Working with stupid

@jasoncrawford makes some excellent points in his post How to work with “stupid” people.

• Calling someone stupid is often based on the fact that the person has made (what seems to be) a bad decision.

• Just because you disagree with a decision doesn't make it bad. Just because a decision doesn't produce the desired outcome doesn't make it bad. And apparently bad decisions may not be so bad when you frame them differently, appreciating the context and constraints.

• Bad decisions may be caused by bad information or bad technique. Just because a person is intelligent doesn't prevent them making bad decisions when misinformed, or when skipping some of the validation and consultation steps.

• And bad decisions may also be caused by timidity or emotional pressure. Just because a person is intelligent doesn't stop them being intimidated by other people.

• Regarding someone as stupid (even if they are) is not a helpful starting point for understanding the causes of a difference of opinion, let alone resolving it.

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Just as it is risky to draw conclusions about a person's stupidity from a single decision, so it is also risky to draw conclusions about a person's intelligence from a decision that had a lucky outcome. Labelling people as intelligent can be almost as damaging as labelling them as stupid - it distorts future decision-making and in some circumstances has been shown to discourage hard work. (See my post Explaining Enron.)

Of course we do often come to conclusions about the intelligence and character of our colleagues and partners, and this may be based not on a single lucky or unlucky decision but on a repeated pattern of decision and action. But what that really tells us is how intelligently that person is able to operate within a particular organizational context. Does the person have the information and tools and appropriate management support, and the right kind of motivation and pressure, to think about the right issues in a sufficiently rigorous manner? One of the symptoms of a stupid organization is that nobody appears able to make intelligent decisions. And one of the strongest arguments for improving the intelligence of an organization is to release the latent intelligence of its people, which must surely be of benefit to them as individuals as well as to the organization as a whole.

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So what about working with stupid organizations? People inside organizations may perceive many of the symptoms of organizational stupidity, may despair of a culture that inhibits open discussion and learning, and may seek to remedy this in various ways. But what about relationships between organizations with different styles of decision-making? The goal is surely to build collaborations where the intelligence of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Which entails a clear understanding of the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of each organization, and the kinds of collaboration that may be effective.

The challenge for consultants, of course, is that it is the stupid organizations that may need our help most.

Wilensky on Organizational Intelligence 1

Have finally got hold of a library copy of the original book on Organizational Intelligence by Harold Wilensky, published in 1967. Some of Wilensky's assumptions look a little dated now, but there's a wealth of great ideas and examples.

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One of the problems talking about intelligence is that people may use the word to refer to a number of different concepts.

• Signals and their content - intelligence as raw material for sense-making and decision making
  

• Expertise - intelligence as the individual and collective ability to reason efficiently about significant questions - Wilensky discusses several different types of expertise, which may be mobilized in an intelligent organization

• Function - a set of processes for acquiring and deploying intelligence as required across the organization, typically operated by a specialist organization unit
  

• Strategic capability - intelligence as a property of an organization, enabling it to operate effectively in volatile environments

Wilensky himself defines intelligence as "information - questions, insights, hypotheses, evidence - relevant to policy" (p viii), and mostly uses the word to refer to the content rather than the process or capability. But the book is largely about the intelligence function, and how this function is supported by relevant skills, capabilities, doctrines and organizational structures.

Value of intelligence

In Chapter Two, Wilensky argues that an intelligence function has particular value and relevance for large organizations in complex environments. He identifies three key specialist roles, contributing to his notion of organizational intelligence, and identifies three factors creating particular need for these three roles.

Contact men, responsible for liaison and communication with the external environment, This role is similar to the "Resource Investigator" team role identified by Belbin.	Especially needed when an organization is in conflict with its social environment or depends on it for the achievement of its central goals (p10).
Internal communications specialist, responsible for liaison and coordination inside the organization.	Especially needed when an organization depends on the unity and support of persons, groups, factions or parties within its membership for the achievement of its central goals (p13).
Facts and figures men. These are responsible for building and deploying analytic models and methods. More recently known as quants or wonks.	Especially needed when an organization sees its external environment and internal operations as rationalized - that is, as subject to discernible, predictable uniformities in relationships among significant objects (p14).

