Ken Hunt has an article in this past week’s Globe and Mail’s (a national newspaper in Canada) Report on Business titled The Big Idea: Six Stigma. The title of this post refers to the joke that starts off this article. It’s fitting that it’s the engineer that sees the absurdity of taking a concept of Six Sigma to its extreme. I am assuming the engineer’s response in the joke is to management’s obsession with Six Sigma versus their claims of its necessity without understanding it fully. Being an engineer however I acknowledge that it is more likely both. The article states that the extent to which Six Sigma continues to be applied is undermining individual contributions to companies. In effect a boundary has been crossed with regards to the extent of application.

I recall the first training session I attended that introduced the Cynefin framework and remember how strange it felt to spend so much time talking about boundaries (metaphors were being used heavily at that time) in an abstract way. It was not until months if not over a year later when the concept of bounded applicability was introduced to me that the effort and importance of understanding boundaries in the earlier course was fully appreciated. Held within engineered production environments Six Sigma I believe has delivered significant returns. Hence its application is properly bounded within such areas. Pushed beyond such ordered environments it is starting to receive kick back which I read as the main claim of the Globe and Mail article. This is where I see the Cynefin framework offering a significant benefit in that it can offer a way to understand the limits of approaches such as Six Sigma, business process engineering, narrative / story collection, etc. within a context of an organizations operating environment. And so the graphic of this post shows that “Six Sigma” is valid in an ordered and predictable environment but shows that it becomes “Six Stigma” if one pushes to apply it in unordered complex environments.

it was with a little nervousness that I accepted the offer to be the inaugural Guest Blogger on the Cognitive Edge website. It came at a time of a busy travel/work schedule along with family demands (a 2-month old son, 6 yr old daughter on summer vacation, and the start of a house building project). However after jumping in and using my travel time as the opportunity to prepare posts I must say that it was an enjoyable experience. In the end I found myself looking forward to the opportunity to reflect and share thoughts with the broader community of CE practitioners and getting some attention from those that follow Dave’s blog.

This week represents the start of a new guest blog appearance at Cognitive Edge. I will leave the introduction to the next guest to Dave. Now having spent some time initiating posts I am looking forward to engaging in the comment section in the weeks ahead. It will be interesting to see how the mixed sequence of practitioner, academic and thought leader guests stimulates new insights and perspectives. The baton is now in your hands Gary…

Michael Cheveldave

I have spent most of my career trying to understand what makes experts in their field so good. Looking at fireground commanders making life-and-death decisions in seconds, nurses noticing that babies are developing infection – even before the blood work comes back positive, pilots inventing ways to control “uncontrollable” airplanes, military commanders immediately spotting the focal point for an upcoming battle, the experts see things that are invisible to the rest of us.

A friend of mine, Steve Fiore at the University of Central Florida, tried to ruffle my feathers by sending me a review of a book by Ian Ayres Super Crunchers. The takeaway message from Ayres’ book is that statistical analyses are more trustworthy than expert opinion.

I haven’t always been enthusiastic about the proliferation of so-called decision biases.

One of my early articles was entitled “Do decision biases explain too much?” I examined the Vincennes shootdown incident (in which a U.S. Aegis cruiser mistakenly shot down a commercial airplane flying from Bandar Abbas airport in Iran to Dubai). The captain was accused of decision bias because he appeared to see what he believed was happening. However, if he had failed to shoot down the airplane and it had in fact been an Iranian warplane that attacked him he would also have been guilty of decision bias – for ignoring base rates. In other words, as long as the captain got a bad outcome he would have been guilty of some sort of decision bias. But if decision bias can explain everything then it explains nothing.

Every month or two I host an informal brown bag lunch about cognitive systems engineering – a design approach aimed at improving cognitive work by guiding the system features by the cognitive processes they need to support.

Some of the comments on my first blog raised questions about expertise. Patrick Lambe wondered if it was possible for people in the KM community to develop expertise. I responded in a comment to Patrick but I think it may be useful to examine what criteria we use to assess experts.

Also, Wayne Zambergen asked directly What is expertise?

A recent report by an independent commission in the U.S. recommended purging the 26,000-member Iraqi national police to purge it of corrupt officers and Shiite militants. The report decries the sectarianism of the current police force which can only be eliminated by scrapping the current force – basically, starting over.

For years I have wondered about the disproportionate influence of the final events in sporting contests. If a basketball player makes a shot in the final seconds to turn a loss into a win, the newspaper accounts will typically describe how that shot won the game. Similarly, if the shot misses, then the newspapers will likely explain the loss in terms of that missed shot. Despite all the other plays during the entire game, these final heroics/failures carry a major share of the explanatory power. That seems distorted.

