Evolution or Revolution 2

@ceciiil asserts a difference between @oscarberg and @bduperrin in his post E2.0 Evangelists : the Revolutionaries and the Evolutionaries (March 24, 2010).

I'm not convinced by this distinction. Cecil says that revolutionaries believe in disruption and evolutionaries believe in incremental change. But these beliefs are not mutually exclusive. In a simple linear world perhaps, incremental change is unlikely to be disruptive. But in a complex dynamic world, incremental change can often trigger disruptive change. (There is a branch of mathematics called Catastrophe Theory, dedicated to the study of such non-linear phenomena. And Hegelians define dialectics as the transformation of quantity into quality - see for example Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels.)

So I have long argued that the difference between evolution and revolution is largely a difference of perspective. Not either/or but both/and.

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The following is an extract from Chapter 5 of my book on the Component-Based Business (Springer 2001).

A sudden change is often described as a revolution. A progressive change over time is often described as an evolution.

Even in biology, the distinction between sudden change and slow change is problematic. If you had been sitting on the seashore many millions of years ago, you might have seen the first sea creatures crawl onto land, and this might seem a sudden and dramatic event, from a human perspective. However, a squid might see this event as relatively unimportant, merely as one of many tentative explorations by a few creatures at the margins of the oceans, or as a fairly routine extension to previous innovations within a large and diverse community of sea creatures.

Many present-day commentators characterize the emergence of computing, or the Internet, or E-Business, as revolutionary. From one perspective, these appear to be previously unseen phenomena, emerging suddenly into public awareness from the obscurity of some other domain. From another perspective, the same phenomena appear to be a natural consequence of a large number of independently planned and executed moves by a large number of engineers, businessmen and others, whose origins can be traced back to innovations made years ago, decades ago, perhaps even centuries ago.

Thus the same phenomenon can be described as revolutionary AND evolutionary at the same time, depending on where you’re standing, and the amount of history you’re prepared to absorb.

If I describe a change as revolutionary, I’m inviting you to concentrate your attention on certain aspects of the change. I want you to see it as a dramatic break with the past, with sweeping implications across a fairly wide domain.

If I describe a change as evolutionary, I’m inviting you to take a different perspective. I want you to be aware of the links between the past and the future, and the extent to which previous patterns and innovations are being adapted and reused.

Some people feel safer with evolutionary descriptions of change, while others feel happier with revolutionary descriptions. As a manager or consultant, I might feel the need to motivate some people, while reassuring others. Sometimes I want to emphasize continuity; at other times, I want to emphasize novelty. At least from a logical point of view, I’m not necessarily contradicting myself if I describe things differently for different stakeholders – although there may be ethical or practical difficulties if the descriptions diverge too greatly.

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Related Posts

Evolution or Revolution (May 2006)

Where is the fear?

@hnauheimer recommended a discussion in the Linked-In Organizational Change Practitioners group. Rauf Aslam Butt had asked why people FEAR to change, and this prompted a number of responses about resistance to change being caused by anxiety, ego, dislike of effort, fear of the unknown, and so on.

I thought it was interesting that we often describe other people as fearful, anxious, reactive, and so on, but never ourselves. WE are rational and THEY are emotional.

Sometimes resistance to change is a perfectly rational response to a flawed or ill-conceived initiative, as my friend Linda Levine pointed out many years ago. Many change programmes in large organizations are not properly thought through, and many large organizations are trying to run several incompatible change programmes at the same time. As Christina Buchanan said in the discussion, we should all fear badly-planned change.

The second good reason to fear change is that the change may get half-way through and then run out of money or trust. (People losing faith when the change gets to that inevitable dip in the middle.) Or there'll suddenly be a new person at the top with a different agenda.

People learn to be apprehensive about change because of accurate observation of what has happened in their organizations and elsewhere. Art Kleiner suggests that "resistance to change occurs not because people fear change, but because they fear the consequences of contradicting the perceived priorities of the core group" (Strategy+Business, April 2010). Rather than complain about "fear", maybe change practitioners should look at addressing the causes of fear. (Perhaps this was the purpose of Rauf's original question.)

