the present in which widespread, global patterns emerge as social and personality structures, as identity and difference, as human “habitus”. I have been pointing to how the complexity sciences model complex adaptive systems as generalised, abstract interactions that demonstrate the possibility and plausibility of the theories that Mead and Elias present” (13)

Are you perpetuating old conversation forms as though they are not something you are responsible for?

(1) What’s so new about the new economy? HBR 1993

(2) Flores quoted in Brown, J. and D. Isaacs Conversation as a Core business Practice,

(3) Cartoon by Michael Leunig

(4) Stacey R. D.,2003 Complexity and Group Processes: A Radically Social Understanding of Individuals Routledge, p65

(5) “Social Impact” Winter 2011. p. 36-41.

(6) Moore, Geoffrey – White Paper – “Systems of Engagement and The Future of Enterprise IT, A Sea Change in Enterprise IT”, http://www.aiim.org/~/media/Files/AIIM%20White%20Papers/Systems-of-Engagement.pdf

(7) The extensive literature around feral children and “the forbidden experiment” bears this out. Let alone create, we cannot live without language. To do language is to be human. In the 13th century, Emperor Frederick II of Germany experimented to see how children would develop without being exposed to language. He theorized that children would either develop the ability to speak Hebrew (the language which he thought was the original language of mankind) or to speak the parents’ language. Infants were fostered without having a word spoken to them – all the children he used in the experiment died. In a similar vein, the 16th century Mogul emperor Akbar experimented with infants to see if they would develop a “natural” religious faith without being in contact with people – the children grew up quasi-deaf and mute for life.

(8) Weick, Karl E. ; Sutcliffe, Kathleen M. ; Obstfeld, David Organizing and the process of sensemaking Organization Science, July-August, 2005, Vol.16(4), p.409

(9) Robert Chia Discourse Analysis as Organizational Analysis Organization: a debate on discourse 7(3): 513–518 2000

(10)Stacey 2003 p62

(11)Stacey 2003 p63. Eventually, these tools take the form of artefacts that in turn pattern our own behaviours, as described by Francis Cooren: Cooren, F. 2000 The Organising Property of Communication (Amsterdam, John Benjamins)

(12)Stacey 2003 p 63, 64

(13)Stacey 2003 66. This is Stacey’s critical contribution – the theory of complex responsive processes of relating that lead to organisations. As Stacey goes on to say ”with regard to human action, the useful concept is process rather than system.”

David Jones

Changing the ways people talk to get work done.

New work? New conversation! Change Conversation.

#1 Conversation in complexity: to allow for the inevitable feature of emergence

Tags

complexity, emergent, planning, Scope

First – what do we mean by complex?

Well, you have to be amused that defining complexity turns out to be, well, complex….

“Complexity has turned out to be very difficult to define. The dozens of definitions that have been offered all fall short in one respect or another, classifying something as complex which we intuitively would see as simple, or denying an obviously complex phenomenon the label of complexity.“ (1)

In such circumstances, it often turns out to be best to go with our intuitions of what we mean, and allow instances and illustrations to clarify our meaning. It’s a method that works for all sorts of important ideas, like what it means to love, or be a dad, or….

Perhaps the one thing that is worth saying is that complex is more than just complicated. Modern cars are complicated – they have many thousands of components, but no mysteries. The neurobiology of car drivers is complex – perhaps fewer different kinds of working parts, but deep mysteries about how they combine to produce the “simplest” of phenomenon like recognising your turn off…

And then what do we mean by emergence?

Economist Jeffrey Goldstein defined emergence as: “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems”. That’s a bit tricky, because it manages to use the terms emergence, complex, and self-organisation all in the same knot.

When the actions of entities that are un-coordinated by any explicit mechanism result in a “higher” level order of behaviour arising, this is known as self-organization or “emergence”. Activity systems that appear disordered at one level, such as ice crystallisation (and crowds and economies) may yet exhibit ordered behaviour, such as snowflakes (and fads and markets). (2) This is also a feature of human conversation. We string together bits called words using some simple rules (like “add-verby things go with verby things”) and complex things emerge that make or break someone’s day, like saying “Will you marry me?”

