It’s 11:00 pm on October 31st here in Connecticut. I’ve just finished hosting a party that started at 6 pm for approximately 60 people (about 30 adults and 30 kids). My posting will be brief because I’m exhausted from putting my sugar-charged 4 year old to bed, and then running around picking up glow sticks, half eaten chocolate candy, full juice boxes, broken plastic toys, small pieces of potato chips and discarded skeleton necklaces.

I just want to thank Dave Snowden for his children’s party metaphor to illustrate complexity principles. Thanks to him, it was a fabulous party. Here’s how I planned for it…

I’m always interested in companies that share stories of their mistakes because (as Dave Snowden quite frequently points out) we learn more from mistakes than successes. An article I ran across a few days ago said Red Wing Shoes initially failed at trying to move out of its traditional realm of work boots into the more profitable casual shoe market in 2005. Luckily they recognized they were suffering from entrained thinking:

Some days I’m just blown away by the universe. There I’ll be, zipping along through my life worrying about all the things I’m forgetting to do, picking up after a party, opening the shades in the early morning, or picking up milk at the grocery store and then BAM the infinite variety and wonder of the universe ends up in my lap (literally) on my computer in two truly gorgeous pictures.

Wonder #1 is the discovery of brainbows. Neuroscientists at Harvard used fluorescent proteins to make strands of complex nervous system tissue stand out from each other. This allows them to look at the detailed microcircuitry in the brain.

I would like some feedback on a phenomenon that I think is more dangerous than helpful: the prevalence of anonymous comments in social media. I wholeheartedly believe in strong opinions and useful (even sharp) criticism, but I believe that feedback should be attributed, period. I find that allowing anonymity in blogs and other media leads almost inevitably to abuses that might not happen otherwise. Today I was reading a communication blog where a blogger posted a piece criticizing a bad editorial job from an in-house publication. The politically correct squad turned out in record numbers to criticize him (and not without reason in some cases). What really bothered me, though, is that half of the responses to this person’s writing were anonymous.

The blog on Anonymity generated some really great responses. Thanks to all who contributed. In particular, Michael Cheveldave sparked my thinking about the relationship between trust and complexity. In the last book I wrote, Managing Interactively, I talked about the relationship between trust and speed in organizations. My informal observations over the years have shown me trust levels have a significant impact on the strength or weakness of connections between agents in complex organizations.

In the Poetry Society of America’s Journal, there is an article in which poets speak about complexity. I particularly enjoyed Susan Mitchell’s entry: “The poets that interest me most, that excite me to return to them again and again, all share a single characteristic: they are remarkably attentive. They see, hear, smell, taste and feel more of the world than other poets, and they contrive to pack that moreness into their poems…As a result, their poems attend to more of the world, including disorder as well as order, contradiction as well as congruence, insanity as well as sanity, the hidden as well as the inaccessible.”

If you took this paragraph and substituted the word “leaders” for “poets” and “leadership” for “poems, ”it would very aptly describe the leaders that interest me most. Effective sense makers must be attentive to the world around them in all of its complexity. Leaders need to forego the temptation to seek the easy answers, simple measures, best practices, and executive summaries, leaders have to, as Susan Mitchell says “attend to more of the world.”

One of my favorite poets is Czeslaw Milosz. In “Ars Poetica?” what he says about poetry could also be applied to leadership:

While I’m on this poetry binge, I thought I would introduce two poems for the more mathematically inclined readers of this blog. These were two entries in a Math Poetry contest. The second entry was the grand prize winner. I hope you enjoy them.

Untitled (by William Gasarch)

We're always eager to produce a new result
Even if an oracle we must consult
For though P=NP is ever open
To solve it we're still hopin'
And though exponential search we despise
We're not afraid to relativize
For we will never weary
Of computer science theory

Conference on Computational Complexity Theory
March 1983
Santa Barbara, California

And the winning entry was…

As I wind down my first stint as a blogger, I’m thinking back to other milestones.

In 1977, I used my fax machine. It had an acoustic coupler and was located in Congressman Mann’s office in the U.S. Capitol where I was an 18 year old intern. I was blown away that you could put that phone receiver in there and send a picture.

In 1980, I used my first word processor. For someone who loves words, this experience was almost mystical.