When change agents perceive ordinary busy people as fearful or ego-driven, simply because they don't leap with enthusiasm and energy for every half-baked scheme that is put to them, or because they ask awkward questions, maybe there's a certain amount of projection involved. (Psychologists call this transference.) It might seem that the people who are really most anxious about this change and its immediate prospects are the change agents themselves? But that's not the whole truth either.

Following my post Where is the intelligence?, we might ask a similar question about the true location of the fear. Even if the change agents authentically acknowledge their own feelings about the change, and deal with these feelings in a healthy and mature manner, we might wonder if the change agents really owned these feelings, or whether they were sensitively picking up the anxiety embedded in the organization itself. (Psychologists call this counter-transference.)

Unless we are completely emotionally cut off, our feelings inside organizations are strongly connected to the emotional state of the organization as a whole. This applies to feelings such as motivation as well as anxiety, and applies whether we are change agents ourselves or the recipients of change led by other people - often we may be both at the same time.

Change agents should also acknowledge their own contribution to the sum total of fear and anxiety in an organization. One common tactic for change is to create something called a compelling event - a story that attaches fear to the status quo, prodding the organization reluctantly into the future like a herd of cattle. As a consequence of this tactic, many organizations are almost paralysed by the accumulation of would-be compelling events.

But in my opinion, one of the biggest errors of a change agent is to focus attention on the people who are most vocal in expressing anxiety about a given initiative - treating them as if they were the instigators of these feelings rather than merely witnesses to them, sometimes even trying to exclude or avoid them as if this will cause the bad feelings to disappear. But anyone who brings their concerns out into the open is doing you a favour, because these concerns can then be addressed, and the change programme will be better for it. It is the silent ones you really have to worry about.


Linda Levine, An Ecology of Resistance. In Tom McMaster et al, Facilitating Technology Transfer through Partnership (Springer 1997) pp 163-174

 

Related posts: Passive Adoption (December 2009), Why new systems don't work (December 2009), The Role of the Sceptic (April 2010)

Where is the intelligence?

When a system behaves intelligently, we may want to discover where the intelligence is located. In smart technical systems, we may imagine that there is some clever lump of software somewhere doing the smart bits. In intelligent organizations, we may imagine that there must be some clever people pulling the strings. So we may wish to take the system apart to discover how the system works.

But I prefer to see intelligence as a holistic property of the whole system, emerging from the interaction between all the parts of the system, rather than something that can be specifically located in certain components or subsystems.

Let's consider any team sport - baseball, cricket, or any kind of football. The top teams are successful not just because they have the most talented (and expensive) players, but because they respond quickly and fluently to the tactics of the opposing side, which involves all of the elements of organizational intelligence.

The team may have a captain, but in many sports this is merely an honorary position for the oldest or wealthiest member of the team and there may be no visible difference in behaviour between the captain and the other players. The collective intelligence of a good team is not just the eleven men on the field but also the man on the touchline in the suit; not just the 90 minutes on the field but the whole training regime that enables them to perform at that level. When our team plays another team, where is the "memory" located of the other team's recent performance? It may not be the players themselves who watch and analyse the TV footage; it may be the coaches who feed this knowledge into the pre-match training.

So does that mean the knowledge is somehow "owned" by the coaches (on behalf of the team as a whole) and then "transferred" to the players before the match? But that is a gross simplification - it makes it seem as if the players were merely blank slates for the coaching staff to write upon. All we can accurately say about this kind of knowledge is that it is derived from observation and interpretation of TV footage, contained somewhere in the whole-system, and somehow influences the behaviour of the whole-system. It's not about transferring knowledge from one subsystem to another, but about communication and collaboration that results in the whole-system using the knowledge effectively.

Describing intelligence in this way allows us to focus on a series of critical questions - how does the team (as embodied whole-system) use knowledge intelligently, what kinds of signal does it pay attention to, how does it learn from past experience, how are new tactics and counter-tactics developed, and so on.

