Points of Contexture

Thriving in the Age of Complexity - With no answers, only choices

You are hearing more and more that the current recession has bottomed out, that the economic crisis is easing as job losses slow and we are beginning to see confidence return to the marketplace.  This is good news indeed as we turn from survival and begin to look forward.

 Nevertheless, the global business environment is becoming more and more interconnected and complex.

The future will see new uncertainties, ambiguities and even more surprises.  Our world is acting as a complex system, and what we are now experiencing is just a taste of what will undoubtedly come.

An Open Letter: Leadership and Strategy in the Crisis

January 5, 2009

 

To Whom It May Concern:

 

Significant changes in your environment require an immediate strategic review to refocus your competitive advantage.  Strategy is all about future differences, creating your future, the competitive difference you can bring, and how you identify and take advantage of the resulting new opportunities.  In this economic crisis, in this critical moment, how you chose to act and respond will have far reaching impacts for you and your organization.

Now is the time for reconsidered strategy - for your organization, your business units, and your alliances and partnerships – creating precise actions aligned with that strategy, with an eye ready to see the opportunities that are clearly beginning to emerge.

While the jury is out on how long this crisis will continue, one thing is sure:  The world simply will not look nor act the same afterwards.

Strategy in the Current Crisis: Thinking and Acting in the Recession

One of the more interesting topics of recent conversation is the idea that this economic crisis really has no model or pattern that is discernable from past downturns and crises.

 

I was listening to Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan) this past Sunday morning on Fareed Zakaria's (The Post-America World) GPS show: He and the other roundtable members made some very compelling points about the unique nature of the current crisis.  And after listening to some other folks, and thinking about some recent work I have done, there are some critical new ways of thinking you need in this crisis.

Inutition's Role in Decision Making-Redux

At KM World 2007 last week, after my presentation with Steve Barth, I was asked about an apparent conflict in the way intuitive sensing, sense making and decision making works compared to decision making using business intelligence (BI) systems. Actually they don't conflict at all, unless we make or let them - they all work together!

Accelerating Decisions and Innovations

Steve Barth and I will be presenting our latest work and thoughts on Sensing and Sense Making at our sesison at the 11th annual KMWorld & Intranets Conference and Exhibition on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 10:30am. We'll be focusing on the practical implications and applications for Innovation with some new ideas on Decision Making:

This session draws on insights from cognitive psychology and complexity science to reconsider how knowledge workers individually and collectively interact with their information environments and share their perceptions and opinions with important implications for how to support knowledge work. Knowledge, information and data are everywhere in business ecosystems, but the challenge of synthesizing fragmentary signals into actionable intelligence is really more about human cognition and organizational culture than business technologies and organizational structures.

The conference and exhibition runs November 6-8, 2007, at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, CA.

Early Warning Signals: A Conversation for Exploration - Part 1

From 2005, but even more relevant today:
In the past four years (Author's note: now 6-1/2 years since September 11, 2001) we have been inundated with variations on the theme of “early warning signals”, “connecting the dots”, “hindsight” and “foresight”. We see and hear them almost daily – in newspapers, magazines, learned journals, books, television news and shows (24, anyone?).
What we really want from information, intelligence and knowledge is asymmetry. We want to know things others don’t, or at least to know things before others do. We want and need early warning signals to be able to connect the dots and provide foresight of future events and the early identification of threat.

Prediction Markets - Tapping the Wisdom of Crowds

Well, as my first conference on Prediction Markets (Yahoo Confab Dec 2006) this one left me a little puzzled, even with James Suroweicki and Robin Hanson there in person. So here are my thoughts, questions, and reactions to what was presented, talked about, questions asked and examples thrown out to us. (These comments were first posted at Arik Johnson's ReconG2)

Workshop at SCIP: "Accelerating Decisions and Innovation through Sense-Making"

This workshop has been cancelled for SCIP, but check here for the next upcoming date.

Steve Barth ( see Steve at Reflexions) and I will be conducting a workshop at SCIP's 2007 International Annual Conference and Exhibition.(SCIP site) The meeting will be in New York City April 30-May 3, 2007.
The workshop includes three mission-critical Learning Objectives:
1. Understand the cognitive and cultural dynamics of sense- and decision-making, and how to increase the bandwidth of organizational awareness.
2. Discover how to improve the flow actionable intelligence by using existing characteristics and behaviors in your organization and networks.
3. Explore structures, practices and tools that support sense-making and leverage intellectual and information resources for better business outcomes.

Beginnings

A new way of conversation...musing on the totality, sensing the whole as well as the parts...