A key thing to note is that in environments of complexity, emergence is inexorable (it happens relentlessly whether we want it to or not), but not necessarily desirable.

Is a big wave a complex phenomenon with emergent features?(3) No doubt that could start an argument. But what there is no doubt about is that the place to be as it unfolds is riding it, not under it… This is the capability provided by conversation in emergent environments.

So let’s take it as given that human enterprises

a) are in many cases becoming more and more complex, due to technological innovation, increasing variety in products and services, sophistication of customer demands, the span (number of countries) a business operates, and globalisation

b) that therefore they will exhibit this weird and (not necessarily) wonderful phenomenon of emergence.

For conversation to be any use to us in such a world, we have to be able to propose a mechanism for conversation to have an effect.

It turns out that it does.

“Complex adaptive human systems are created through social interaction, i.e., discourse. Meaningful discourse is the result of social interdependence and requires the coordinated actions among members of the organizational system (Gergen, 1994; Pearce & Littlejohn, 1997). At the most basic level, discourse is “what is said and listened to” between and among people (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). Described more fully, discourse is a complex information-rich mix of stimuli that includes not only what is spoken, but also the full, conversational elements of behaviours, symbols and artefacts, etc. that are used in conjunction with, or as substitutes for, what is spoken. Conversations maintain realities through an accumulated mass of continuity, consistency, and relatedness to other conversations (Berger & Luckmann, 1996; Watzlawick, et al, 1974).” (4)

And the place that that can most reliably predicted to happen is in the conversations that we might call “planning”:

a) not just the BIG planning conversations of the enterprise, but all those conversations in which we align our understanding and create shared meaning for our actions, and

b) though not in scheduling on MS Project – although the best scheduling conversations will in fact have significant social interactions built in,

c) but in the kind of planning successful generals seem to have always understood, yet we can identify with in everyday life:

“The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because …a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human … is able to see beyond the first battle. In this sense one should understand Napoleon’s saying: “I have never had a plan of operations.“ … no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.“(5)

“Paradoxical as it may seem, there is an important role for planning in emergent design. Even though a plan may evolve considerably over time, we need its content at any one point to help us coordinate our individual actions in that moment. Also, planning occasions conversations that are the medium for the emergence and evolution of shared ideas and relationships, the continuous renewal of shared understanding, common purpose, alignment and trust.”(6)

Of course, not everything that goes under the name of planning is up to the challenge of coordinating us in conversation.

“While it is now commonplace to say that our world is complex to the nth degree, it is another thing to try and map out that complexity in a chain of causes and effects as results-based management frameworks attempt to do. Planning and reporting methods that attempt to do so, while useful under conditions that are relatively simple and orderly, are not credible ways to generate understanding of contexts where complexity and uncertainty are high.” (7)

In fact we need to shift our attention from the content of the planning – the attempt to control the future by specifying its trajectory – to the conversations of planning:

“The results indicate that the group processes leading to the development of shared strategic cognition are more important than the outcome of shared strategic cognition in terms of predicting organizational performance.”(8)

“ ‘complexly structured, non-additive behaviour emerges out of interactive networks. . . . interactive agents unite in an ordered state of sorts, and the behaviour of the resulting whole is more than the sum of individual behaviours. Ordered states. . . [arise] . . . when a unit adapts its individual behaviours to accommodate the behaviours of units with which it interacts. …Interacting people and organizations tend …to adjust their behaviours and worldviews to accommodate others with whom they interact. Networks with complex chains of interaction allow large systems to correlate, or self-order. … Humans adjust their interaction based on characteristics of the other parties to the interaction. Extensive communication among large networks of humans can spread and create self-ordering structures, such as norms. “ (9)

So conversations, demonstrably in the form of “planning conversations”, and in fact in other significant forms too, are what enable us to become the big wave surfers of enterprise.

