As I am nearing my 40th year of self employment, being a disruptive technology is a helpful notion – especially for those who have wondered for many years what it is I exactly do!

Over the years I have tried a variety of ways to provide an answer – while ‘free range feral’ appealed to me at one time, it probably would not have engendered confidence in potential employers. Charles Handy used the term ‘portfolio worker’ to describe people whose life was a mix of activities, paid and unpaid. While this provided a veneer of respectability for the somewhat unemployable, it still did not answer the question. I finally reverted to’ I do stuff’ – some of which I get paid for’.

So it was with a great sense of relief when I first encountered Dave, and the Cynefin framework in 2003 and discovered a way of describing and revelling in being disruptive – not for its own sake, but with purpose and intent. Disruption is a life long theme for me… something which came naturally and was unable to be tamed. Now I had a way of describing it.

Continue reading "On being a disruptive technology……" »

I grew up with jigsaw puzzles – my mother was disappointed when a birthday or Christmas passed without a new jigsaw puzzle somewhere among the presents. I’ve found nothing as effective to help me wind down while on holiday than unpacking a new jigsaw puzzle, sorting out the edge pieces and settling down to start looking for the patterns. And I still remember one weekend when I was scheduled for a brain scan on the Monday after the weekend, and the only way I could think of to get through the waiting was to focus on a new type of circular puzzle I had never built before.

Jigsaw puzzles are not all born equal, and it’s about much more than size. A large puzzle just requires more patience than a smaller one, but need not be harder to figure out. One of the strangest ones I ever saw, and which I regret not buying to this day, had the same picture printed on both sides, in portrait orientation on one side and in landscape on the other, and you had to figure out which side up the pieces had to go. In the round puzzle I mentioned earlier, it was not even possible to identify all the edge pieces from the word go, as many of them did not have obviously straight edges.

Continue reading "Cynefin jigsaws?" »

In our work at the Foundation, we have developed a language of our own with phrases like “speaking Greek to the Italians”, “polishing shoes” and others. The phrases function like metaphors and are short-hand for ideas we have discussed at length previously – the one about speaking Greek to the Italians refers to using Cynefin language when speaking to people who are not part of our team and therefore are unlikely to understand what we are talking about. Most families develop private languages like these; they play an important role in establishing membership and identity.

The same applies to fields of knowledge, of course. The discipline-specific discourse provides more precise language tools than the language in common use. Effective use of the discipline discourse is a crucial element of what students must learn in order to acquire an identity, first in the academic world and later as a professional in their chosen field. As an internal consultant, I learnt early on that the skill to rapidly acquire a new discourse is vital in getting access to any new community you want to work with. The downside, as Dave pointed out in his blog earlier this week, is that the use of language can also be used to exclude people from a community.

Continue reading "The vexed issue of language" »

When I was a statistician, I had almost complete professional freedom, as the people I worked for or with did not consider themselves qualified to judge whether the approaches I took were the right ones. In the world of education, the opposite happens – as everyone has gone to school for more than a decade, everyone considers him- or herself an expert on how it should be done, and therein lies the rub. Many an intervention is tried, and even implemented on large scale, because it sounds like a good idea, with very little evidence as to its suitability for the particular context.

So the Foundation I work for set out to generate evidence to support solutions in all our programmes. That turned out to be easier said than done in something like a bursary programme. The sample sizes required to achieve acceptable power and discrimination using traditional statistical methods were simply prohibitive in terms of cost. All the ethical issues familiar in social research presented themselves; for example, how can we not provide the support we believe can make a difference to the bursars’ success just for the sake of having a control group in the experiment? And if we see something is not working, how can we not intervene just to get good data?

Continue reading "What do you mean, evidence? " »

When my daughter was two or three years old, she asked for a story one night, and of course, being a devoted mother, I obliged. But the next night she asked for another story, and the next night, and the night after that…. Soon it started to feel like hard work to come up with a new story each night, so I developed a story-generating algorithm, which went something like this:

* Think of something that happened that day
* Start with “One day, a long, long time ago there was a …”
* Personalize the thing or animal you thought of into a character she could sympathize with
* Create a problem for the character and explore the consequences
* Find a way to solve the problem
* End with a description of how the thing or animal lived after the problem was solved.

