Nick Leong has a topical and interesting question relating to the recent financial crisis and its impact on Citigroup.  He posted it on his own blog and didn't get an answer, so he has placed the question here:

Hopefully, this will generate more response than it did on my blog. Caveat: This was post on my blog before Vikram Pandit was confirmed as the new CEO but the lingering question remains: how does one manage knowledge in such a behemoth?

Read on for his original blog

This experiment of being open is working well (and open for the rest of this week). Today Alan Byrne shares a frustration on measurement. It reminded me (Dave) of several corporate environments I have served or observed. What do you think?

I am frustrated by management performance models which seek to measure how you do your job. The phrase is 'observable behaviours'. Can one hope to find a better tool to provide a platform for any prejudices or dislikes harboured by those doing the performance review? It is tantamount to saying 'I don't like the way you do your job because I don't like you'. The stupidity of the process is that it creates a homogenous workforce - everyone who plays the game ends up like those above them - it can become like a role play, but you forget to come out of the role.

On reading my invitation to a Cognitive-Edge training session in New York, I was struck by the use of certainty and uncertainty. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, explored these concepts throughout his work. During my editorship, I intend to explore these two from the position of a practicing psychoanalyst. Those of you who know anything of Lacanian Psychoanalysis will know this is an impossibility….

Certainty and its relationship to the Other: Zizek uses George Soros as his example of this. Soros is either manipulating the money markets (El Shaddai?) and so in a direct relationship to many people’s well-being or he is relieving people’s distress (Elohim?) with money from his massive charity foundation. He ricochets between these two positions and he is generating certainty from both positions. The UK government is in a similar position with the amount of ‘protective’ legislation they have passed onto the statute books especially in the area of mental health.

From the News: A police Inspector? was bailed for one violent offence. He murders the key witness to the offence. The Judge states he does not know why he gave him bail. Let’s speculate….

I start with three items of news: Steve Wright who is accused of murdering five prostitutes, the inquest into Princess Diana’s death and Britney Spears.

A response to Professor Willem Buiter’s blog Sunday 6th January, 2008 ‘Is Britain going mad?’

A confession: For the past two years I have been promising to write a paper on this topic. My ‘To do’ leaps up accusatorily at regular intervals. This is a note from my resting place on the way to production.

Dictionary definitions of perverse, perversion and pervert refer to abnormal or unacceptable sexual behaviour. In today’s society, this means paedophilia. I use perversion in a more technical sense that of being against the (Oxford Concise Dictionary) weight of evidence, as in the law, or the direction of the judge. By law, I do not mean the UK’s legal system but refer you to El Shaddai. So two possible perverse symptoms are: creating a world which goes against the weight of evidence (Reread Buiter’s blog) and setting up and controlling your own system in competition with the judge. Jacques Lacan called perversion which is the same word in French, pere (father) version (against). This system excludes uncertainty.

The government is consulting about the section 60 legislation under the Health Professions Order 2001 which will force (though the bps has actually volunteered them) all psychologists to be registered and regulated by the Health Professions Council which is an arm of the government. If the psychologists become a ‘protected title’, then counsellors, therapists, and psychoanalysts will follow. Thus the government will specify training, competences, fitness-to-practice and so on and will regulate what you are licensed to do: work with anxiety, issues arising from adoption and so on. 1984 or what.

Complaints and Fitness-to-Practice are enshrined in the Health Professionals Order 2001 which regulates ‘health professionals’ including psychologists, counsellors, therapists and psychoanalysts. The logic underlying both of them is similar: There is the one standard Health Professional and the one standard treatment for each bundle of symptoms. Thus if you deviate from the One standard you are not fit for purpose.

MSc in Information and Knowledge Management Research Proposal

I’m feeling slightly apocalyptic these days, if “slightly” is a qualification one can use with that extreme term. I suppose you might call it, not exactly a “crisis” of confidence, but certainly a heavy pause. And it’s around when our methods fail.

I think we tend towards apocalyptic thinking when things become too difficult, encumbered and fractured, when hope sinks, dragged down by the clutching hands of multiple failures.

This is because apocalypses both mirror our mood but also offer hope: they are dark and bloody, and they mirror the depth of entanglement we feel – but they also promise radical simplification. They promise a clean sweep, wiping out the wrongness, offering clarity in the separation between right and wrong. They offer extreme sensemaking.

I believe there’s a strong temptation towards apocalyptic thinking in much of what we do in the social complexity space, precisely because we humans naturally abhor lack of meaning and clarity, and if meaning (and its consequence, success) doesn’t come easily, simpler sensemaking mechanisms than Cynefin come into play.