Wilensky's argument now looks dated, not only because of his assumption that these roles would be filled by men, but also because of his trust in rational and predictable analytical models, which would now be seen as unrealistic and simplistic. However, it seems like a good historical starting point for starting to think about a division of labour / expertise within the intelligence function and beyond.


...  to be continued

Visualizing Complexity

Lot of people have been mocking a Powerpoint slide produced by PA Consulting Group and first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, which attempts to visualize the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan. Some commentators refer to this slide as "Spaghetti Logic".


via MSNBC

Elisabeth Bumiller writes We have met the enemy and he is PowerPoint. (New York Times, 26 April 2010) @presentationzen picks out the money quote from General James Mattis: "PowerPoint makes us stupid".

Elisabeth Bumiller also quotes General McMaster, for whom PowerPoint’s worst offence is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” says General McMaster.

I don't know the exact provenance of this particular slide, but I have seen similar slides in which the original analysis has been carried out in a proper modelling tool, designed for system dynamics and simulation, and then merely rendered into PowerPoint for communication purposes. We may of course question whether PowerPoint rendering is adequate for communicating this kind of complexity, but most of the complaints about the slide seem to be about the situation described by the slide, rather than the slide itself. (Which looks to me rather like shooting the messenger.)

Richard Engel summarizes both sides of the debate.

The slide is undoubtedly overwhelming. For some military commanders, the slide is genius, an attempt to show how all things in war – from media bias to ethnic/tribal rivalries – are interconnected and must be taken into consideration. It represents a new approach to war fighting, looking beyond simply killing enemy fighters. It underscores what those fighting wars have long known, that everything matters. But for others, the diagram represents a fool’s errand that the United States has taken on in the name of national security. Detractors say the slide represents an assault on logic, an attempt to jam a square peg into a round hole. They say the concept of occupying a foreign nation to protect security at home is expensive, time consuming, ineffective and ultimately leads to the "spaghetti logic" of the slide. They say this slide is what happens when smart people are asked to come up with a solution to the wrong question. [So what is the actual surge strategy? (NBC, 2 December 2009)]

In my opinion, visualizing the complexity of America's intervention in Afghanistan is surely helpful, whether the conclusions are that the American forces can operate more effectively by paying attention to some of the subtleties of the situation, or that the situation is just too damn messy and America should never have gotten involved in this mess in the first place.

Whether this kind of diagram is the best way to visualize this kind of complexity remains an important question, but it isn't a PowerPoint question any more but a much more general question about systems thinking techniques for modelling (sense-making) and communication.

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See also

• Hypnotizing chickens, Afghan insurgents, and spaghetti (27 April 2010)
• Joey deVilla, PowerPoint is NOT the Enemy (April 29, 2010) via @skemsley
• Chris Soderquist, We have met an ally and he is Storytelling (29 April 2010)
• Linda Booth Sweeny, Why We Should be Suspect of Bullet Points and Laundry Lists (30 April 2010)
• Complexity is not the enemy (10 May 2010)

Innovation by Committee

The historian and filmmaker Laurence Rees is setting up a subscription-based website providing coverage of World War Two, called WW2History.com. In an article in today's paper No, children: Hitler came after 1066 (Sunday Times, 25 April 2010), he describes some of the financial and organizational challenges, and the risks of the subscription model.

If the subscription model of internet funding doesn’t work, I can’t see how truly authoritative educational material on the web has a future. Unless, of course, it’s assembled by a state-funded or charitable institution.

I was particularly interested in his comment about the failure of universities of pursue this kind of innovation.

