Managing the Complex

Notes from October 1998 in Boston

Issues/Challenges for March:
Core themes for our pursuit:

What are the benefits of our meetings?

• An opportunity to incorporate the non-verbal (in the liberal sense) aspects of discourse into the development of a shared understanding
• The existence/emergence of a shared context within which to develop personal understanding
• further develop a community of meaning
• enhancement of a common context for discussions
• experience in articulating emerging view points and stories related to complexity with rich and immediate feedback
• time out from daily lives to focus on these issues
• Real time forces me to focus attention, creates much more sense of community, is more productive for these and other reasons.
• In real time dialogues do not develop sequentially, but in a more parallel distributive, and therefore more dynamic way.  A clash of ideas becomes more interesting in real-time because all media can be used whether in E-time discussions often tend to lead to shopping lists of arguments. It is much more fun to share things with people of which you have a feeling/experience.
• Although considerable butt sniffing, to use Hugo's articulation, took place during the first 36 hours, it evolved considerably into a much more free spirited, giving and sharing, real time interchange of state of the art thinking which I for one benefited from and I believe no one can deny benefiting from.  This would not have taken place with nearly the rapidity nor the value retention level for all had it been done through singular exchanges on the web.
• dialogue - face to face - see, feel, hear reaction of all in room to commentary
• Spontaneous response - triggers more creativity and potentially new insights.  (More fringe thinking and out of box than rational logic)
• Easier to negotiate semantics and vocabulary to move towards an organizational complexity lexicon.
• I find the Complex-M conference a very useful way of meeting people with whom I have developed an on-line Ôrelationship. The people I met in Toronto and Boston have not disappointed me in terms of their thoughtfulness, depth of insight and experience in developing and applying CAS thinking in the real-world of organizations. Furthermore, I have met others (particularly, some of the speakers), who have provided me with a profound learning opportunity, - a chance to really cut my teeth, and open up new areas of inquiry in my work. I view the Complex-M Conference as a personal R&D opportunity, and it has also increased my network and relationships with important thinkers and practitioners in this rapidly evolving field. Finally, I can see a true community of meaning as well as a community of practice emerging through these conferences.

Issues/Challenges for March:

• Convergence of thoughts, not thinking
• Complexity as metaphor
• Life in the web vs. on the web
• need clear structure for
  • Theory - theorems, principles
  • Application - tools, methodologies
  • Case studies - successes, failures
• Lessons learned
• How can we effectively study organizations as CASs?  What methodologies can we use?
• Applying an organic model.
• A common definition/meaning of complexity theory applied to organizations - move the paradigm forward
• Find truly CAS organization re organizations totally acting on complexity theory perspective (3M has attributes of a CAS, but also of non-CAS organized entities) maybe tripod, idea, etc.
• We should present work that opens us to go beyond the sniffing.  You can describe swimming in a variety of ways, but the real fear is just diving in the water, and trying to swim.  This implies we will have to leave partially the metaphorical level to get more into concepts and methodologies
• Scalability:  Stages and Phases of Growth in Complex Environments

Core themes for our pursuit:

• Complexity:  mental model or management doctrine?
• The transition from a community of meaning to a culture of creating meaning
• Thinking together vs. thinking the same.
• Tools - qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis
• Methods - pluralism  case studies, definitions
• Proofs (mathematical or computational) of complexity (GST) theories
• What is rigour for soft analysis?
• discussing patterns present in CAS
• how can these patterns better inform management decision making in the areas of organization science and strategic management
• Challenges of managing an organization as a CAS, including such things as organizational learning, encouraging info flows, compensation & reward, functions of boundaries, transformation.
• Intentionally emergent coherence
• Cross-disciplinary comparative complexities
• Webs vs. networks
• Organizational learning
• How to actually apply complexity theory (CT) to organizations
• How to talk about CT in managerial/laymen terms
• How to test whether CT actually works or makes a difference
• Getting beyond the rhetoric
• How to break out of Newtonism thinking when talking/arguing CT
• Developing a shared meaning of CT
• Build a model, not a computer SIM
• Make an inventory of the different models and methodologies, accompanied with an evolution of those who use it, love it, oppose it; it's like a travel guide through the managing the complex landscape.
• Our (the collective of global humanity as custodians of the earth) well being and wellness is increasingly dependent on the decisions and actions of corporate (business) organizations which are themselves finding it increasingly difficult to capture an understanding of the global economy and translate it into change that is beneficial both for the company and its environment (customers, etc.).  Our (the brain trust of CAS management thinkers) core theme is to rapidly develop effective and understandable tools (process and patterns) to help corporations adapt meaningfully further qualities good.  This will return value to them and us.
• Topics for a complexity based management curricula Complexity in Management 101
  • Economics - increasing returns
  • Operations research - cellular automation, adaptive agent models, NK models
  • Asset management - knowledge assets
  • Organizational behavior structures, incentives
  • Strategy - fitness landscapesÉ
  • R&D - creativity
• conflict, power, domination-subordination
• models, not metaphors
• anchored in existing concepts, theoretical frameworks
• (conflict) competition, collaboration and level of analysis (scale)
• identify information and resources
• Being vs. becoming
• Co-evolutionary/adaptive strategy -- How do organizations adapt and co-evolve?
• The Connected Digital Economy & CAS -- What new technologies & organizational species are emerging in the digital economy?
• Organizational structures and processes -- How are adaptive organizations organizing?  How do they strike a balance between exploitation and exploration?
• The paradox of Intentional, Emergent Coherence --A foundation them which illustrates the difficulty  of reconciling intentionality and emergence in organizations.  A good starting point on the theory.
• Managing meaning and knowledge -- What do we do differently in complexity-based organizations about knowledge, information systems and meaning?  Also covers learning organizations.
• Leadership in CAS -- What does leadership mean in the new world?  What are the different options?
•  Sustainability in Business Ecosystems and organizations
• CAS:  Mechanistic vs. organic on a continuum rather than digital polarities
• Recognizing, promoting, fertilizing, nurturing emergence
• Excoding the change sin corporate DNA
• Distinctions in differentiated organisms/organizational (finance, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, Info System, consulting)
• Case studies modeled after AOL case studies
• Autopsies - failed business analyses
• On line consultations - real problem analysis
• Entrepreneurial start-ups.  ? develop on-line
• Differentiate human (judgment) intellectual/financial capital and ROI on each
• Proposals of business models and structures that would incorporate organic (free-willed) CAS principles
• Discussion of imposed or constrained boundaries
• Recognizing characteristics in the zone of complexity