Cognitive Edge News
Cognitive Edge Guest Blog
Our guest blogger for the next two weeks is Viv Read. Viv is the Director of Emerging Options Pty Ltd. She has extensive experience in workplace reform, organisational transformation, positioning and strategy development, as a consultant and manager for over 30 years in Australia and South East Asia. In the past seven years she has applied Cognitive Edge tools and processes in projects including climate surveys, stakeholder consultation, strategy development, impact evaluation and innovation. Viv has co-facilitated Cognitive Edge accreditation courses in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong.
17 March 2010
The unintended consequences of a sideways intervention……
I live with my 3 dogs on 4 acres… and need someone on site who can look after things when I am travelling for work. Over the past year, a young woman we will call Bella has been doing this on an ‘as required’ basis while an annex is being built. There had been few problems with the arrangement other than occasionally me being aware that rather than staying in the house she was with her boyfriend.
The annex was nearing completion, and the move in date was set. One of the builders said “ I thought you would be settling in the new dog today”. Me “What new dog”. He: “ The chihuahua that Bella is bringing”. Given that I had already said yes to a ferret, a bird and a fish tank and have extreme prejudice against very small dogs – and had not been asked before she collected it, I was absolutely seething.
Continue reading "The unintended consequences of a sideways intervention……" »
15 March 2010
On being a disruptive technology……
As I am nearing my 40th year of self employment, being a disruptive technology is a helpful notion – especially for those who have wondered for many years what it is I exactly do!
Over the years I have tried a variety of ways to provide an answer – while ‘free range feral’ appealed to me at one time, it probably would not have engendered confidence in potential employers. Charles Handy used the term ‘portfolio worker’ to describe people whose life was a mix of activities, paid and unpaid. While this provided a veneer of respectability for the somewhat unemployable, it still did not answer the question. I finally reverted to’ I do stuff’ – some of which I get paid for’.
So it was with a great sense of relief when I first encountered Dave, and the Cynefin framework in 2003 and discovered a way of describing and revelling in being disruptive – not for its own sake, but with purpose and intent. Disruption is a life long theme for me… something which came naturally and was unable to be tamed. Now I had a way of describing it.
14 March 2010
Cynefin jigsaws?
I grew up with jigsaw puzzles – my mother was disappointed when a birthday or Christmas passed without a new jigsaw puzzle somewhere among the presents. I’ve found nothing as effective to help me wind down while on holiday than unpacking a new jigsaw puzzle, sorting out the edge pieces and settling down to start looking for the patterns. And I still remember one weekend when I was scheduled for a brain scan on the Monday after the weekend, and the only way I could think of to get through the waiting was to focus on a new type of circular puzzle I had never built before.
Jigsaw puzzles are not all born equal, and it’s about much more than size. A large puzzle just requires more patience than a smaller one, but need not be harder to figure out. One of the strangest ones I ever saw, and which I regret not buying to this day, had the same picture printed on both sides, in portrait orientation on one side and in landscape on the other, and you had to figure out which side up the pieces had to go. In the round puzzle I mentioned earlier, it was not even possible to identify all the edge pieces from the word go, as many of them did not have obviously straight edges.
11 March 2010
The vexed issue of language
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.
Getting the task of closing or opening a conference is always a more interesting task than slotting in to the middle somewhere. Opening you can set the agenda, closing you have the responsibility to reflect on what other people have said and leave people with some new ideas and thinking so they go away on a high. For 
I'm sitting in my room at The Residence in the 
I think Hugh must be living a parallel life at the moment! This was today's Gaping Void cartoon and it represents one of those interesting questions on engagement with others. Now to make it clear, the fact that a criticism or disagreement appears stupid, may just mean that I (or you) have failed to understand it. However there have to be limits, and I think the disengagement point is where this cartoon represents your state of feeling about the other party. Fortunately its rare!