The other day I found myself being reprimanded – ever so nicely – for queue jumping. I was heading for a specialized department in a London hospital. At the entrance to the building five people were standing around in no particular spatial configuration and clearly de-coupled from each other. The door was already open so clearly, they were not waiting to get through the door. Without thinking, I went through the door to look for the department that I had been referred to. One of the five people that had been hanging around outside came in after me and pointed out with some indignation that there was a queue and that he was first in line. I looked around. What line? I concluded that I was dealing with one of those metaphysical kinds of queue, one whose existence has to be inferred from a limited number of subtle and indirect signs, most of which are culture-specific - raised eyebrows, pursed lips, shouting, running at the queue jumper with a meat cleaver, etc. – rather than from direct observation. In such queues, one needs inside knowledge to figure out whether one is in or outside the line. Naïve empiricism has no purchase on this process.

My 19-year old son tells me that I am immature. At his age, my eldest daughter – now 38 - said the same thing. That was nineteen years ago. I have had nineteen years to mature and now appear to have passed up the opportunity. So either my kids misunderstand me or I am an incorrigibly immature 63-year old.

I have always been interested in the nature of codification, the process in which phenomena are assigned to socially agreed upon categories. Codification is typically presented as a quintessentially soporific activity. Under the tyranny of codification, the habitual insomniac, instead of just counting the sheep jumping over fences to get herself to sleep, is required to classify them as they jump. White sheep versus black sheep, fat sheep versus anorexic ones, sheep chewing gum versus sheep wearing make-up, etc. As the complexity of the classification system grows, the excitement that accompanies the power of classifying (esp. of sheep wearing make-up) helpfully begins to dim. The process is guaranteed to halve the time-to-REM that simple sheep counting can deliver.

I often write papers with my friend Bill McKelvey, professor of strategic organizing at UCLA. It works like this. He flies into Barcelona and stays with my wife and me for a few days. He admires the view of the sea from my terrace and we go for frequent walks. The view from my terrace has a calming effect on Bill, and as you will presently see, this is important to our collaboration.

I often drop in at the Gran Sitges Hotel for a drink. The hotel is conveniently located at the foot of the hill on which my house is located. Three days ago, I went into the bar and asked for Diet Coke. I was told that there was none and was offered a Diet Pepsi instead. Now I happened to know that the hotel stocks Diet Coke but that since the margins are juicier, hotel staff are under strict instructions to push Diet Pepsi instead. When I pointed out to the waiter that I was an ‘insider’ who knew what the game was, he sighed and went off to get me a Diet Coke. But, provocatively, he brought it ready-poured in a glass, with no bottle in sight. Determined not to be taken for a ride, I asked to see the bottle. The waiter, by now feeling homicidal, went and fetched the bottle.

I have been helping to prepare a workshop that will be held at CERN just outside Geneva in mid November. CERN, you will recall, is where the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator that is 27-kilometer in circumference, is being built in order to test for the existence of a tiny and elusive particle, the Higgs Boson. Two research teams are competing to find the elusive particle, one called ATLAS, the other called CMS. ATLAS is one of the largest high-energy physics experiments ever undertaken.

In 1949 George Zipf, a Harvard linguistics professor, published Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology. What became known as Zipf's law inversely relates the ‘size’ of an occurrence of an event to it's ‘rank’. For example, he sought to determine the 'size' of the 3rd or 8th or 100th most common word. Size here does not denotes the length of the word itself, but the frequency of use of the word in some English language text. Zipf's law states that the size of the r'th largest occurrence of the event is inversely proportional to it's rank

We face an environmental crisis. Average per capita energy consumption is too high and growing. Neither current levels nor projected trends are sustainable. Mother Earth is having none of it. Some have concluded that sooner or later we will either all have to learn to eat our evening meals in the dark – steering our forks towards our mouth by drawing on what is left of our echolocation skills – or we will have to vastly expand the US space program so as to export those who are surplus to requirement towards some currently under-developed exo-planet suffering from labor shortages, and hence in need of immigrants.

Some years back, Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London introduced congestion charging for road vehicles wanting to occupy Central London’s road network during working hours. This makes sense since the supply of Central London roads is inherently limited and the demand for central London roads keeps increasing. Economics 101 suggests that congestion charging merely reflects Central London’s overall scarcity value. And although there is some debate about how successful congestion charging has been, it has now been extended to the west of London. Viewed from the perspective of someone (ie, me) who spend on average a week a month in Central London and does not own a car, the congestion charge has been a godsend.

