http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/ en Copyright 2010 Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:29:08 +0000 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss In our work at the Foundation, we have developed a language of our own with phrases like “speaking Greek to the Italians”, “polishing shoes” and others. The phrases function like metaphors and are short-hand for ideas we have discussed at length previously – the one about speaking Greek to the Italians refers to using Cynefin language when speaking to people who are not part of our team and therefore are unlikely to understand what we are talking about. Most families develop private languages like these; they play an important role in establishing membership and identity. The same applies to fields of knowledge, of course. The discipline-specific discourse provides more precise language tools than the language in common use. Effective use of the discipline discourse is a crucial element of what students must learn in order to acquire an identity, first in the academic world and later as a professional in their chosen field. As an internal consultant, I learnt early on that the skill to rapidly acquire a new discourse is vital in getting access to any new community you want to work with. The downside, as Dave pointed out in his blog earlier this week, is that the use of language can also be used to exclude people from a community. http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/03/the_vexed_issue_of_language.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/03/the_vexed_issue_of_language.php Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:29:08 +0000 When I was a statistician, I had almost complete professional freedom, as the people I worked for or with did not consider themselves qualified to judge whether the approaches I took were the right ones. In the world of education, the opposite happens – as everyone has gone to school for more than a decade, everyone considers him- or herself an expert on how it should be done, and therein lies the rub. Many an intervention is tried, and even implemented on large scale, because it sounds like a good idea, with very little evidence as to its suitability for the particular context. So the Foundation I work for set out to generate evidence to support solutions in all our programmes. That turned out to be easier said than done in something like a bursary programme. The sample sizes required to achieve acceptable power and discrimination using traditional statistical methods were simply prohibitive in terms of cost. All the ethical issues familiar in social research presented themselves; for example, how can we not provide the support we believe can make a difference to the bursars’ success just for the sake of having a control group in the experiment? And if we see something is not working, how can we not intervene just to get good data? http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/03/what_do_you_mean_evidence.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/03/what_do_you_mean_evidence.php Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:00:27 +0000 When my daughter was two or three years old, she asked for a story one night, and of course, being a devoted mother, I obliged. But the next night she asked for another story, and the next night, and the night after that…. Soon it started to feel like hard work to come up with a new story each night, so I developed a story-generating algorithm, which went something like this: * Think of something that happened that day * Start with “One day, a long, long time ago there was a …” * Personalize the thing or animal you thought of into a character she could sympathize with * Create a problem for the character and explore the consequences * Find a way to solve the problem * End with a description of how the thing or animal lived after the problem was solved. This made it much easier to construct an impromptu story. One evening I even ended up with a pink flannel sheep social network. It started with the pink sheep on her green flannel pyjama suit. Of course the sheep was lonely; he had no other sheep within reach to talk to. Until one day (a key phrase when constructing the story), when he realized that where the pyjama top covers the pants, he could get close enough to another sheep on the pant half, and they had a lovely gossip. Then they both found other sheep they could reach across a fold of the fabric, or where the sleeve rests on the pants, and soon all the pink sheep were sharing news by passing messages up and down the pyjama suit, telephone-style. http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/03/bedtime_ritual.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/03/bedtime_ritual.php Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:28:10 +0000 Well, I suppose a lapsed statistician is a more accurate description of my current status in the field of statistics – I haven’t proven a theorem in a quarter of a century, the last time I tested a hypothesis was two decades ago and as for data-analysis, well for that I now have SenseMaker Explorer! When I started out as a statistician, there were no personal computers; we made very strong assumptions just to be able to calculate the results; non-parametric methods with fewer assumptions took all-night runs on the university mainframe for a simple hypothesis test. Then came the PC; suddenly exploratory statistics became possible – not that it was considered rigorous enough to be proper statistics back then. But I loved it – it was like being a detective, looking for structure in a mass of data, using dimension-reduction techniques to squash the information down into two or three dimensions that could be visualized and interpreted, looking for patterns in graphs and finally, when the data set gave up its secrets, finding out what the patterns I saw could actually correspond to in the real world! Unfortunately, in the first stage of analysis, the pattern often corresponded to a management decision nobody bothered to tell the poor statistician about, but that’s another story. Sounds familiar? When I first saw the scatter plot matrix in Explorer, I felt like I’d come home – even better, I could now do the same kind of analysis on “soft” data too! http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/03/reflections_from_a_statisticia.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/03/reflections_from_a_statisticia.php Thu, 04 Mar 2010 03:16:49 +0000 In our work at the Foundation, we have experienced one example after the other of happy coincidence. We would go to an official meeting, only to find that the chairman of the meeting is a childhood friend, or university roommate, or close colleague from a first job, or … I would identify a suitable partner for a project, only to learn that the Foundation’s director, Mpho, helped him to set up his business. We would decide to tackle a certain issue in a particular way, and then discover that the ideal opportunity to present the case is coming up in two weeks and we can still get on the agenda … Now I’ve long ago discarded the “assumption of intentional capability”, especially the version that implies that when something unpleasant happens, someone intended harm. Such a position is simply not tenable if you view the world as a collection of systems at different levels, going about their business and interacting with each other when the circumstances require. That some of these events will have effects that I experience as negative, is just a simple inevitable fact of life – no malicious intent is required to explain it (I’m also not a fatalist – some of the agents in the systems I’m part of may indeed intend harm, but that’s quite rare in my experience). http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/03/serendipitous_synchronicity.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/03/serendipitous_synchronicity.php Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:10:18 +0000 The last year or so has been a fascinating roller-coaster ride of excitement and frustration as a small team of us worked to set up the Sasol Inzalo Foundation, whose goal is to be a pioneer and leader in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education systems reform in South Africa. We’ve met new wonderful, passionate people, but also rediscovered an amazing number of friends from the past; we’ve experienced so many unbelievable coincidences that we’ve stopped to be surprised by serendipity, and the intellectual challenge of engaging with complex ideas has more than made up for the frustrations of grappling with the South African education system and its stakeholders. As this journey forms the backdrop to much of what I want to write about, let me start with some background about the Foundation: it was set up recently by Sasol, a large South African petrochemical company, and the world’s largest producer of synthetic fuels, hence the STEM focus. However, the Foundation has an independent board and our mandate is to focus on STEM skills development and capacity building for South Africa, not on Sasol’s future talent needs (although Sasol will benefit indirectly too, of course). http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/03/the_journey_begins.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/03/the_journey_begins.php Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:10:56 +0000 The main thing I'm supposed to be doing as a guest blogger this week is reflecting on how accreditation courses have changed over the years. You want to know the truth? Here it is: The first accreditation course felt more like a Harry Potter movie than an IBM Global Consulting meeting. http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/reflexions_iii_the_meetings.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/reflexions_iii_the_meetings.php Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:15:51 +0000 As part of this reflective exercise, I've been going through a lot of old notes from the early days of the Cynefin Centre, which eventually metamorphosed into Cognitive Edge. When we began, one of the things that I noticed was that different types of people seem to be dealing with complexity science at different levels: http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/reflexions_ii_the_metaphor.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/reflexions_ii_the_metaphor.php Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:11:11 +0000 More loose, unstable thoughts that need their own contextualization. What's most interesting to me about the Cynefin model is that it marries four ways of looking at the world that are usually thought to be incompatible. (Per Ron's comment, I'm not ignoring Disorder, just treating it separately.) With their biases for perception and action, people are likely to have blind spots for the others that cause them to misinterpret, not just miss the signals.]]> http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/reflexions_i_the_model_continu_1.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/reflexions_i_the_model_continu_1.php Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:06:38 +0000 Cynefin Framework (CF) is that it maintains the appropriateness of disparate approaches and insists that problems or situations must first be framed with the appropriate contexts of Simple, Complicated, Complex or Chaotic. Different contexts (based on diverse relationships between cause and effect) require different approaches to learning, analysis, planning and management, based on the practicality of understanding, prediction and control. "This explains everything!" is the typical reaction I get when demonstrating. Last summer, I watched this happen again when I set up a contextualization exercise for UN Peacekeepers in an ancient square in the Italian town of Otranto. For Peacekeepers, the fallacy of Order from Chaos is built into their Security Council mandates, when in fact almost every aspect of their missions straddle the boundaries of complex and complicated. ]]> http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/reflexions_i_the_model.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/reflexions_i_the_model.php Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:03:15 +0000 Business Renaissance Institute. Like BRI, my interest in "spirituality at work" is based on a conviction that quantitative and qualitative outcomes in organizations today call for fundamental transformations in corporate culture. However, I see culture as the emergent consequence of individual decisions and actions, which depend on deeply held values and beliefs that are normally off limits to organizational management (so deeply held that I believe they can only come from that "spiritual" place in each of us). So I'm curious what you think about the framework I'm sketching out.]]> http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/spirituality_at_work.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/spirituality_at_work.php Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:15:25 +0000 Michael Cheveldave, Craig Horangic and a diverse dozen participants in an accreditation course on Cognitive Edge models and methods, as well as an in-depth look at the SenseMaker tools for narrative-based research and decision-making. I haven’t tried to “live blog.” I’m simply not smart enough to add value on the spot. But even though I’ve been working with these ideas for a decade now, I learned a lot and took copious notes. So over the next week I’ll be reflecting and posting more.]]> http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/digesting_the_accreditation_co.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/digesting_the_accreditation_co.php Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:58:56 +0000 whole organization can know what it knows!" I think the metaphor here is watershed. ]]> http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/how_does_an_organization_know.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/how_does_an_organization_know.php Wed, 17 Feb 2010 06:03:50 +0000 Ray Sims compiled more than 60 KM definitions—and much better than just one definition of knowledge management that fails to please anybody. And no matter how precise someone tries to be, differences in expectations, experience, context, culture and language will always cause people to hear things differently. ]]> http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/km_definitions_or_metaphors_1.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/km_definitions_or_metaphors_1.php Mon, 15 Feb 2010 07:51:48 +0000 San Diego accreditation course and comparing it to two weeklong sessions in 2003. I'll try to explain what the Cynefin model has meant to me, my work and my clients. And I'll ask for your impressions of some of the things that I've been noodling about lately. See you tomorrow...]]> http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/time_differences.php http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2010/02/time_differences.php Sun, 14 Feb 2010 07:01:26 +0000