complexity

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April 4, 2012 by Patti

Network Tensions

I was reminded recently during a meeting with a client about the importance of both distinguishing and acknowledging the tensions inherent in intentional networks. The case in point: a very high-powered network of senior leaders in the nonprofit arena who had been carefully selected to be part of a facilitated network. The funder of this network supported network members by providing them sabbaticals; planning and facilitating shared learning experiences outside their geographic area; and giving them opportunities to meet, identify shared goals and possible areas for collaboration; and fostering their visibility to the wider nonprofit and political communities.

The funder did not set specific goals for the network. That is, there was nothing that they were expected to work on as a common effort. The intention was purely to provide a container that bounded the network and to stimulate the network in various ways to enable collaborative opportunities to emerge. And they did. Still, some people continued to question the “why” of this network. What were they supposed to do, exactly?

This tension, I noted, is one of the primary ones I exposed in Net Work: “Outcome v s. Discovery.” Tensions, I wrote, “are present all the time; both leaders and members of a network should be aware of how these tensions impact the health of a network. All networks will shift along these lines of tension as they respond to changes in the environment, changes in the demographics of their members, and changes in purpose, structure, and style.”

 

In one of those delightful moments of serendipity, I very shortly thereafter received via email from Andrew Rixon the following cartoon:

(Cartoonist: Simon Kneebone)

It’s always nice to hear that Net Work is being used, and useful and especially gladdening to see depictions such as this one.  Thanks, Andrew!

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May 18, 2011 by Patti

Leadership & Networks: Complexity & Self-Managed Teams

A visit to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to see the marvelous glasswork of  Dale Chihuly resonated in many ways, but salient for me was how looking at and reading about how these works are put together. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about leadership and networks. One of the key “tenets” in my list is to “embrace complexity;” when I reach this part in my NetWorkShops I often use the Snowden Cynefin Framework, and then talk about how the leader has to let go of trying to define specific results and outcomes. Leadership is about setting and holding a vision, setting guide lines for accomplishing the work, providing tools, infrastructure, coaching, and political support so that people can self-organize to do the work, and watching for patterns to emerge.

I recently came across a couple of blogs that very nicely mapped this recipe to the concept of self-organizing teams. One, a very nice blog by Dave Gray who  continued his podular theme in a post, Give pods a chance. He likens pods to self-directed work teams, and then gives examples from 3M, Amazon, and the Chinese motorcycle industry.  He emphasizes that podular, modular design needs to happen in the context of a connected company. He says of Amazon:

Bezos does have an answer though: Break big problems down into small ones. Distribute authority, design, creativity and decision-making to the smallest possible units, and set them free to innovate. Small teams focus on small, measurable components that customers value.

Gray does not skirt the problem set: rewarding teams rather than individuals, dealing with loafers, and so on, but stresses that if you are in an industry in which complexity is increasing, you need to “take another look at organizational forms that play to natural human strengths, like ingenuity, curiosity, and the job of making a clear and recognizable impact on the world.”

Co-incidentally, Rachel Happe posted a vision of the social organization that provides additional detail about what it takes to provide an environment in which employees “self-commit” to projects that have been defined within the scope of the overall company strategy and direction. Managers are there to coach and support employees as they choose projects and navigate their careers. Rachel focuses on the social environment that is being enabled by the communications tools available to us; this is a nice counterpoint to Dave Gray’s description of how the pods (“projects”) innovate and create breakthroughs.

So, how did Dale Chihuly get me off my butt to finally write about this? It turns out that his projects are all about how he provides a vision, a set of guide lines, and a desired future state to the artists who work in his studio and who set up the art for exhibition. The Lime Green Icicle Towerconsists of over 2,400 individual pieces of glass that were blown and shipped to Boston. If you look at the video of its construction you may wonder about a detailed specification of how all the pieces were to be assembled. The fact is, there was nothing detailed. The parts were put together in Boston using the sense (vision) of what the finished piece was to look like, but was otherwise assembled in context, on the spot.

My sense of this is that the teams Chihuly is using are self-organized at two points in the artistic process: first, after he has a vision for a piece and describes the colors, shapes, and overall aesthetic that he is going for. Glassblowers work within these boundaries to create the amazing, individualistic shapes and contours of the pieces. Then, given boundaries for what the finished work is to be, they assemble those pieces, never entirely sure of what, exactly it will look like. The relationships among the pieces is always different, whenever a finished work is assembled, but the results are always true to a vision.

 

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July 23, 2005 by Patti

Emergent Learning and AARs : Connecting Marilyn Darling

I was delighted to hear that the current issue of Harvard Business Review contains a long-awaited article by Marilyn Darling, Charles Parry, and Joseph Moore, Learning in the Thick of It. It gives an insightful view of the AAR (After Action Review) process as it is practiced by the US Army’s National Training Center. Marilyn and her colleagues at Signet Consulting have been developing the Emergent Learning practice that brings the discipline to businesses. The core of the process is to elicit learnings from an experience that can be immediately applied in the next round of activities.

Nortel Networks was an early adopter of the Emergent Learning practice — that is where I first met and worked with Marilyn. We trained over 20 people in the method and used it as a core part of our knowledge management program. It’s one of those methods that, once learned, becomes ingrained in your thought and learning processes. The significant success factors, highlighted in the conclusion of the article, are particularly worth repeating here:

1) Lessons must first and foremost benefit the team that extracts them.
2) The AAR process must start at the beginning of the activity.
3) Lessons must link explicitly to future actions.
4) Leaders must hold everyone, especially themselves, accountable for action.

I also consider a method like this as an essential tool in the toolkit for building networked organizations. Why? Because the process requires conversation, honest dialogue and collaboration. People who use methods like this learn to know and trust each other, forging solid network bonds.

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