Organization Archives - Page 7 of 11

Places to Intervene in a System

A nice reminder from Jack Vinson about an excellent resource on ways to
poke on complex systems that are more likely to be effective than our
typical efforts. I’ve pointed to this before in several incarnations (here and here).
We’ve certainly seen more than our share recently of ineffective ways
to intervene. Perhaps we can hope that some of these lessons will find
their way into broader practice.

Places to Intervene in a System

A 1997 article by Donella Meadows has been reprinted in a software developer magazine, Places to Intervene in a System. (Here’s a fuller version from 1998.)

Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in “leverage
points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an
economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in
one thing can produce big changes in everything.

The systems community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those
of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have absorbed
one of his favorite stories. “People know intuitively where leverage
points are. Time after time I’ve done an analysis of a company, and
I’ve figured out a leverage point. Then I’ve gone to the company and
discovered that everyone is pushing it in the wrong direction!”

[via Johanna Rothman]

– jackvinson (jackvinson@jackvinson.com) [Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

Thinkers you should know – David Reed

(cross posted at Future Tense)

One of the most profoundly important (and disturbing) things about the Internet is that fundamentally no one is in charge. One of the individuals responsible for that design is David Reed, a computer scientist from MIT.

As far back as Jethro and Moses in Exodus, we’ve applied hierarchy to bring complexity under control. Many have characterized Jethro as the world’s first management consultant. One of the reasons that hierarchy works so well in organizational settings is that is addresses the problem of information overload on managers, where middle managers serve to consolidate and route information through the hierarchy.

However, computers are not people and hierarchy is not the only, or necessarily the best, solution to information management problems. Reed, along with J.H.Salzer and D.D. Clark, wrote a seminal paper in the early days of the design of ARPANET and TCP/IP called “End-to-End Arguments in System Design” that laid out the reasons that hierarchical solutions were a bad idea in designing a network of the scale and complexity envisioned for the ARPANET. Those design insights were baked into the basic architecture of TCP/IP and are one of the core reasons that the Internet has grown as widely and rapidly as it has. If you hope to understand how the net and network thinking in general will continue to impact the future of work, this had better be one of your starting points. “End-to-End Arguments” is a pretty technical paper, although it is manageable; you might find “The end of End-to-End?,” also by Reed, a better starting point.

More recently, David has been exploring other notions about how markets and technology interact in ways that don’t necessarily mesh with our default assumptions. In particular he’s done interesting work on why eBay and other internet companies have thrived but handing significant power over to their customers with the notion of Group Forming Networks.

Currently, David is back at MIT at the Media Lab leading a research program on Communications Futures. A good starting
point for this work is the program on Viral Communications (pdf) David is doing with Andy Lippman of the Media Lab.

Like other thinkers, the value of looking at what David is up to is twofold. First, the ideas themselves are powerful. Second, watching how someone smart tackles problems can give you insights into how you might tackle other problems

Sharing Knowledge

This is indeed a succinct and useful introduction to knowledge management in the context of knowledge intensive organizations.

Sharing Knowledge.

Sharing Knowledge
(.pdf) has been receiving quite a bit of attention in various knowledge
management blogs. It’s essentially a case study of how to create a
knowledge sharing environment in smaller organizations. Most of the
suggestions are basic and should be familiar to those who have been
following KM developments. The document does provide a nice overview of
wikis, communities of practice, and general (physical) workspace design.

[elearnspace]

Paul Graham on the deeper business lessons of open source

Doc Searls points to an excellent essay by Paul Graham on What Business Can Learn from Open Source. It’s full of thought-provoking observations. Here’s just one sample:

The third big lesson we can learn from open source and
blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of
flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work
bottom-up: people make what they want, and the the best stuff
prevails.

Does this sound familiar? It’s the principle of a market economy.
Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those
worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all
their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like
commmunist states.

There are two forces that together steer design: ideas about
what to do next, and the enforcement of quality. In the channel
era, both flowed down from the top. For example, newspaper editors
assigned stories to reporters, then edited what they wrote.

Open source and blogging show us things don’t have to work that
way. Ideas and even the enforcement of quality can flow bottom-up.
And in both cases the results are not merely acceptable, but better.
For example, open source software is more reliable precisely because
it’s open source; anyone can find mistakes.[ Paul Graham]

Well worth your time. I suspect that most large
organizations will have an extraordinarily hard time grasping and
acting on the trends Graham highlights. Those that do manage will have
an edge in attracting talent.

It’s a bottoms-up world

Rex is right. Go read what Kevin Kelly said.