(1) Principia Cybernetica web http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/COMPLEXI.html cache accessed 250913

(2) This different kind of order is usually referred to as a “higher level”, but I’m not sure what the reference point is for that comparator.

(3) Photograph by Shalom Jacobovitz http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2010_mavericks_competition.jpg. The big wave surfing metaphor is worth keeping in mind. Being on top of the wave is better than being under it, and conversations make it more likely that you can ride complexity. But there are no guarantees. Mark Foo (December 23, 1994), and Sion Milosky (March 16, 2011) died surfing this wave at Mavericks.

(4) Mary A. Ferdig Complexity Theories: Perspectives for the Social Construction of Organizational Transformation http://www.sba.muohio.edu/management/mwacademy/2000/21d.pdf

(5) Moltke “On Strategy” (1871), as translated in Moltke on the Art of War

(6) Anthony L. Suchman 2012 Organizations as Machines, Organizations as Conversations: Two Core Metaphors and their Consequences Relationship Centered Health Care University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry p1

(7) Daniel Buckles &Jacques Chevalier 2012 Assessing the impact of international Volunteer co-operation IVCO International forum on development service

(8) Michael D. Ensley & Craig L. Pearce Shared cognition in top management teams: implications for new venture performance Journal of Organizational Behaviour 22, 145±160 (2001) http://web.cgu.edu/faculty/pearcec/Cognition_in_TMTs.pdf

(9) James W. Begun, Brenda Zimmerman, Kevin Dooley, 2002 Health Care Organizations as Complex Adaptive Systems. Revised version in S. S. Mick and M. E. Wyttenbach (eds.), Advances in Health Care Organization Theory (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003).

David Jones

Changing the ways people talk to get work done.

New work? New conversation! Change Conversation.

10 reasons why Conversational Methods are essential to facing complexity

Tags

complexity, fuzziness, narrative, perspectives, resilience

Conversations are the crucible in which humans build shared understanding, engagement and intent around a problem space. And, particularly relevant to our present situation in the world, conversation brings to bear the highest human capacity for facing complexity in real time.

“The most essential responsibilities for managers…can be characterized as participation in conversations for possibilities that open new backgrounds for the conversations for action” (Winograd and Flores, Computers and Cognition)

“We know that even at the heart of production lies innovation. We know that enterprise, and societal competitive advantage is driven by knowledge. Not just in the design and delivery of products/services, but in day-to-day problem solving and decision-making processes (especially considering results and impact). We know that to mitigate the impact of complexity upon an organisation that there is a need for devolution and the empowerment of front-line personnel, the sensory receptors that enable fast reactions to the changing environment. We also know that the ability to network and collaborate is a vital component in becoming resilient against the effects of complexity. ” http://theknowledgecore.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/complexity-and-integrated-reporting-a-new-opportunity-for-km/

These are the indicators that you need a capability in conversation. Only in the brilliance of what humans can be when they talk together – using patterns that are crafted wisely – can we really be resilient in the face of complexity.

Recommendations that are purely grounded in procedural control have an inevitable brittleness. They are as misdirected as this patented machine for the perfect golf swing….

Over the next series of posts I will introduce 10 reasons why conversation is vital for enterprises that face complexity – and how enterprises can become complex adaptive systems through unlocking the brilliance of human capability in the requisite conversations:

…in order to allow for the inevitable feature of emergence

…in order to bring the “organisation” into being

…in order to activate and apply our capacity for adaptive expertise

…in order to harness the power of fuzziness in language

…in order to access the multiple perspectives required to grasp the system

…in order to clarify and cultivate our values that will bound our system activity

…in order to access the requisite variety essential to leadership in the system

…in order that we can participate in forming the necessary shared context

…in order to take energy in from our operating environment

…in order to access the enduring DNA of narrative

David Jones

Changing the ways people talk to get work done.

New work? New conversation! Change Conversation.