By Michael Cheveldave

Well, here we go.  Another milestone reached by Cognitive Edge with the role out of a new website and a separate site that presents their software offerings.  It’s an exciting turning point for CE.  As the first guest blogger I hope to help mark this transition with a series of interesting posts discussing my experiences and lessons I have learned through working with Cognitive Edge methods during the past few years.  I was first introduced to the methodology and thinking in 2003 (in the days when the effort was part of IBM) and it has been an interesting journey going from being amazed and fascinated by the theoretical concepts to putting them to practice on real-world applications and exciting projects.

About a month ago I was meeting with a small project team I am working with and one of the team members mentioned an interesting National Geographic article they had read on swarming behaviour. Since I have been talking about complexity for many months with this group (we worked together on another project last year that used CE methods) we very much engaged in trying to understand the key points of this article. For those who have not read (or will not have the time to read) the article, it basically explains how the patterns of self-organization in bees or ants can result in the entire population as a whole doing amazing things without having any one agent (ant or bee) in control. We discussed this as it might relate to hierarchies in companies and the possibility that departments in companies might run just as well with the same concept – namely no central authority or concentration of control. I don’t believe this since there are fundamental differences between ants or bees and human beings; however I do believe that there are great lessons to be learned from ants or bees that can help leaders navigate complexity. The discussion then led to an interesting concept that perhaps employee morale (good or bad) is an emergent pattern that occurs without any individual employee realizing that they are contributing to the pattern. The other issue that I suggested is that there might be attractor (possibly strange) dynamics at play where the group morale feeds on itself and is difficult to shake. For poor morale, it grips a group or organization like an infection. The same could be said for a good morale (i.e. how often do we say things like ‘her positive attitude is contagious’). Now if individuals in groups engage at the agent level in a way that they cannot see the overall emergent pattern of morale then they can be contributing to either a negative or positive effect without knowing it.

Recently I completed facilitating my ninth Cognitive Edge Archetype, Theme, and Value workshop. This method involves allowing a group of people to share stories (possibly customers talking about a product or experience with receiving a service, patient’s experiences when receiving care in hospitals, employees about everyday work, etc.) in a certain context and then running wall exercises (papered walls with lots of hexagon-shaped post-it notes) to identify the emergent archetypes, themes, and values that are embedded in the stories that were shared. As a variation of this you can have a group also review other types of material such as news articles, photos, artwork, etc. and include this material with stories that are told by the participants. I ran a variation of this workshop with a group of eContent conference attendees earlier this year for which an article was written.

This past weekend my wife and I along with the help of our retired fathers and our very capable building contractor surveyed our new property and positioned the foundation of our new home. In a couple weeks our building crew will be starting on the project so we needed to clearly stake the perimeter of the house on our property. We are excited and nervous at the same time. Part of the process of positioning the house on the property is to map out elevations where the home will be situated. As you can see from the picture the property is quite flat even though we are surrounded by mountains. The elevation changes are minimal around the building envelope, but even small changes can have impacts on landscaping, basement window placements, entrance considerations, etc.

Taking elevations reminded me of reading contour maps when I was younger when we hiked mountain streams and lakes with my father and friends on fishing trips. Having grown up in the mountains here in British Columbia one gains an appreciation and understanding of contours and landscape variation. Landscapes and their 3D surface plots provide a good metaphor for organizational situations and insights. This past year I was introduced to landscape representation by Cognitive Edge and how they can be created using organizational stories held in narrative databases.

Over the past several months a number of my client projects have had me thinking a lot about high performance (organizational) and culture. It is quite impressive the level of thought, debate, and effort organizations, both private and public, spend on defining what a high performing organization is for their context and how to best communicate their ideal definition to inspire employees to align their behaviors accordingly. What about monitoring an organization’s current culture? We have many hard measures of performance but the link to culture is more complex. Can we learn from companies well known for their performance and strong cultures?