According to an article in The Economist of September 15 (‘Business by numbers’) algorithms have become the instruction manuals for a host of routine consumer transactions. Amazon, for example, uses algorithms to help the company recommend further purchases ‘in the neighborhood’ of your new purchase. The logistics firm that will deliver the Amazon product to your door will then use an algorithm to identify the best delivery route. And the call centre in Mumbai dealing with your complaint to BT will use an algorithm to figure out from your voice which part of Yorkshire you come from before matching you up with a plausible Bangalorian. The latter, in turn, will be algorithmically instructed to fool you into believing that he lives just across the road from you and knows what school your kids go to.

Pragmatist like Charles Peirce and William James to knowledge to be beliefs that had cash value – ie, that you would be willing to act upon. Last week, account-holders in Britain’s fifth largest mortgage lender, Northern Rock, brought to light a perverse way of looking at the Peirce-James definition of knowledge by acting on beliefs that had no-cash value, thus triggering the first bank run in Britain since 1866. This got me thinking of the relationship between individual and collective confidence, and by implication, on the relationship between knowledge individually held and knowledge collectively held. Money, for example – the stuff of bank runs – expresses a fiduciary relationship between citizens and the state. I know what I can currently buy for a pound sterling even though this knowledge ultimately depends in some mysterious way on what I believe I can buy for a pound sterling. Confused? There is worse to come. What I can buy for a pound sterling also depends on what you believe I can buy for a pound sterling, and on what your neighbour believes I can buy for that sum, and on what your neighbour’s neighbour believes, so on. In a sense, then, knowing exactly what I have when I have a hundred pounds in my account – knowledge that I will act upon when I sign my next credit card slip – is dependent on a complex web of beliefs that link me up with the whole British social fabric as well as a number of Pushtun Tribesmen lost in the mountains of Waziristan whose minds is currently focused on poundings more than on pounds.

You have a public self and a private self. The public self is what you hold yourself out to be and are willing to take responsibility for; the private self, on the other hand, you may be able to do little about. Peel away the layers of the public self to get to the private self under the controlled supervision of a shrink and you finally reach those elusive Freudian entities, the ego, the superego and the id whose frenzied interplay often play havoc with the public image you are attempting to project. In the case of an onion, such peeling away will be enough in itself to make your shrink weep; in your case only a seriously repressed id would attract such sympathy from a professional.

As a frequent consumer of its products, I have often pondered the Starbucks phenomenon. A ‘Tall’ tea at Starbucks cost one pound sterling and 45 pence. To get your tall tea, you may have to stand in line for anything between ten and fifteen minutes waiting to be served – often longer at airports. When this happens, being of an impatient nature, I start reflecting on the deeper structure of the experience. If I were to put a value on my time at say, six pounds an hour – approximately the minimum wage in the UK – I would conclude that the real cost to me of a ‘Tall’ tea at Starbucks was approximately two pounds and 45 pence, the extra pound being the cost to me in time lost in waiting in line. So why did I not go somewhere else where I could sit down and get a waiter to serve me? It would almost certainly cost me less.

Congratulations to the Cognitive Edge team for a terrific set of guest bloggers. It's been a joy to read posts from thinkers whose work has so greatly influenced my own. In my postings I thought I would concentrate on describing some of the business narrative projects we've done at Anecdote since we started in 2004. But to get things started an introduction is in order.

Last month my colleagues and I at Anecdote filmed some stories about our work and history, mainly for internal use. One of the stories we recorded was how I met Dave in 2000. This meeting marked the beginning of my work in business narrative. The last 7 years has been tremendous fun.

Large government agencies can be daunting places for new starters especially for those people who have never experienced working in a vast and complicated bureaucracy. I know the feeling well having experienced a first day in 2000 joining IBM and trying to make sense of that 300,000 person strong fuzzball. Now imagine how you might feel if you are an Aboriginal person who has recently worked in a small community organisation and is now starting a new career in a large government department.

One of the most useful models I use is the Cynefin framework. It's particularly useful in explaining to executives why they might use narrative techniques to address complex business issues. Here is how I explain the Cynefin framework to decision makers.