This apocalyptic thinking may not be completely explicit, but it appears in the idea that organisations can be fixed or improved, that we can help them fix themselves, that through the alchemy of our methods we can divine the critical few things to focus on, that we as consultants hold special powers to divine right and wrong, to judge, to advise. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we always claim these powers, but this is the implicit power relation we enter into when we take work with a client. Which consultant never gave advice?

We are certainly claiming to offer them something valuable, otherwise why do we charge and why do they pay? What exactly is our compact with them? And even when we stand back and artfully refrain from delivering judgment by claiming the standing of mere mortals, we still play in the theatre of judgment, even more godlike in our aloof rituals of divination than if we tell them directly the answers they crave; and in a way we are then as irresponsible as the Greek gods, who meddled but never stuck around for the consequences.

Let me pin this down a little. We have recently finished a second cultural archetypes exercise with a client, two and a half years after the first. Things are much, much worse now (I’ll tell you more about it in my next post). In the course of the exercise, one of the participants turned round to us and said “What’s the point of doing this again? You guys made the archetypes so cutesy-cutesy the last time, nobody took the real issues seriously.”

I don’t think this is really a problem with the artwork for our archetypes. I recall the presentations the first time were hard-hitting and somber. But a method that should have given self-awareness and the capacity for change, gave a temporary and soon-forgotten way of looking at themselves.

This doesn’t satisfy me. We do what we do as consultants because we want to help as well as earn a living. We want to see productive outcomes. We know we don’t have magical powers, but we grieve when our magic doesn’t work.

So when we see everything done “right”, when we see well-meaning and committed people working hard in the right direction, it’s hard not to ask what went wrong (the question of right and wrong comes into sharp relief) and who’s to blame (the question of the righteous and the damned) and what can be done (the saviour). So we descend into Apocalypse.

The faint-hearted of you might want to know that I intend to take this two week stint to try and argue myself out of apocalyptic thinking, and navigate my way to a more constructive but no less human view of what failure means for us. If that’s too depressing a prospect, feel free to take a vacation until the next guest blogger turns up.

The more charitable among you may decide to stay around and help. If you do, just a slight word of warning: I’ve already done the “pull yourself together Patrick, life is full of ups and downs” thing. I want to dig seriously at what failure means for our practice, at how we respond to it, and at the temptations we need to avoid.

A couple of years ago we were hired to help an organization craft their knowledge management strategy. As part of that we gathered stories about their knowledge sharing culture, and helped them build a set of archetypes that expressed what was currently happening with values, attitudes and behaviours around information and knowledge sharing.

The archetypes were unusually negative and defensive for this kind of exercise. There were one or two positive characters, but the leadership characters were either dysfunctional or well-meaning but weak.

Almost three years on, we have gone back to do the exercise again. Their KM team has been working extremely hard on a number of initiatives and pilots to tackle both their soft and hard KM issues. So they wanted to see if the culture had shifted in a more positive direction as a result of their efforts.

The second horseman of the apocalypse is War. He rides a red horse. He is of course the natural follower of Pestilence: Pestilence spawns blame, blame with power spawns strife, and strife with a polarized sense of right and wrong, spawns wholesale war. We cannot say that we have wholesale war in the organization I described in my last post, but the levels of aggression and resentment are high.

We tend to think of war as high drama, high ideals, high purpose (despite our long history of grey, messy and morally ambiguous violence). Wars have a story, they begin and end. They have heroes and villains.

But the last century also taught us that aggression can be institutionalized, that wars can be cold and they can be static. Territories are marked out and fortified, patrolled with suspicion. Small incursions are met with disproportionate response, to dispel any idea of rapprochement and common cause. Watchful eyes are sensitive to the smallest affronts.

Famine follows war. Of course it does. The normal infrastructure of production breaks down or is destroyed. Famine is the third horseman of the apocalypse, and he carries a pair of scales. The scales are not to symbolize equity but inflation… the price of staple foods rockets – worth its weight in gold, you might say.

If anything, the scales represent gross inequity. Profiteering, price-fixing, pillage. Productive work is almost non-existent. The economy is destroyed, any productivity that exists is leaking badly into just a few people’s pockets, the black market rules. You have to improvise, be extremely lucky, or corrupt to survive. People sacrifice their long term productive capabilities for immediate-term survival. They eat their seed corn, kill their milking cows.

We tend to think of famine as being about scarcity – and it often is – but it is the lethality of famine that is the most traumatic. Those of us who have been fortunate enough not to have been touched by it will still recall the images of famine and the look of death in the eyes of the still-living, a look that we also see in the photographs of Nazi concentration camp victims.