I attended my first teleconferencing industry meeting in 1981 at the University of Wisconsin-Extension. The big issues then were travel cost displacement and distance education. On the trade show floor I remember freeze frame systems and executive videoconferencing systems. (Next August I’m going to Las Vegas for a reunion of the teleconferencing industry – I’ll be tipping a glass with at least 133 veterans of teleconferencing and social computing.) We were all so excited about the possibilities for collaboration in the early 80s. It was a very idealistic and optimistic crew that met at those conferences.

I also remember being an intern at The Institute for the Future around 1983 and using a workstation that connected our Sand Hill Road location to another spot in Palo Alto via voice and video “store and forward"...

So last week, before a presentation at KMWorld, Dave Snowden dropped a huge carton on my podium. Inside was a Ryobi toolbox: heavy nylon canvas held open by a thick plastic frame and a polished aluminum bar. Ryobi’s popular cordless power tools are available at any Home Depot in the US; but the chain refuses to sell the toolbox designed to carry them. Dave picked one up for me in the UK and schlepped it through security and customs to San Jose. He’s a great guy, but that’s not my point.
Dave and I have debated personal knowledge management (PKM) many times before (eg, for AOK in 2004, which became the lead chapter in Jerry Ash’s Next Generation KM II). Not to rehash it (hashed here), but I believe the collective is just as much a consequence of its constituents as individuals derive their identities from the social constraints and traditions around them.

Dave said to introduce myself, so here are some things to know about me.

Ok, I’m a baaaaad blogger. But things come up. Yesterday I got a frantic call from a friend who has to submit his engineering dissertation next week. He was a nervous wreck. So while I waded through 60 pages of the latest theories on reinforced concrete, I needed him to calm down. I sent him out to the new Reflected Knowledge Executive Leadership Center ...

Last week, Richard Marrs and I presented at KMWorld about “Intuition’s Role in Decisions and Innovation.” The ideas behind the presentation evolved dramatically between the time our abstract was accepted (over the summer) and our preparations were finalized (an hour before the session). The slides for the presentation can now be downloaded here. NOTE: this entry is cross posted on Reflexions, where it includes some of the diagrams we used.

Much of our collaboration over the past few years has focused on the role of intuition in sense- and decision-making, with an assumption that intuition is one way that “tacit” expertise expresses itself in practice.

I’ve always been fascinated by the processes and professions of design—above all, architecture. Faced with the complexity and multiple contexts of an emergent space, good architects always find ways to blend art and science into craft without compromising either.

Last week we attended a talk by the new dean of architecture at USC, Qingyun Ma. His firm was asked how to revitalize a historic district in Shanghai. Ma felt that any direct intervention would strip the authenticity from the old streets, buildings and communities. Instead, he suggested developing a new, adjacent shopping district as an extension of the old district’s main thoroughfare. The idea was that the new development would draw more people through the original neighborhood…

“Exponential adoption often comes down to irrational factors such as addiction and codependence. When technologies are imperfect but hackable, users who customize them end up excusing and defending their flaws.”

Yes, John, your iPhone.

As a device and as my device, its the political issues I resent the most. Its usefulness as a productivity tool for me is limited because it more of a revenue tool for ATT/Apple in ways that are counter to a dedication to customer satisfaction. So here is my opinion—not a typical technology review but a political response.

Today I spent the day drinking good coffee sitting in a comfortable chair (7D) beside a window looking out at the Arizona desert from a height of 33,000 feet. I was supposed to be writing, but on a clear morning, flying from LA to New York, I was mesmerized the stunning topology below. The land winds and folds through canyons, escarpments, plains and badlands punctuated only occasionally by human activity. A Joycean stream-of-consciousness passage from the planet itself.

A long time ago, I profiled legendary California geologist Tom Dibblee. I only took a few walks with him. But even if I couldn’t learn to hear it myself, I discovered how the earth could speak to someone—how they could learn to listen.

Bouncing between coasts this week, I thought about how to give a flavor here of the things I wonder about. But the bouncing cut seriously into my blogging, hence the first of my last few blog bounces. This week I waxed about United’s new LA-NY premier service, but last week I whined about their inability to manage a simple one-hour hop to the Bay Area. Getting to KMWorld from home took 8 hours; 2 more to fly than if I had just driven the distance.

The point—the bounce—I’m curious about is the mechanism by which brands go from underdogs to evil empires in ever-accelerating cycles: Microsoft, Apple, Starbucks, the USA. This is a marketing question, but it’s also a complexity question.

