Greetings all. I’ve been looking forward to my upcoming role as Cog Edge’s guest blogger. To jump right in: One of the many concepts that has stuck with me as supremely useful is the word Cynefin itself. The notion that each of us shifts seamlessly between multiple identities has been most helpful to me personally. For starters, I am the father of a 16-year-old daughter, constantly juggling between the sub-identities of cheerleader, coach, occasional mentor, full time taxi driver, a most reluctant disciplinarian from time to time… Beware the risks and rewards of separating such creatures from their cell phones. Each of these roles has its own nuanced operating principles and code of ethics, and while I am sure I often send mixed messages to my daughter, Cynefin at the very least, gives me the occasional pause and a platform for reflection when it all go sideways. Seamless indeed.

I would like to share a decision-making algorithm that we have been using in my corner of the health care sector now for a couple of years. It is very much a cobbled together version from a variety of sources but is fundamentally rooted in the concept of multiple, safe to fail probes in complex environments.

First a bit of context: the impetus for developing a decision making process was one of 30 different initiatives that arose from a project aimed at making sense of the culture of care and compassion at our small regional hospital. Michael Cheveldave ran the project with Dave’s support, while I was the eager apprentice. Michael and I worked towards the big day when over 60 front line health care providers, support staff, physicians, managers, and administrators came together to examine various sense-making items and then to design safe to fail experiments. One of the go forward plans was to articulate a generic decision-making process.

So here’s the five step algorithm in its simplest form.

1. Ask a good question.
2. Get the right people at the table
3. If complex, swarm around the question.
4. Execute & monitor.

Nothing quite like finalizing plans for a flu pandemic to cast a light on biased approaches to planning and action.
We have 52 cases of swine flu in British Columbia as of this morning, but it looks like the first estimates on volume and severity are diminishing. I heard a reference the other day about “visions of Y2K and all that b-s planning and stress.” I have also heard others whisper about the Armageddon that is sure to come if not this spring then this coming fall for sure. Depends on who you talk to.
In such circumstances where our health care system prepares for sudden and extraordinary strain we make plans to convert our normal org chart to a scalable Emergency Response Management System (ERMS). The roots of this system, I believe, are military. Ominous 3-inch binders and bulging hard drives filled with planning templates, communication samples, and various processes prepared by earnest pre-planners are dusted off. These people are secretly thrilled that their hard work is finally getting the attention it deserves.

Back to my hometown of Rossland for a moment.
Of the 1500 or so houses that make up this mountain town, most of the older homes have simple, steep-pitched metal roofs, perfectly suited to shed the 600 or so centimeters of snow we have fall on us during an average winter. The red or green or blue or yellow roofs gives the town a bit of a gingerbread look if you squint your eyes a bit and use your imagination.
But if you stroll around town, you’ll also see that most of the newer houses are constructed with asphalt shingles and complicated roof lines that hold the snow. I've seen enough examples of this causing problems that I now watch new houses go up and track them over the different winters. I you ask me, most of them don't work like a roof should. I’ll often see roof damage caused by the glacial forces of the deep and heavy snowpack. Or at the very least, there are heating cables stapled onto the lower edges of the shingles, an awkward afterthought.
Last winter I visited a small fishing village named La Ventana in Baja California. The local Mexican fisherman all built their haciendas at least 500 meters back from the shore - close to their boats but well back from the ocean itself. But in the last 20 years, the best and priciest real estate (if you’re a gringo) means perching your trophy home on the edge of the 100 foot sand cliffs. Stunning views for sure, but a walk along the beach provides some graphic examples of concrete retaining walls and stairs hanging broken or suspended while the ground they were built upon has been swept away by the weather. More than a few of the houses themselves have a corner of their foundation completely exposed.
I was going to suggest that these building plans and landscape designs represent a certain brand of hubris, but from a pattern thinking perspective I expect it is something far less sinister. In both Rossland and La Ventana, there are decades of knowledge to be seen, and I suspect, generations of knowledge of where and how to build a house, if only people would ask.

I want to relate a story from the OD trenches that speaks to the simplicity and power of anecdotes and metaphor for small scale interventions.
I was asked to help design a process that would begin to bridge a longstanding chasm between the good folks in health protection – those that grant and revoke licenses to restaurants, daycare centers, assisted living facilities, etc. – and the good folks concerned with the dietary needs of our population. As I learned more details, a key story popped up that helped quickly size up the situation for me: “If the folks at health protection wanted to truly meet their mandate of safe food, we would eat all our meals at McDonalds.”