Those primary questions raise some secondary questions about the kinds of organizational structure and team culture in which this kind of intelligence may flourish, as well as the tools, platforms and other mechanisms that may be helpful, but we must always be wary of simplistic means-ends thinking - implement this regime and install these practices, and these outcomes will magically ensue.

for VPEC-T, see comments below

Starting point for adoption

@stephenmann objects to the statement "The logical starting place for ITIL adoption is to deploy a Service Catalogue". Instead he suggests "a great starting point for ITIL adoption would be incident and change".

Is there a single logical starting point for any technology adoption? Or should we identify four complementary starting points, based on what Aristotle called the Four Causes.

• Formal cause - the conceptual structure and framework - in this case the ITIL framework itself
• Material cause - the bits and pieces of stuff to be installed - perhaps including a Service Catalog
• Efficient cause - the adoption process - some kind of plan or roadmap driving the adoption
• Final cause - the purpose or reason behind the adoption - I guess this is what Stephen means by "incident and change"

 A very common tendency of technology change management is to focus on one or two of these and neglect the others. "We installed the kit, we sent everyone on a training course, whaddya mean nobody's using it?"

Knowledge Claims

@JDeragon blogs about the emergence of a "know" profile. He identifies four types of knowledge - intellectual, social, creative and spiritual - and advocates the construction of individual profiles that express our individual "knowledge inventory" across these four types of knowledge.

The metaphor of "knowledge inventory" is based on his assertion that people are containers of knowledge. But what if people are NOT "containers" of knowledge, asks @EskoKilpi, who argues that one of the main challenges for knowledge management is bridging the gap between knowing and acting.

I fully concur with Esko's objection to the "container" metaphor, and I agree that the relationship between knowing and acting is important - in fact it's a critical connection in my model of organizational intelligence. However, I think we have to be careful not to imply that the gap between knowing and acting can ever be completely closed. There is always a need to act under conditions of uncertainty.

Even if we were willing to regard knowledge-as-content, Jay Deragon acknowledges that this knowledge would need to be measured and vetted over time. So the best that we could possibly expect from a set of knowledge profiles is a collection of knowledge claims, together with some information that would allow us to evaluate a given claim. Does this person really know everything about project management? Does this medical researcher really know that this procedure is safe and effective?

When I pointed out that I can claim knowledge about all sorts of things, and asked who is the best judge of how much I really know, @oscarberg replied that "real life is the best judge".

But since we don't have a reliable way of interrogating real life in real-time, we must surely treat all knowledge-claims with caution.

Social Proximity and Trust

Andrew McAfee describes a topography of social networking, which he describes as the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye (November 2007), drawing on the sociologist Mark Granovetter’s theory of the 'strength of weak ties' (pdf). McAfee's topography, which he acknowledges to be a drastic simplification of a large and complex set of phenomena, is drawn as concentric circles with the strongest ties in the centre (presumably this is the "bullseye"). For a discussion of McAfee's topography, see my post From Weak Ties to Weak Signals.

The circles of social proximity may relate to circles of trust. We preferentially share information and ideas with people we trust.

• because we expect to be recognized and rewarded - either by benefiting directly from the use of our knowledge (e.g. as a member of the same team or organization) or by getting some favour in return
  
• because we expect to be informed about the use of our knowledge, allowing us to intervene if the knowledge is used inappropriately or out of context (this is particularly important if the knowledge is complex, uncertain or volatile, or we are unsure about the ability of our friend or colleague to appreciate its full implications)
• or conversely, because we expect them to get on with it without pestering us with follow-up questions

And we seek information and ideas from people we trust

• because we believe that the information and ideas will be good
• because we expect to be trusted with their information and ideas
  
• because we expect to be allowed to use the information and ideas without excessive constraint or tedious negotiation
  

There are several alternative reasons for trusting people. One reason for trusting people is because we know them personally. Another reason is that they work for the same organization - therefore there is some management hierarchy that can resolve any competing claims or other issues. A third reason is that they have some kind of public reputation to maintain. We tend to trust public figures either because we have a fancy of knowing them personally, or because we imagine they have little to gain and much to lose from tricking their fans.

What are the relative strengths of these reasons for trusting people? In some organizations, people trust outsiders (such as consultants) more than they trust their own colleagues - either because they believe that the consultants have access to superior knowledge and techniques, or because they believe that the consultants are disinterested observers of internal company politics rather than active players.