Then think about how the same logic applies inside organizations. Organizations that continue to try to apply top-down control will increasingly fall behind those organizations that can figure out how to tap the same kind of bottoms-up logic that has driven the web over the last decade. How fast that will play out is hard to say, but the evidence from the web is that it will happen much faster than we expect or will be comfortable with.

What Kevin Kelly said. What Kevin Kelly said: (Note: I’m still not blogging this weekend, I just happened to finally getting around to reading something in a magazine that, fortunately, is also online, and couldn’t help myself.) In a must-read Wired Magazine article, “We Are the Web,” Kevin Kelly displays how to make a profound argument stick, not by focusing on the rules and rants about who can and cannot blog, but by providing insight into the beauty of what has taken place over the past ten years — and, in turn, making us realize that the next ten could take us places the rule-makers (be they bloggers or old-media types) are the last to envision.:

What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would be manufactured by users, not corporate interests. Amazon.com customers rushed with surprising speed and intelligence to write the reviews that made the site’s long-tail selection usable. Owners of Adobe, Apple, and most major software products offer help and advice on the developer’s forum Web pages, serving as high-quality customer support for new buyers. And in the greatest leverage of the common user, Google turns traffic and link patterns generated by 2 billion searches a month into the organizing intelligence for a new economy. This bottom-up takeover was not in anyone’s 10-year vision.

No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences – and they knew a lot – confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment. Everyone knew writing and reading were dead; music was too much trouble to make when you could sit back and listen; video production was simply out of reach of amateurs. Blogs and other participant media would never happen, or if they happened they would not draw an audience, or if they drew an audience they would not matter. What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds. There – another new blog! One more person doing what AOL and ABC – and almost everyone else – expected only AOL and ABC to be doing. These user-created channels make no sense economically. Where are the time, energy, and resources coming from?

[rexblog: Rex Hammock’s Weblog]

Organizational lessons from Hunterdon High

Fascinating case study of better meshing high school with real world demands. I suspect that, if this experiment is allowed to continue (by no means a certain thing), these are students who will be prepared to cope with the world they will have to face. Here’s the money quote for me:

“You have to make available all the technology you can get your hands on,” Farley explains. “And then you have to do one more thing – you have to trust them.” At Hunterdon, kids already prepare their own lesson plans. What’s more, Farley expects to see extensive at-home schooling within two years. “You have to decentralize learning,” he says. “It doesn’t all take place in the classroom. Our technology makes that possible. Then you have to think through what that means for the school buildings. Even more important, you have to think through what that means for the school community.” [Fast Times at Hunterdon High]

If you think this is only applicable or relevant in schools, you haven’t been paying attention. I really don’t fully understand why, but the leadership strength it takes to let the “inmates run the asylum” remains all too rare; despite the accumulation of evidence that it pretty much invariably works, be it in schools, business organizations, or elsewhere. Most likely because few of our leaders had the benefit of this kind of educational environment.

First Impression: Life Speed. “Kids today live in a nanosecond world.”

–Ray Farley , Superintendent, Hunterdon Central Regional High School

[Fast Company]

On Experience

This made me grin at least.

At the same time, if you get better and faster at recognizing your mistakes, that alone can help improve performance. I remember talking to my instructor a few years back as I switched from skiing to snowboarding. Her observation about both sports was that you could think of them as a series of controlled recoveries.

It’s only within the mythology of Soviet style planning (whether encountered during the Cold War or in a corporate environment ), that mistakes can’t be tolerated. If you’re quick and agile enough, you can recover from those small mistakes that you make every day. Step one in recovering from mistakes is recognizing them as quickly as possible (Step 0 is given yourself permission to make the mistakes you’re going to make regardless).

On Experience. On Experience —

“Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.”
— Franklin P. Jones

(via The Quotations Page) [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]

Change or die

Rob Patterson is absolutely right, this is easily one of the best articles on change that’s shown up in a long time. Why it’s hard, why most conventional approaches are unlikely to work, and why efforts that appear doomed actually worked. I expect to be re-reading and recommending this one for a while.

Change or Die. Quite the best article on change available…. [Robert Paterson’s Weblog]

Generic meeting summary.

I’ve had reason to appreciate this sentiment far too many times in faculty meetings, partner meetings, and other settings where ego and brains fight for dominance. Worth remembering. Thank you Espen.

Generic meeting summary.

I think this goes for most meetings:

“[…] a […] faculty meeting is not over when everything has been said, it is only over when everything has been said by everyone. By my count, we’re about 2/3 done with the first criteria but only about 1/4 done with the latter.”

Not that I am not guilty of spurious (and oh so well formed) rambling overspecifications myself.

From ProfessorBainbridge.com via Infectious Greed.

[Applied Abstractions]