Last Christmas I visited my folks in Jervis Bay on the New South Wales coast. My father and I were driving to his local shops when he mentioned that he recently got a bad batch of petrol. I asked him what happened and he said, “I filled up at either Vincentia or Huskisson. Come to think of it there was a tanker refuelling the petrol station at Vincentia. I bet it was churning up gunk in the bottom of the reservoir and I managed to get some of that in my car.” This was probably the first time my father told his bad petrol story. He was making sense of his experience but what came next I found really interesting. “And you know what Shawn, I’ll never again fill up at a station when there’s a tanker refuelling.” Dad rapidly went from a story of his experience to a rule of thumb that will change his buying patterns for the rest of his life. There was no analysis, no assessment of the pros and cons, just a plausible story. It occurred to me that this is how we make many of our decisions. It is sensemaking.

I had an immediate application for this insight. We’d been running a series of workshops across Australia for an organisation helping their regional centres establish knowledge strategies. The approach involved collecting stories on how people created, shared and used their knowledge. We then use a workshop process to identify the major patterns in those stories. At one point in the workshop the participants are faced with a wall of post-it notes clustered into themes such as ‘siloed information,’ ‘hard to find expertise,’ and ‘easy to speak our mind.’ To really help the workshop participants understand these clusters we needed to get them to write a story of how these issues emerged.

In my first attempt I presented the workshop participants with a sheet of butcher’s paper and asked them to write a story. They toiled at the task for about 30 minutes and found it difficult. They didn’t really know what I meant by ‘a story’ and they felt inadequate to create one. All the groups ended up merely presenting a set of dot points. A dismal failure. So I searched around for a way to guide the participants in their storytelling endeavours.

One of our friends, Viv McWaters, mentioned to us a while back that she had used a story spine approach to help people come together and work toward a common goal. A story spine is simply a structure for a story that looks like this:

Way back when ...
Everyday ...
But one day ...
Because of that ...
Because of that ...
Because of that ...
Ever since then ...
And the moral of the story is ...

Each phrase of the story spine forms the beginning of a sentence that springboards the story writer to explain what happened.

So on my next workshop, this time in Dubbo, I asked the workshop participants to create a story explaining a theme that emerged from the clustering exercise using the story spine approach. At first there was a little resistance; it seemed a little weird to be asked to write a story. But within minutes everyone was immersed in the task and the room noise skyrocketed with animated conversation.

Each story was written by a small group and served the task of generating a conversation about what had happened to get them to this point in their organisation. It also helped the group notice things that previously had been taken for granted while providing a way for people to say our loud what actually occurred. As Weick says, ‘how do I know what I know until I hear myself say it?’

I owe a lot to Sharon Darwent for teaching me how to run anecdote circles. She might not remember it but Sharon gave me some basic principles which worked. Mind you, now I've run hundreds of them and I'm now cursed with knowledge. This curse has culminated in us writing a short booklet on how we do them. But to find out the two simple principles Sharon passed on to me take a look at this clip.

First of all let me say I’m really delighted to be guest blogging here this week. Thank you to Dave and I look forward to hearing the views of the smart people that check in here frequently.

I’ve just finished reading a very popular management book in the States that mentions in its subtitle “The Leaderless Organization.” This gave me pause because the phrase sounded familiar. What was it reminiscent of?

I don’t know how many of you saw this article in the Financial Times, but it provides a classic example of a leader who acts in a way that is consistent with principles of complexity. Wan Li is 91 years old and leaders everywhere have a lot to learn from him. In the late 70’s, as Party Secretary of the Anhui province, he supported the Chinese farmers from the Xiaogang village who bravely decided to experiment with privatizing their rural output. This set the precedent for numerous rural reforms in China. Here’s my favorite quote from the article:

Dave Snowden has been extolling the virtues of Apple machines almost ad nauseum to me. He constantly tries to convince me that if only I had an Apple like his, my life would be complete, easy, comfortable, luscious. So I took the bait and clicked when I saw this CNET headline, "More security, less safety -- The Secure Mac: Myth or Legend?” Perhaps, I reasoned, it would offer some satisfying tidbit of information that would allow me to say “Hang on a minute, Snowden…” (In much the same way I did when we were working together recently in Boston and my staid, boring old T60 could pick up the wireless signal in the room where we were working while his sleek, hip, friendly Apple required a trip to a precise location in the hotel lobby.)

Anyway, the article (written by David Braue) addressed the question, “Do Mac users need to run antivirus software?” The answer, apparently, is “No.” Here’s what Kevin Long, a network and security specialist with Verizon Business Security Solutions and the company's Mac security expert offered as an explanation: