This guest blog has been a great example of self-organizing process for me. At least at my intrapersonal scale, it has set all three of the (necessary and sufficient) conditions for self-organizing in human systems. The space and time established a container that held my attention and focus. My various experiences and parsing of sense-making differences established the potential energy for change. Finally, the conversations I described and reflection coupled with writing completed the conditions for active self-organizing pattern formation. Container, difference, and exchange forming similarities, differences, and relationships that have meaning across space and time.
Given the sensitivity to initial conditions, nonlinear causality, high-dimensionality, and massively entangled boundaries in which we all live, these same patterns will never emerge again in exactly the same way. And still, their emergent process and the patterns they formed will persist. They have been fun and illuminating for me. Hope the same is true for you.
Please do stay in touch. Visit the website. Visit our social networking site. Send your email, and we’ll put you on the HSD Institute mailing list. Keep talking. Keep learning. Keep teaching back in this time of yeasty learning and discovery about complex human systems dynamics.
Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Dawn. Thanks, All
I’m curious these days about dominance, its role in human systems, and its function in complex adaptation.
In an intervention today, I was working with a male supervisor of an all-female team. As I watched them interact in a formal, conflict resolution conversation, I became painfully aware of his unconscious—and incredibly powerful—dominant behaviors. I watched the women react and heard them give feedback about everything except those specific signals of power and control.
I then realized that I may do the same. Sometimes I unintentionally send signals to claim or maintain my position. Sometimes I react unconsciously to the signals sent by others. Of course there are other times where I consciously and/or intentionally choose a dominant or subservient stance, but I only worry about those when I don’t do it well.
The situation that really challenges me is the one in which I participate in patterns of which I am not aware. Perhaps that is what it means to be part of a dominant culture, but what function does such an asymmetry serve in the complex adaptation, self-organizing, emergent process of social structuration? Is it necessary, or is it an historical artifact that we can and should abolish for the survival of the human race?
Recently many of my conversations have focused on accountability. Sometimes the context is management of a complex project in an unpredictable landscape. Sometimes it is demonstration of outcomes and impacts for international programs to shift massively complex patterns such as nutrition and livelihood. Sometimes, it is simply a prickly relationship between a supervisor and a technical professional. Sometimes it is a new resident in the White House and his retinue.
Unpredictability makes accountability a problematic concept in complex systems, especially ones that are recognized to be adaptive or self-organizing. If you don’t know what an outcome will be, how do you hold self or others accountable to produce a result?
At the HSD Institute, we think of three different kinds of accountability in complex systems.
One is the traditional kind of accountability. It is possible—even advisable—when a system is in a relatively stable state. Examples in my experience include safety regulations, assembly line production, auto repair, logistics, and construction. Even as I write these, I am aware that practitioners in each of these fields would challenge the predictability of their domains, nevertheless:
•Change is slow.
•Parts are tightly coupled to each other.
•Causality is linear or simply nonlinear.
•Boundaries are relatively impermeable and clear.
•Diversity is limited.
•Degrees of freedom are low.
•Part, whole, and greater whole are constrained.
In such situations, one can be relatively certain of outcomes—at least in the short term. It is possible to articulate roles, responsibilities, and objectives and to expect them to remain constant over a specified period of time. In such conditions, one can be held accountable for outcomes.
The second kind of accountability emerges in the process of active self-organizing. From my point of view examples include functional mergers and acquisitions, service delivery, collaborations, cross-functional teams, and effective governments. In these situations:
•Change is unpredictable—sometimes moving quickly and sometimes moving slowly.
•Parts are loosely coupled to each other.
•Causality is complex and nonlinear.
•Boundaries are acknowledged, but they are permeable and sometimes fuzzy.
•Diversity is acknowledged in a small number of differences that make a difference.
•Degrees of freedom are variable across the system.
•Part, whole, and greater whole are mutually influential as patterns emerge and disappear across the entire system.
Accountability does not disappear in these systems, but traditional accountability isn’t possible. Instead of being held accountable to outcomes, individuals and groups can be held accountable for learning, shared meaning making, and directional movement. Are individuals and groups learning new things? Is shared meaning being constructed and/or maintained? Is the trend-line of processes and products moving toward a desirable goal?
The third kind of accountability is even more problematic. It arises when systems appear totally unorganized or random. Immediate response to disasters, transition times in economics and politics, crowds, new technologies, emerging markets, many conflicts are examples of random dynamics in human systems. Also, as I list these, I know there are people who see order and predictability in each of these situations. Patterns, and the categories that describe them, are always relative. In such situations:
•Change is so fast that patterns cannot be discerned over time.
•Parts are uncoupled from each other.
•Causality appears to be absent.
•Boundaries are nonexistent or so numerous that they are meaningless.
•Diversity is unbounded.
•Degrees of freedom tend toward the infinite.
•Interaction of the parts is so random that a system-wide pattern of the whole cannot appear and/or be maintained over time.
Though it may be hard to imagine, accountability is important even in human systems tending toward the random. In these situations, people can be held accountable to explore and share. In the same way that an ant colony spreads out in random patterns, finds a juicy spot, then returns to share the news, people hunt and gather. In random systems, people must be held accountable to gather and disseminate information. This behavior over time increases the coherence of system-wide understanding and action.
So, as I work with clients to improve performance, outcomes, and impacts, I try to help them distinguish which kind of accountabilities are possible in their environment, which kind fits their mission and vision, and which ones represent a reasonable investment in the continuing improvement of humans and their complex systems.
What can you learn when you apply this three-part definition of accountability to yourself and your colleagues?
The Virtual Open House was great fun! We had holiday tunes, pictures and quotes, greeting cards, audience chat, multiple voices, a video, a poll, presents for all, and a list of fascinating questions sent in by guests. The only things missing were the mistletoe and the eggnog, and I’m not completely sure about that.
Thanks, again, to our Webinar Wizard, Denise Easton, of http://www.ULiveandLearn.com !
The slides, a link to the archive, the chat stream, and other relevant documents will appear on our public network site at http://humansystemsdynamicsinstitute.ning.com/ sometime in the next few days. In the meantime, there is one question that we wanted to respond to and ran out of time. (It is amazing how quickly 2.5 hours passes by!)
What are the most fundamental principles of HSD?
HSD lies at the intersection of nonlinear and social sciences. In that space, we draw theory, models, methods, and tools from many different places, so sometimes the “fundamental principles” aren’t all that obvious. To make the question even more interesting, the core of our work doesn’t lie in principles, it lies in action. We live in praxis: theory-informed work and work-informed theory. As an active, self-organizing community, our individual and collective actions are shaped by a short list of simple rules.
Today there is some controversy about whether or not simple rules are relevant in human systems. I’ve heard and made arguments on both sides, but my praxis-minded self has to be convinced. They work.
The idea is that when a diverse group of agents all follow the same general rules of behavior, coherent system-wide patterns emerge. Search for BOIDS to find demonstrations and explanations of the simple rule phenomenon in agent-based, computer simulation models.
In real live, we see sets of simple rules move an organization or a community toward shared meaning and action, but not all short lists are created equal. Royce Holladay has given us some short rules about constructing (or discovering) simple rules:
•Begin with an action verb.
Rules are about what you DO, not what you think or believe or value.
•Keep it short.
Have no more than 5 plus or minus 2. Our short-term memories max out at 7, and you have to be able to keep the rules accessible at all times.
•Include the essentials.
Be sure that there is at least one rule to cover each of the three conditions for self-organizing—container, difference, and exchange.
•Expect consistency but not identity.
Everyone, everywhere in the system has to follow the same rules, though each person will interpret them to fit in their own contexts.
With this rather extended preamble, I can tell you the fundamental principles of HSD in the form of our simple rules:
•Teach and learn in every interaction
•Reinforce strengths of self and other
•Search for the true and the useful
•Give and get value for value
•Attend to the part, the whole, and the greater whole
•Engage in joyful practice
Does this give you a sense of what you might expect from one of our Associates? Can you imagine what kinds of system-wide patterns would emerge from our interactions? Can you see how our fundamental principles are embedded in this list of shorts and simples, and how the list embeds our principles in our individual and collective actions? Would you expect us to host a Virtual Open House in which celebration, learning, inquiry, and humor were braided together into a community experience?
On December 9 from 2 to 4:30 CST, HSD Institute is hosting a Virtual Open House. The theme is CELEBRATING UNCERTAINTY. Please join us. It is free, but registration is required. To register, visit:
http://www.uliveandlearn.com/dsp_breezelivedetail.cfm?ProgramID=07e46373-245a-454b-8ca9-2c26b33ee43b
We will be exploring six questions that squeeze juicy information out of any situation—no matter how surprising.
1. What are the three most important things you notice about the present situation?
2. How do you want these three things to be the same or different in the future?
3. What do you think you know for sure and what are your questions?
4. What are the contradictions you are encountering?
5. What has surprised you in the recent past?
6. What are you going to do to make a difference in the near future?
We’ve used these questions with families, friends, and clients and find that they open a whole world of possibilities in the midst of confusion and disruption. Join us on-line to explore how these questions can unfold opportunities for individuals, organizations, and communities. You can even plug in your USB headset and add your voice to the mix!
I’m preparing for the next webinar in the series Strategy to Action: The Power of Human Systems Dynamics (http://www.uliveandlearn.com/). This session, on December 10, is about communications in a complex system. Of course, if human systems are self-organizing, agent-based, pattern generating entities, communication takes on an essential theoretical role. When you live and work within such systems, communication also becomes an essential element in practice. We are dealing with communication explicitly in many projects right now:
•Conflict resolution that retains diversity of thought and action.
•Collaborations among government and private industry to deliver high-quality, cost-effective services.
•Planning in the midst of very dynamical landscapes.
•Research partnerships across geographical and disciplinary distances.
•Using multiple media to educate and facilitate our expanding network of certified associates.
Sometimes we embed an HSD perspective in communication implicitly into our relationships, and sometimes we make our ideas about communications explicit. The webinar will be an example of our explicit approach. Here is a bit of a preview.
HSD operationalizes communication as exchange, and includes exchange as one of the key conditions for self-organizing in human systems. Tight exchanges move a system toward orderly predictability. Loose exchanges move it toward emergent and surprising patterns. Without exchanges, agents roam around without reference to each other, and the result appears random and chaotic (in the garden-variety sense).
We have investigated ways to design exchanges to influence the coherence and adaptability of systemic patterns. Theoretically, the views are drawn from communications, information, and mechanical sciences. Practically, they emerge from our own experience with clients, vendors, colleagues, and each other. We focus on four aspects of exchange, each of which can be monitored and adjusted to improve the clarity, coherence, and reach of communicative acts.
•Length refers to both the time required for an exchange (both out-going and in-coming) to be completed as well as the number and ruggedness of the boundaries across which a message must travel.
•Width refers to the amount of information that is transmitted simultaneously. A bad dinner party is a much wider exchange than even the best email.
•Dynamic refers to the intent of the exchange to amplify or to damp a previous action or message. Damping (negative) feedback strives to reduce and amplifying (positive) feedback strives to increase a quantity or behavior.
•Direction refers to the “back” part of the feed. Sometimes it is reasonable to broadcast a message without expecting a message in return. The choice depends on the context, the current system state, and the message.
When faced with a communication that is not working, it is possible to describe it in terms of its length, width, dynamic, and direction, and to explore options for action to improve the function by changing one of these key variables. When you shift one of these four dimensions, the exchange is transformed, and systemic patterns shift. You cannot predict the effects, but you can anticipate them before the change, observe them after the change, and adapt tactics to improve performance in the next cycle of observation, decision, and action.
Yes, it is as easy as it sounds. For more information, join us on-line.
Of all the chaos and complexity metaphors, one that is increasingly relevant to my work in communities is the scale-free network. We can speculate about why:
•The ubiquitous internet gives us new ways to think about human systems.
•Escalating challenges and diminishing resources push us toward new models to support action.
•In-coming generations have transformed our traditional organizational and social systems into their own network architectures.
•Changes in network theory help us imagine dynamic and dynamical transformation over time.
•Old hierarchical relationships and distributions of resources and power are breaking down under the load of fuzzy boundaries, global reach, and massive diversity.
You probably have your own list of reasons why network-based explanations are showing up in surprising places.
Ultimately, the reason my clients and colleagues turn to networks is that nothing else works as efficiently and effectively to collect and distribute information, resources, and energy in complex environments.
I commend to you three books that have been particularly helpful as I’ve explored the power of network as metaphor for collective knowledge and action. Barabasi, in Linked (http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/linked.html ), gives an articulate and accessible description of the nature of the dynamical, scale-free, massively entangled, unbounded networks. Goldsmith and Eggers, in Government by Network (http://www.governing.com/books/netwint.htm), describe an adaptive infrastructure that contributes efficiently to the common good. Strogatz, in Sync (http://www.news.cornell.edu/chronicle/03/3.13.03/Strogatz-Sync.html ), demonstrates how networks explain the previously inexplicable in biological and physical systems.
Today, I met with a group of committed stakeholders in East Central Illinois who are concerned about the future of children and youth in their communities. Two years ago, under the guidance and with the support of the Lumpkin Family Foundation (http://www.lumpkinfoundation.org/ ) , a similar group hosted a summit meeting. Seventy-two professionals from nine disciplines and eight communities came together to explore opportunities for collective action. They left with the seeds of a network. Today, individuals and organizations work together in collaborations and partnerships—some formal and semi-permanent, others informal and ad hoc. The challenge for this new team is to design a second generation summit . Their goal is to build capacity, so that the emerging network is sustainable even in the current economic environment and the potentially much worse environment to come.
We talked about setting conditions to support development for the network through its constituent partnerships, organizations, youth, and adults across the region. We didn’t talk technically about self-organizing systems and the conditions that influence the speed, path, and outcomes of self-organizing processes. But we did identify the conditions that they believe will shape their network in the future. Based on the CDE Model for the conditions for self-organizing in human systems (http://www.chaos-limited.com/dissertation.pdf ), these practice conditions include:
•A focused time and place for engagement as well as a compelling vision that will draw people together and hold them in relationship long enough for meaningful collaborations to emerge. These will function as the container for the generative process— the C of CDE.
•A wide array of interests, resources, perspectives, and locales to inform innovation and productive collective action. These will function as the differences that make a difference—the D of CDE.
•Multiple opportunities before, during, and following the summit for individuals and groups to share resources—ideas, funding, insights, infrastructure. These will function as the exchanges—the E of CDE—that connect entities in meaningful and productive relationships and form the emergent, system-wide patterns of scale-free networks.
Embedded in the summit design, these conditions will establish the opportunity for new networks to form, emerging ones to be strengthened, and existing ones to become more adaptive. The twelve people in that room know, much better than our network scholars, what it means to thrive in a self-organizing system. The metaphor of scale-free networks converts their private, personality-driven knowing into shared, collective action.
At the end of the meeting, one woman made an insightful comment. “We are struggling to build this network in support of youth, but when they grow up, networks will be their native tongue. Might we be paving the way for a future for youth that we cannot even imagine? “
We can imagine it. It is a dynamical network.
The “edge of chaos” doesn’t exist in my world. Yes, I know it is only a metaphor, but I don’t think it is a very helpful one. The reason became obvious in a conversation I was having yesterday.
A government client is developing a massive information system to support a wide variety of functions. Old processes work in silos, abuse customers, are difficult to maintain, expensive to upgrade, and out of compliance with federal regulations. The vision is to create a system that is reliable and flexible, secure and accessible, coherent and optimized for individual functions, available to a wide network of users and tightly controlled, easy for newcomers and efficient for experts. In short the goal is to create an information environment that is simultaneously tightly and loosely constrained. Both technical and business experts wish there were an edge of chaos upon which they could build a system, but try as they might, no edge is in sight.
The business architecture, developed over the previous months, will help them navigate their way. Roger Sessions’ SIP methodology established a framework for quasi-independent, controlled interaction agents for business functions—ABCs (http://objectwatch.com/.) The current question is how to move this conceptual business design into a workable technical architecture and implementation platform.
We have been brought in to support the transformation of the human system as the information system moves through its various phases of development and implementation. If the technical solution is messy, you can imagine how much more messy the human beings and their constructs are. The meeting yesterday was a perfect example—business and technical leaders are working out fundamental assumptions and approaches. One of the key questions is whether the project will be managed as a single unit—built or outsourced—or whether it will be managed as a suite of complementary modules. Two points of view emerged. The one focuses on stability, security, risk reduction (or displacement), and ease of management. The other strives for the same things, but also adds adaptability, sustainability, and business fit into the mix.
The conversation began with a gulf between the two perspectives and the personalities that supported each. As we listed pros and consequences of greater and lesser constraint, the gulf narrowed to a line, and the line quickly morphed into a zone. Using the construct of adaptive action, the group drafted decision criteria for when to apply which approach. At various points, the conversation threatened to digress into philosophical debate. At those junctures, I suggested that we frame the dilemma and address it further when we have a specific, grounded situation in hand. I find that real work often clarifies the essentials and marginalizes the rest, so options for action become clearer in the concrete specifics.
On Monday we have an all-day meeting with business and technical stakeholders in the room. Again the questions of over- and under-constraint will shape our conversation. Again we will define the extremes and the practical zone of action that lies between. If we were thinking of this challenge as an edge, I think we would all be destined to fail. I will let you know how it goes.
Thanks, Dave, for the invitation to this shared inquiry. There is nothing like a probing question, a rousing discussion, or a disturbing story to move me to challenge old assumptions and build new insights. In fact, that is the greatest thing about my current role as founding Executive Director of the Human Systems Dynamics Institute—I get to have lots of stimulating conversations. Each one strikes a match that could land on dry kindling or soggy leaves. Sometimes a bonfire erupts, and sometimes the energy smolders for months. Of course the outcome depends more on the environmental conditions than on the match manufacturer. The match is still necessary, even if it is not sufficient.
So, over the next few weeks, I will plan to share some of those amazing and mundane conversations in hopes of sparking more fires here and perhaps igniting others in your corner of the forest.
I want to start with some questions that have been generating energy for me and my colleagues recently: I
If you have answers, I’m all ears. If you have questions of your own, that is even better!
Glenda
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