From the first day I started making WW2History.com I was curious as to why no university had created something similar to this before me, especially since all the academics I asked to contribute to the site could see the value of the work instantly. Partly it’s because of money — universities can scarcely expand into new areas when they face cuts elsewhere. But, according to one distinguished academic I talked to, there’s also another reason. “We could never do this,” he said. “It isn’t just because we don’t have the media expertise or the cash, it’s because we would set up a committee to oversee production and no one would ever agree on anything.”

Does this mean that innovation by committee can never work, or merely that universities typically lack the capacity to operate the kind of collective intelligence that would make it work?

Organizational intelligence in the Roman Catholic Church

One of the ideas I am trying to investigate about organizational intelligence is that it enhances the viability, sustainability and survival chances of an organization. Is this idea contradicted by the existence of some extremely old institutions, such as the ancient universities and the Catholic Church? Or do these institutions possess some form of intelligence that is not always apparent from their observable behaviour?

Firstly, we may note that very few mediaeval organizations have survived to the present day; so the fact that a few wealthy organizations have survived through centuries of social and political change could be attributed to a combination of wealth and luck, rather than intelligence. Not just material wealth but also social capital - a good reputation, together with a large network of supporters and sympathizers. Such wealth may be diminished during periods of crisis, and replenished at other times: thus an extremely wealthy and well-positioned organization may be less dependent on organization intelligence for its survival.

The Roman Catholic Church has faced many crises in its history, and has had periods of innovation as well as periods of stasis. It is currently facing a crisis in relation to its handling of child abuse cases, and this crisis shows some interesting aspects of organizational intelligence.

The first point is the apparent ability of perpetrators of these crimes to disable the intelligence loops of the organization that might have prevented them from committing and repeating these crimes, sometimes over extended periods.

• Event signals are suppressed. The victims are persuaded to remain silent. Allegations are fragmentary and can be disregarded.
• Sensemaking is misdirected. The perpetrator surrounds himself with the tokens of respectability, and creates a confusing network of relationships, often including the victim's family.
• Decisions are ambiguous and weakly enforced. Perpetrators are given the benefit of the doubt. Guidelines intended to keep perpetrators away from future victims are understood as merely providing protection against "false allegations".
• If the volume of suspicion becomes too great, perpetrators have sometimes been merely relocated, where they have been able to start afresh. This appears to represent a serious failure of collective memory.
• Communication channels are suppressed.
• Thus it is difficult for any meaningful learning to take place.

The second point is the muddled and counter-productive way in which the Vatican now faces these problems. In an article for the BBC News website, Gerard O'Connell (editor of the British Catholic newspaper The Universe), identifies the following problems.

• Accusations not being fully answered or firmly rebutted in timely fashion
• Never knowing ... caught completely off guard on several occasions
• Absence of a coherent media strategy ... missteps that fanned rather than moderated the media frenzy
• Sparking tensions with Jews ... offending victims' organisations ... enraging the worldwide gay community.
• Fr Lombardi, the chief Vatican spokesman, has no mandate to coordinate the Vatican's media strategy. He has not even spoken with Pope Benedict about the abuse crisis since it broke last February.

Paola Totaro (@totts) adds

"Unlike modern multinationals or big government bureaucracies that would employ communications specialists to manage a public crisis, the Vatican appears to have been paralysed by its own byzantine structures. It has been unable to explain or make its own case in public, this despite the strangely modern decision to Twitter some public statements as well as use its traditional media, principally the L'Osservatore Romano, to rebut and argue its case." Benedict at sea in a world of hurt (Sydney Morning Herald, 17 April 2010)

Meanwhile, there is a good article by Thomas Reese SJ, asking what European bishops can learn from the U.S. sexual abuse crisis. He writes that

"... from the beginning, the American bishops underestimated the size and gravity of the problem. ... The biggest miscalculation the American bishops made was to think that the crisis would pass in a few months. Hunkering down and waiting for the storm to pass is a failed strategy."

Between 1985 and 1992, the American bishops started to discuss the problems of child abuse and admitting their mistakes in handling these cases (at least in closed session). According to Father Reese, incidence of child abuse went down during this period. But in 1992, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a series of best practice (in other words voluntary) guidelines for dealing with sexual abuse, and the situation worsened again. It took another ten years before the bishops, with Rome’s consent, imposed binding rules requiring zero tolerance of abuse. Father Reese calls this a "long learning curve", and says the European bishops "need to travel the same ground very quickly".

So this could be a good test of the Catholic Church's organizational intelligence. For his part, Anthony Grafton hopes for innovation and renewal to come from the margins of the Church rather than from its central institutions, as has happened several times in the past.

"Over the centuries, the central institutions of the Church have often worked in counter-productive ways, emphasizing the powers and prerogatives of the institution over the spiritual life of the faithful. Again and again, Catholics have proved astonishingly resilient and inventive, and have come forward to offer what the hierarchical church was not providing."

On this view, intelligent renewal comes not from popes but from saints. Grafton mentions Francis of Assisi, Ignatius Loyola and Angela Merici. "Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero."

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A person or organization with limited intelligence can do excellent work within a stable and predictable environment, but struggles to cope with unexpected complexity, and takes a long time to learn new things. So an organization can be highly successful in Business-As-Usual, but may struggle with change.

So some questions in relation to an institution such as the Catholic Church would be

• what challenges has this institution faced, and to what extent has it succeeded in responding promptly and appropriately to key events?
• what kinds of learning and change has this institution been able to carry out in response to changes in the outside world?
• how has the organizational structure and culture of this institution helped or hindered its ability to respond appropriately to emerging complexity?
• what are the likely consequences of this on the long-term prospects for this institution?

If we were to carry out a detailed analysis, we might well come to the conclusion that a different organization structure would result in more effective learning and change, but we might equally conclude that higher levels of intelligence might be achieved without radical alteration to the existing organization structure, so I shouldn't want to prejudge this.

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Andrew Sullivan, The Third Strike (The Atlantic, 10 April 2010)
Jonathan West, The Times and Ealing Abbey (Confessions of a Skeptic, 10 April 2010)
Richard Dawkins, The pope should stand trial (Guardian 13 April 2010)
Paul Behrens, Why the pope can't be tried (Guardian 13 April 2010)
Gerard O'Connell, Why the Vatican media strategy is failing (BBC News, 14 April 2010)
Anthony Grafton, The Pope and the Hedgehog (New York Review, 20 April 2010)
Thomas Reese, Taking Responsibility (America Magazine, 26 April 2010)

The Role of the Sceptic

@ceciledemailly asks the @ocpractitioner group for practical tips to address the initial resistance of a key/instrumental stakeholder within an executive committee.

Here's how this looks when viewed through a group dynamics lens.

The group requires at least one member to express sceptical ideas, which Cécile is labelling as resistance. If such a person is sidelined or excluded, then others will emerge from the group to take on the sceptic role. On the other hand, if the sceptics are encouraged to work through their doubts, and are trusted by the rest of the group to perform this function, this allows everyone else to get on with the work. In Belbin's Team Inventory, this role is known as the Monitor/Evaluator.

Having been on the receiving end of a lot of change initiatives that weren't thought through properly, my sympathies are generally with the sceptic.

A lot of change initiatives get snarled up in the transition from "vision" to "content". Sometimes executives are attracted to grand visions and assume that the implementation details will sort themselves out somehow. We have seen the same thing happening with large public sector IT projects, where politicians have repeatedly been seduced into spending vast sums on initiatives where nearly all the experts (with the exception of those hoping to gain financially from the project) advise that it won't work.

Cécile says that "the vision is quite clear". But clear visions are usually simple: reality is complex. This is why a clear vision, while essential for gaining a degree of consensus and enthusiasm from most of the group, can sometimes be unrealistic. Monitor / evaluators tend to be unpersuaded by simple visions, and prefer to work through the practical details before buying into a scheme. If they are given space and time to do this, the scheme will be much more robust and likely to succeed.

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By the way, many Christians misunderstand the vital role of Saint Thomas in the New Testament, and I've heard him spoken of with some disrespect. But he was the one who didn't accept mere rumours of the resurrection of Jesus, but wanted to test this with the evidence of his own senses, and therefore becomes the most valuable witness for the gospel story. Jesus may have said "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed", but of course that doesn't imply (as some commentators seem to imagine) that those who are initially sceptical are any less blessed.

Too much information

@unorder In his post on Weak Signals, Shawn Callahan repeats four fallacies of sensemaking identified by Gary Klein. In this post, I want to look at the fourth one he identifies - that more data leads to better sensemaking.

In an earlier post, Shawn talked about when there is too much information (May 2005), which produced some interesting comments from Denham, Andrew and Clive Wilson.

Several presenting problems were identified in this discussion.

• conflicting and voluminous information
• complexity, uncertainty, unclear path

In such a situation, many managers will seek more information. Is this always incorrect?

Firstly, we may note that an automatic (knee-jerk) demand for more information may be motivated by a number of factors.

• Ease, immediacy and relatively low cost of certain kinds of information retrieval (especially what is freely available and easily found using internet search engines);
• Prior investment in information technology and analytic capability (skilled professionals);
• Institutionalized risk aversion and "due diligence";
• Requests for more information (or inquiries or studies) being a strategy to defer or avoid making a decision. (This strategy is commonly found in dysfunctional organizations as depicted in the Dilbert cartoons.)

But even if people are driven by ignorance, fear or laziness, they might still be doing the right thing by gathering more information. (Things may be done for the wrong reasons, but still produce good outcomes.) Organizations that encourage managers to think twice before acting may not be as bad as organizations that encourage managers to act without thinking at all.

Instead of gathering more information, Shawn advocates focusing on principles, values and preferences to help you make a choice, and basing your decisions on plausibility instead of accuracy. For his part, Clive disagrees; he thinks the problem is often not a lack of information as such, but a lack of relevant and useful information. "In such circumstances, you would expect to get better quality decisions by obtaining the additional information first, rather than making a decision in its absence."

I can see that both positions might be reasonable in different contexts. The real issue for me however is achieving a good balance between three things.

1. The quantity and quality of information.
2. The capacity of the people (working collectively) to use the information effectively.
3. The demands of the situation.

In other words, we need to have just enough good information to support the collective intelligence of the management team in addressing the complexity of the situation. And in complex situations we need information not merely to support the decision itself but also to support the timing of the decision, which (after Lacan) we can divide into three phases: the instant of seeing, the time to comprehend, and the moment to conclude.

If the management team is already overloaded with information, then there seems little point merely trying to get more information. However, if we are overloaded with poor quality information, then it may be very useful to replace it with higher quality information. (This entails an ability to ask the right questions, and to frame any investigation intelligently.) At the same time, we may wish to increase the reasoning capacity (sense-making and decision-making) of the management team. If we can't manage to connect the dots, simply having more dots all over the place isn't necessarily going to help, but having dots closer together may help us to see the pattern. (By the way, I think I agree with Klein that sense-making isn't just about connecting the dots, but it is part of the story. I shall come back to that in another post.)

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Gary Klein, Brian Moon, Robert R. Hoffman, "Making Sense of Sensemaking 1: Alternative Perspectives," IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 70-73, July/Aug. 2006, doi:10.1109/MIS.2006.75

See also Sensemaking in a World of Shadows, a review by Stephen Few of Gary Klein's latest book.

The Wisdom of the Body

Art Kleiner argues that the organization is alive (Strategy+Business, April 2010) and refers to a book published in 1997 called The Wisdom of the Body, by Sherwin B. Nuland.

So that set me thinking about the intelligence of the body. The body has a series of highly sophisticated mechanisms for maintaining stability, and is in a sense "programmed" for survival and reproduction.  But some of these mechanisms can produce undesirable outcomes (such as obesity and diabetes), and people are commonly driven by urges and appetites that seem primitive in comparison to the demands of the modern world. Our ancestors lived in a world where salt, sugar and fat were scarce; many people nowadays overindulge on these ingredients, and don't find it at all easy to exercise control over their diet. So there is a sense in which the body may be more powerful than the conscious mind, and able to achieve a certain range of outcomes in the face of a certain range of environmental conditions, but I don't know I'd want to call this intelligence let alone wisdom.

How does the body adapt to changing environment? Apparently thanks to a device known as the brain, which sometimes produces clever ways of dealing with an inhospitable environment - for example fire and animal skins and shelter to protect against the cold. So we are led to imagine that the intelligence of the body is largely located in the brain (this is perhaps already a misleading simplification).

And when we think of the body as a metaphor for an organization, it is tempting to think of the cognitive and communication and learning devices within an organization as being analogous to those in the body, and that the intelligence of the organization is largely located in its senior management, who serve as the "brain of the firm".

There are several coordination mechanisms in the human body - nervous system, the cardiovascular system, the endocrine system - and Kleiner suggests loose parallels between these mechanisms and the different communication systems within an organizations. He points out that an organization has several communication systems that perform different purposes - including command and control, knowledge sharing, sharing cultural values - and argues that these are distinct systems, "each requiring its own form of intervention to effect change".

There is an important difference between the human body and the organization, however. In the human body, the cardiovascular system and endocrine system can be trained to a limited extent, but most of the scope for innovation and problem-solving resides in the brain. In the organization, on the other hand, the intelligence is not limited to the command and control system, and there may indeed be more scope for innovation and problem-solving through multiple communication systems.

In which case, a healthy organization may have forms of wisdom greater than the wisdom of the human body. But what is required for a healthy organization?

Ethics and Intelligence

@flowchainsensei (Bob Marshall) argues that All Executives are Unethical (pdf).

More precisely, he argues that it is unethical to believe things without proper evidence. (He is particularly interested in beliefs about product and software development, but the argument applies more generally.)

As far as I can see, there are three steps in this argument.

1. People are ethically responsible for their beliefs. (According to Bob, this was the basis for a controversial paper presented to the Metaphysical Society by William Kingdon Clifford in 1876.)

2. An unfounded belief is unethical.

3. A person who holds unfounded beliefs is unethical.


Let's look at step 1 first. This appears to entail an ethical obligation to subject one's beliefs to some kind of "due diligence". However, most of our beliefs are based, not on evidence that we have personally collected and analysed, but at least partly on evidence that has been filtered through other sources. We may have reasons to trust certain sources more than others, but if it is unethical to believe things without proper evidence, it would also surely be unethical to trust things without proper evidence. We may accept an ethical obligation to subject our beliefs to "due diligence", but this is normally a collective obligation rather than an individual obligation.

Step 2 asserts that any failure to ground beliefs in proper evidence is an ethical failure. People are rightly held accountable for failing to act in certain circumstances (for example failing to save someone from drowning), but ethical censure generally assumes both awareness (knowing that someone needed rescue) and capability (being able to swim). So the problem with Step 2 is that the more complex the beliefs are, the greater the intellectual power (intelligence) that is required to appreciate and thoroughly investigate these beliefs. If the management team isn't individually or collectively intelligent enough to understand what proper evidence would look like, then believing things without proper evidence is a consequence of insufficient intelligence.

Does being stupid count as an ethical failure? (Being deliberately or avoidably stupid might, but most instances of stupidity are not deliberate.) Appointing people and teams who don't have enough intelligence might be unethical, but only if the appointment was deliberate or avoidable, and so on along the responsibility chain until we can find someone who should have known better.

Step 3 assumes that we can categorize people as ethical or unethical based on incidence of ethical or unethical behaviour. Once we have a hard-and-fast concept of sin, then we can define a sinner as a person who has committed (and not yet purged) at least one sin. The trouble with this is that if we are all sinners, the category of "sinner" ceases to have much value except for the purposes of hellfire rhetoric. Labelling all executives as unethical (and why stop at executives, by the way) becomes merely a rhetorical gesture.

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So where does this leave the virtues of diligence, responsibility and probity? Firstly, I hold that these are collective virtues - executives display moral character in a particular organizational setting, and we may not know how their ethics would stand up in a different setting.

Secondly, I think character and intelligence are distinct virtues. We should not automatically suppose that intelligent people are more ethical than less intelligent people, and therefore we should not define "ethical" to mean something that only especially intelligent people can comply with.

Thirdly, there is a widespread belief (especially among consultants) in the value of knowledge (although I don't know exactly what would count as proper evidence for this belief - if executives are unethical, I dread to think where this leaves consultants). If we define knowledge as justified true belief, then knowledge is degraded to the extent that it is unjustified or untrue, or for that matter disbelieved. If it is unethical to believe something without proper evidence, it may sometimes also be unethical to disbelieve something. Sometimes excessive scepticism shades into cynicism and negativity, and maybe this can be just as unethical as unjustified optimism.

The Paradox of Change

@PG_Rule @leanstekel @flowchainsensei .

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If culture change requires behavioural change, and behavioural change requires system change, where does system change come from? How is system change possible?


@PG_Rule retweets @leanstekel The best way to change and sustain an organizational culture is by first changing and sustaining management behavior ~ Jim Womack newsletter

@flowchainsensei No. Best way to change org culture is to change the system. Implies mgmt change first - but they're in a system too.

@leanstekel systems are man-made; who should initiate change? a system is not an excuse

@flowchainsensei Although, remember the story of the monkeys and the ladder. Sometimes the (mgmt) system has a life of its own. #zombie

@PG_Rule Splitting hairs. Snr management is responsible for designing the system of work. It can't change unless they change 1st

@richardveryard Perhaps the distinction between espoused-system and system-in-use (Argyris) gives you some wriggle room.

@richardveryard so the possibility of change emerges from contradictions within the (management) system

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The paradox of change is that a completely closed and contradiction-free system would find change impossible. Advocates of revolutionary change have always understood the strength of the forces maintaining the status quo, and the importance of finding (or if necessary creating) contradictions as seeds of change. I think this is what Marxists call dialectic materialism.

For example, Mao Zedong On Contradiction

"The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes."

For "thing" read "system".

If we turn our attention away from the political systems that concerned Lenin and Mao, towards the kind of management systems that interest Bob, Rob and Grant, what are the possible contradictions that might trigger cultural change and behavioural change and therefore system change?

The most obvious kind of contradiction is often a conflict between values and outcomes, or between policies and outcomes. Perhaps the system is increasingly perceived (from within its own management subsystem) to be struggling to remain viable in the face of hostile events. Perhaps policies are perceived to be not achieving their intended results. (For this kind of contradiction to trigger productive change, it is important for these contradictions to be perceived by the right people. But as we shall see, there are other kinds of contradiction that may be able to trigger change without being consciously perceived or explicitly acknowledged.)

The next most obvious kind of contradiction is that there are multiple conflicting values and multiple conflicting policies. This is almost inevitable within a large complex system or organization. This pluralism creates opportunities for changes to emerge; these changes may not be consciously planned, and may be unwelcome to some or even to all stakeholders. (However this emergent change typically increases diversity, which creates a different kind of opportunity for change. Kevin Kelly's Nine Laws of God include two that are relevant here -  Maximize the Fringes and Honour Your Errors.)

A more subtle kind of contradiction is between the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. The official understanding of the system (what Argyris calls the espoused theory) always falls short of what is really going on (the theory-in-use). This gap between the official and the actual can provide space in which the most radical and productive changes can start to take root.

Weak Signal Theory

@hnauheimer 's Observatory for Weak Signals quotes @Mindsystems asking Is ‘Weak Signal Theory’ the secret to business success?