On Tuesday, September 11 I was the keynote speaker for a conference on Modeling and Simulation held at Virginia Beach, Virginia. My topic was the cognitive dimension of modeling and simulation. The topic had two purposes – to describe the cognitive functions of the people using the models and simulations, and also to provide guidance to people who build avatars and intelligent agents and want them to more closely mirror the way people think.

Sonja speaking: I was first introduced to Dave and the then Cynefin set of methods around 4 years ago when the first practitioner training took place. Back then I was still working for IBM, and it was an uphill battle to find any projects to work on. Since then, we’ve had the opportunity to do some really interesting work, specifically in the financial sector. Last year I struck out on my own, and I’ve never looked back. Prophets of doom in IBM said that the application of complexity and narrative in business would never be a sustainable business model, but I’m happy to report they were proven wrong! I recently started a new company together with 2 other practitioners, one of which, Aiden Choles will be blogging with me (Sonja) this week. We are the official Cognitive Edge accreditation partners in South Africa, and therefore have a good understanding of Cognitive Edge related activities. In this first entry, we’d like to reflect on the journey of building a Cognitive Edge network and capability in South Africa.

I (Aiden Choles) sometimes wonder if business leaders know what they’re missing out on by not embracing narrative techniques within their businesses. I remember facilitating an Anecdote Circle that drove this point home for me (which also caught the business by surprise a little). It was the first time this business had engaged in a narrative process when dealing with a problem. The issue at hand was a particularly bad run of resignations that had gutted the business of talented individuals during the course of a 12 month period.

When asked how I would approach the problem, I suggested that a narrative enquiry, in the form of an Anecdote Circle, be used to elicit narratives on the problem.

In my (Sonja) last entry, I mentioned a recent project in one of the large gold mining concerns in South Africa. In this entry, I'd like share some of the experiences from this project.

I have been part of multiple pre-hypothesis narrative enquiry projects over the last few years; it's probably the Cognitive Edge process I am most familiar with. However this project, a Culture Audit in the supply chain, provided a number of new and interesting challenges, the most notable being language and literacy. Because this process depends heavily on the ability of the participants to capture and cluster items, solving these problems was critical to the success of the project.

There is much global hype around Talent and the unique problem of attracting and retaining talented staff. As I (Aiden) track the shifts taking place in business, I see how talent retention strategies that were once successful are becoming less relevant and reliable. We wonder why these strategies are no longer effective? The reality is that the nature of talent in organisations has shifted and the level of complexity associated with this problem has increased dramatically – it is no longer as simple as offering more remuneration or status to retain talented employees. The expectations around loyalty and superior performance have changed and the dynamics at play are now more complex than ever.

In most instances, consultants propose a set of best practice initiatives, with a certain amount of customisation and creativity, to create a culture of retention. The basic premise of a Complexity approach to Talent Management is that such strategies may be relevant, but one cannot be sure until the problem has been explored, interrogated and space made for emergent solutions that are relevant to the context.

I (Sonja) have long been a fan of the Future Backwards exercise, in my opinion it is a CE component which is largely under-valued by practitioners. I've been using it with great success, in many different contexts, from Strategic planning workshops to Culture audits. It is also an excellent tool to set context when doing knowledge discovery.

Over the years I (Sonja) have been part of many sales pitches, both successful and unsuccessful. In this post I want to share a couple of thoughts on some of the do's and don'ts of selling projects of this nature. I would also be really interested to hear from you and want to encourage you to share some of your own learnings by commenting on this entry.

One of the Cognitive Edge methodologies that Sonja and I (Aiden) have found to be building up a nice head of steam in South Africa is ASHEN. The process of eliciting the Artifacts, Skills, Heuristics, Experience and Natural Talent in the Knowledge Transfer realm has been very valuable – especially when one considers the challenges of knowledge transfer across generational gaps.

We have begun to wonder though if the methodology might be expanded on to include elements that make for a greater depth in capturing knowledge?

Hands up those who have gone through a really solid exit interview process when leaving a company. Just what I thought ... very few of us have experienced a thorough, meaningful exit interview. Instead, many exit interviews are a mere "tick the box in the personnel file" formality rather than an opportunity to gain a rich perspective based on the anecdotes employees have to tell about the organisation.

I am a novice blogger. Dave Snowden invited me to blog for a couple of weeks on this website and I decided that I would try it out for fun. However, I feel a bit like a country cousin from Iowa gate crashing a New York fancy dress party. I am hoping that people will not see through the fact that I am not disguised and will actually mistake me for a country cousin from Iowa.