This made it much easier to construct an impromptu story. One evening I even ended up with a pink flannel sheep social network. It started with the pink sheep on her green flannel pyjama suit. Of course the sheep was lonely; he had no other sheep within reach to talk to. Until one day (a key phrase when constructing the story), when he realized that where the pyjama top covers the pants, he could get close enough to another sheep on the pant half, and they had a lovely gossip. Then they both found other sheep they could reach across a fold of the fabric, or where the sleeve rests on the pants, and soon all the pink sheep were sharing news by passing messages up and down the pyjama suit, telephone-style.

Continue reading "Bed-time ritual " »

Well, I suppose a lapsed statistician is a more accurate description of my current status in the field of statistics – I haven’t proven a theorem in a quarter of a century, the last time I tested a hypothesis was two decades ago and as for data-analysis, well for that I now have SenseMaker Explorer!

When I started out as a statistician, there were no personal computers; we made very strong assumptions just to be able to calculate the results; non-parametric methods with fewer assumptions took all-night runs on the university mainframe for a simple hypothesis test. Then came the PC; suddenly exploratory statistics became possible – not that it was considered rigorous enough to be proper statistics back then. But I loved it – it was like being a detective, looking for structure in a mass of data, using dimension-reduction techniques to squash the information down into two or three dimensions that could be visualized and interpreted, looking for patterns in graphs and finally, when the data set gave up its secrets, finding out what the patterns I saw could actually correspond to in the real world! Unfortunately, in the first stage of analysis, the pattern often corresponded to a management decision nobody bothered to tell the poor statistician about, but that’s another story.

Sounds familiar? When I first saw the scatter plot matrix in Explorer, I felt like I’d come home – even better, I could now do the same kind of analysis on “soft” data too!

Continue reading "Reflections from a statistician " »

In our work at the Foundation, we have experienced one example after the other of happy coincidence. We would go to an official meeting, only to find that the chairman of the meeting is a childhood friend, or university roommate, or close colleague from a first job, or … I would identify a suitable partner for a project, only to learn that the Foundation’s director, Mpho, helped him to set up his business. We would decide to tackle a certain issue in a particular way, and then discover that the ideal opportunity to present the case is coming up in two weeks and we can still get on the agenda …

Now I’ve long ago discarded the “assumption of intentional capability”, especially the version that implies that when something unpleasant happens, someone intended harm. Such a position is simply not tenable if you view the world as a collection of systems at different levels, going about their business and interacting with each other when the circumstances require. That some of these events will have effects that I experience as negative, is just a simple inevitable fact of life – no malicious intent is required to explain it (I’m also not a fatalist – some of the agents in the systems I’m part of may indeed intend harm, but that’s quite rare in my experience).

Continue reading "Serendipitous synchronicity" »

The last year or so has been a fascinating roller-coaster ride of excitement and frustration as a small team of us worked to set up the Sasol Inzalo Foundation, whose goal is to be a pioneer and leader in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education systems reform in South Africa. We’ve met new wonderful, passionate people, but also rediscovered an amazing number of friends from the past; we’ve experienced so many unbelievable coincidences that we’ve stopped to be surprised by serendipity, and the intellectual challenge of engaging with complex ideas has more than made up for the frustrations of grappling with the South African education system and its stakeholders.

As this journey forms the backdrop to much of what I want to write about, let me start with some background about the Foundation: it was set up recently by Sasol, a large South African petrochemical company, and the world’s largest producer of synthetic fuels, hence the STEM focus. However, the Foundation has an independent board and our mandate is to focus on STEM skills development and capacity building for South Africa, not on Sasol’s future talent needs (although Sasol will benefit indirectly too, of course).

Continue reading "The journey begins ..." »

The main thing I'm supposed to be doing as a guest blogger this week is reflecting on how accreditation courses have changed over the years. You want to know the truth? Here it is: The first accreditation course felt more like a Harry Potter movie than an IBM Global Consulting meeting.

Continue reading "Reflexions III: The Meetings" »

As part of this reflective exercise, I've been going through a lot of old notes from the early days of the Cynefin Centre, which eventually metamorphosed into Cognitive Edge. When we began, one of the things that I noticed was that different types of people seem to be dealing with complexity science at different levels:

Continue reading "Reflexions II: The Metaphor" »