Here is the Mindsystem strategy for detecting weak signals

• Do something to cut down the background noise
• Be on the alert for the smoke screen that ‘Conventional Wisdom’ can throw up
• Develop techniques to “see the emerging patterns” in the chaos which is information overload
• Look for and expect the unexpected.
• Adjust our attitude to seek success in the unusual and the marginalised ideas and opportunities

As far as I can see, this strategy only works if you already know how to separate the weak signals from the background noise, and can see through the smoke screen, etc etc. In which case you don't need a strategy at all. This sounds more like wishful thinking than real theory - weak signal-theory rather than weak-signal theory. As for expecting the unexpected, this is of course perfect nonsense, as Oscar Wilde knew perfectly well.

For some reason, this so-called strategy is attributed to Bryan S Coffman, who had written a paper on Weak Signal® Research in 1997. However, Coffman's position on background noise seems much more realistic and practical. "In order to uncover a full picture of the situation, a great deal of noise must be processed. Note that the noise is frequently eliminated only by understanding it." I believe the true author is likely to be one John England, Executive Director of Mindsystems, who claims credit for the Mindsystems blog on his Linked-In entry. (Update - this attribution has now been corrected.)

As far as I can see, Bryan Coffman's original material is a lot more intelligent and useful, and there is also some interesting work on Weak Signal Analysis by Dale Coffman (some relation perhaps), but this all seems to fall short of the pioneering work of Igor Ansoff. So we have a curious process of Chinese Whispers here, with ideas and theories being attenuated in transmission. An interesting form of metacommunication perhaps?

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In a further comment, John England tries to explain the example between the expected and the unexpected using an example based on controlling the power grid. He regards a variation in TV transmission times as "expected", and regards an outage in a power source as "unexpected". However, I presume that both of these classes of event are anticipated by the designers of the control dashboard, and fully covered by the training received by the managing engineer, so they can hardly be regarded as weak signals.

In fact the outage of a power source is clearly an example of a strong signal, which Holger Nauheimer describes thus. "Strong signals about things going the wrong way are easy to notice in an organization - or even to measure by numbers. Strong signals will show up anyway and everybody will be concerned about them. When we notice strong signals we know that something needs to be done." In comparison, the variation in TV transmission times might once have been disregarded by power engineers, because it doesn't seem relevant until we make the connection between TV viewing and kettles (and for that matter toilets), so it might formerly have been a weak signal. However, the monitoring of TV transmission times is now embedded in standard working practices for the control of various networks including power grid and water, so it is no longer a weak signal relative to current knowledge and practices.

If that is the kind of thing that Mr England means by "expecting the unexpected", then it doesn't entail anything more than "being prepared for known problems to occur at any time". And that is not going to be much help in detecting genuinely weak signals. However, Mr England defines "weak signals" as merely "variations from the norm" and recommends "systems to constantly monitor specific bodies of knowledge", which suggests that he is talking about something rather different from the rest of us, and certainly different from the notion of weak signal introduced by Ansoff in the mid 1970s.

Meanwhile, for most people including Oscar Wilde, the phrase "expect the unexpected" has a paradoxical air, so it sounds more like a Zen koan than a simple usable guideline.  As for "approaching every situation with an open mind and leaving your baggage at the door" - this is something we might all want to achieve, we might even imagine we are good at it, while noting how often other people fail to do this. Simply telling people to be open-minded is useless, because everyone aready imagines himself or herself to be pretty open-minded already. The point is to construct a social process (this is part of what I call organizational intelligence) that allows preconceptions and expectations to be exposed and challenged, and allows weak signals to be detected and reasoned about.

We may not all have the kind of software that is used by the FBI and Homeland security (which Mr England describes as a "luxury"), but there are many organizations that are a lot better than these at detecting and dealing with weak signals, so there is no need to regard the processing of weak signals as outside the capabilities of any organization.

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See also

• Shawn Callahan, Weak signals (March 2010)
• Leena Ilmola and Anna Kotsalo-Mustonen, Filters in the Strategy Formulation Process (2003)
• Paul J.H. Schoemaker and George S. Day, How to make sense of weak signals (MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2009)