I just wanted to sneak in a quick thankyou and an invitation to those who read my guest blog over the last two weeks.
I have been a sporadic reader of blogs at the best of times, and certainly a timid commentor. My brief tenure here was just the nudge I needed to write more. How was it for you?
I would invite you to send me an email with any feedback you have about my blog. I am interested in hearing where you might place my blog entries on such sliding scales as academic/practical, useful/useless, dry writing/overwritten, too short/too long, and so on.

send to timiller@telus.net.
all the best,
Terry Miller

I live in one of the more isolated cities in the world. Perth in Western Australia is a city of 1.5 million people, sited on the edge of the Indian Ocean, about 3,000 kilometres from our nearest neighbours Adelaide and Jakarta. Twenty years ago Australians often talked about the ‘tyranny of distance’ and we felt a sense of separation from the rest of the world. Nowadays, that sense of isolation has almost completely vanished. In a physical sense, air travel is cheap and readily available, and many Australians travel often to international destinations. Of greatest impact, of course, has been the internet and the general explosion in communication which it enabled.

The possibilities for networking have been an exceptionally fruitful part of the information age revolution. Cognitive Edge has been one entity which has been particularly adept at creating and sustaining physical and virtual networks – or is it that CE create the conditions in networks can flourish and sustain themselves? In my involvement with CE over the last 5 years, I have been able to meet other practitioners at conferences, on accreditation courses and keep informal contact going by email. When I am travelling myself, I visit people at their workplaces to talk of what they have done and get further inspiration to work with new concepts and techniques.

So, as I sit here in my beautiful, isolated city, I often feel that I have the best of both worlds – the peace and calmness that comes from being in a quiet place, combined with the opportunity to be part of vibrant, cutting-edge thought and practice. This opportunity to be guest blogger will add another dimension to my connectedness and I hope you will enjoy the next two weeks as much as I.

Although I have been working with Cognitive Edge techniques for the last 5 years, I have never had an opportunity to use Future Backwards. A week ago, my first opportunity came along. My client was a Faculty in a university which was reviewing its operations. The Co-chairs responsible for reviewing governance and management, came to me with a competent but conservative plan to seek the views of the staff. I did some fast talking, and convinced them that FB was the way to go. ‘How many staff do you expected to come?’ I enquired casually as they were leaving. I expected the number to be around 25, similar to other reviews I have assisted them with. 'Around 70', they said, causing me to blanche momentarily. I hadn’t wanted my first foray into FB to be quite such a big, public event. It had better work!

I was struck by the allusion that Dave Snowden and Mary Boone used in their November 2007 Harvard Business Review article, to describe the difference between the complicated and complex domains. They described how a Ferrari racing car is an impressive piece of engineering, but can be stripped down and put back together again, with the aid of a good car manual and a fair bit of expertise. This ‘complicated domain’ task is tricky certainly, but it can be done. However, an Amazon rainforest, if cleared, cannot be re-created by planting the same plants again and hoping it will all somehow come together. This complex web of relationships and interdependencies cannot be predicted and reconstructed. I am remembering this example, because I have inadvertently created a similar situation in my backyard.

If you are interested in the interplay between virtual communities and action in the real world have a look at Global Corporate Challenge (GCC) at http://www.gcc2009.com/

I am participating in the GCC which started on 21 May and runs for 125 days. It is a networked activity, with a health-improvement focus, in which teams of 7 people aim to take at least 10,000 steps each day. In our virtual world, each team starts off on day 1 at the Taj Mahal in India. We log in the number of steps we have taken each day, and this score determines how quickly we proceed in a journey (or race if you are the competitive type) around the world. At certain points we catch virtual planes to take us to new countries.

Did I miss something? Are management and teambuilding games seriously out of favour? Was there a whole debate that happened around this that somehow I missed? Last week I was asked by a group to run a teambuilding game for them, and I then realized that I hadn’t run a game for about two years.The group that approached me had recently had a change in leadership, precipitated by the retirement of a long-standing leader. Their physical space was divided into a number of rooms/areas scattered around a beautiful heritage building. Charming but problematic. Their aim for the day were to do some planning for the future and to reconnect with each other.