Next month I wrap up three years of work in Thailand. Officially, I’ve served as an advisor to Government Savings Bank, a century old state enterprise with about 20 million customers. Unofficially, I’ve been loaned out to the Prime Minister’s Office, the Crown Property Bureau, the Office of Knowledge Management and Development and to a UN Advisory Group. All the work focused on the effectiveness of grassroots development programs and projects in terms of organizational learning and intellectual capital, but the work has ranged from writing speeches and books to field research to leading workshops.

The CEO of the bank has been aggressive and creative in the ways he has tried to modernize the bank’s bureaucratic culture. But regardless of talent and intention, bureaucracies evolve to preserve the system, not support the current strategy.

A year ago this time I was redlining the copy-edited version of Net Work. I had to fight that crushing feeling of knowing I could have written a passage differently, or chosen a different example, or explored a topic more fully, but that the opportunity had passed. Just the typos, Ma’am, that’s what’s left to fix.

Networks are about relationships among people, and they are changing all the time. Hence, networks and the work we must do to maintain them (our “net work”) belongs in the domain of complexity. Our understanding of them, too, is changing all the time based on our own experiences coupled with the reporting and observations of journalists, thought leaders, scientists, and pundits (i.e. bloggers).

So I welcome this opportunity (thanks, Dave!), as I welcome speaking engagements, to add some new bits to Net Work. So I begin.

My last real post to my own blog (Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness) is a month old, and it’s the one heralding Dave and Mary’s HBR article. My HBR subscription is coming due, and I just received what I think is my last hardcopy issue (December 2007, not yet online) which contains an interview with psychologist John M. Gottman, an expert on relationships of married people. While he wisely declines to make any extrapolations from the deeply personal domain to the business domain, there are some insights that may be applied to the net work of relationships, which the smallest unit of glue in a network, and to building social capital, the sum of the ties of all types.

• The saltshaker of “yes.” Gottman suggests that having a full shaker of ways to respond positively, or with interest, or with respect, to what others say, can keep relationships running smoothly. There is an old language trick I adopted some time ago that helps with this: learning to replace the word “No” with the phrase, “Yes, AND” while also replacing all “Buts” with “Ands.” This shifts the speaker’s mindset as well!

• Being open to small moments of attachment and intimacy. It may feel like time and work to inquire after the health of a child, comment on a new photo affixed to a cubicle, or to share one’s own current personal conundrum or perplexity. And it may be hard for some to do without feeling phony or manipulative; consider it a prerequisite that you must have respect for the other person and also be able to listen.

• The “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” of relationships – the best predictors of failure – are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.
  

I am closing my public talks on Net Work these days with a quote from The Little Prince: “It is the time you take for your rose that makes it valuable to you.” So be it also for our networks.

On Network Weaving, Valdis Krebs announces the "tipping point" for the term social graph. I followed some of the breadcrumbs to earlier blogs on the topic that Valdis referenced in this post, and am suitably complexified. Let's see how straight I can get it.

The term graph comes into the realm of social networks quite honestly: in mathematics and computer science, graphs are collections of objects that have relationships that can be represented as nodes and lines connecting them. (Thanks, Wikipedia.) So far, so good. But the question is, is the graph a representation or is it the real "thing?" The term social graph seems to be getting mixed up with the term "social network;" (Dave Winer) suggests that they are exactly the same thing. (So, apparently, does Wikipedia, so that if you search for "social graph" you land on the "social network" page.)

Valdis simplifies a long blog by Tim Berners-Lee by summarizing the insight as a set of layers, each of which can be described in 3-letter acronyms:

• III (International Information Infrastructure) - how computers are connected
  
• WWW (World Wide Web) - how documents are connected
  
• GGG (Giant Global Graph) - how people are connected
  

The GGG (in Berner-Lee's exposition) is the Semantic Web, which provides the enabling technology to reveal information about content and links: meaning. So, a social graph would be embedded with information about the connections among people.

How to explain all this in simple terms? I would like to say that the social network is the connections among people and the graph its representation, its map. Mapping is an attempt to shift something complex (relationships) into the domain of the complicated, where it can be revealed in mathematical terms. But the map is always (as I say when I give workshops on ONA/SNA) is just a snapshot in time. As soon as you capture the graph, the network changes.