The university at which I work is on the banks of the Swan River, a broad, calm stretch of water fringed by parklands. It’s a beautiful walk along the river. At one point there is a bench with a plaque on it in memory of a twelve-year old boy who died there on 25 December 1999. The inscription reads:

Come sit a while and be with Tim,
The memories and the joy of him,
He left this world happy at play
One beautiful, sunny Christmas Day.

I still remember the shock I felt the first time I came across this plaque. My thoughts were disordered in the face of tragedy. Questions swirled in my head. What had happened to Tim? How could death come to such a seemingly safe and tranquil place? The illusion of certainty and permanence created by my mind briefly dispelled. I was an unwilling witness to the fragile and transitory nature of life.

I am touched by the poignant inscription, expressing grief, joy, acceptance and celebration of a life. Several times a year I accept the invitation to ‘sit a while and be with Tim’ whose too-brief life has touched mine through the simple beauty of a heart-felt poem.

You know how it is with advice – you love to give it and avoid taking it. However, on a CE course I was given some advice which has proved invaluable to me time and again.

Dave had just done his compelling spiel about complexity and all the CE tools to deal with it. I was contemplating a gig I had scheduled for later that week, with a client group who were undergoing a merger within a university context. An introverted research unit was being merged with a sales-oriented unit which taught advanced medical skills. I had a nice, safe plan worked out for the day. With my newly opened eyes, I could see all my planned approaches would have them operating on the ‘ordered’ side of the Cynefin Framework, whereas the reality of their current situation was that everything they understood about their working lives had just been blown apart with this merger. They were living in the complex and chaotic domains.

Dave breezed by and threw out one of his one-liners. ‘Why give them the Cynefin Framework, get them to address one problem in each of the 4 domains, then do social Network Stimulation with them?’ Why not indeed – apart from the fact that I only just found out what Cynefin and SNS were five minutes ago, and didn’t feel like committing professional suicide just now.

I know the theory of goal-setting, but it’s a very different thing to live it. As mentioned in a previous blog, I am participating in the Global Corporate Challenge, in which teams of 7 people aim to take 10,000 steps a day.

We are all rediscovering how powerful having a goal can be. Team members start engaging in some very odd behaviours to get their steps up. One member describes jigging up and down in front of her computer at midnight waiting for a literature search to complete. Any opportunity to lift the daily steps score. I have been seen marching up and down the hallway at home just before bedtime trying to get in another 500 steps. My husband is both bemused and amused. “Why don’t you just cheat?” he asks. He also suggests helpfully that I tape my pedometer to the inside of my hubcap. Cheat? I couldn’t possibly. Instead I march determinedly and ridiculously up and down.

The research tells us that setting a goal leads to 16% higher output than what is achieved with the exhortation to ‘do your best’. Deming the continuous improvement guru said “What gets measured gets done.” A combination of goal-setting and measurement is certainly changing my behaviour. Perhaps its time to re-introduce this into other aspects of my life? But right now could you excuse me, I am going for a walk which will be worth at least 3,000 steps.

Hi All,
This is my first time blogging.... So, let's start and se how it goes... We just got back from a week in Cornwell with the children as last week was half term. Yesterday we had excellent weather and we went down to the beach in Sennen. Now before I continue you should know that I am Italian, I grew up in Naples and spent the first 23 summers of my life between Sorrento, Ischia, Capri and the Amalfi Coast. For the ones who have not been there summers in the south of Italy can be HOT, I mean really hot, 35 C + and the Mediterranean is nice and warm, especially in July and August. So my mental image of the "beach" is, sunny, hot, sun shades, and be in the water because it is simply too hot not to get wet... Now, this is how I have been conditioned to think during my first 23 years if my life (I still remember as a child that my parents would not allow me in the water too early in the day because it was too cold... More on my upbringing later on, as I am going through a period of rethinking of my own history...)
When we got down to beach in Sennen, one could see wind protectors after wind protectors, people dressed up and people putting on wet suites before ging in the water to surf...Now my brain was telling me, this is not what you know as a beach... It is alien, it is different it is dangerous :-)
But I was really tempted to do body boarding; it just looks such good fun... I really wanted to go in. My desire was in sharp conflict with my "educational conditioning"... I ended up going in the water (after renting a wet suite and a body board), I had to get out, when I could not feel my feet and my hands any more because of the cold, but I had a really great time..... So it was a good holiday with some small but interesting challenges....
Luca