This project which is finally starting (the one thing I do not like about Colombia is the insane bureaucracy of its procurement process) is a fascinating one.  Working over the five major cities using SenseMaker® and linked intervention methods to understand how to improve entrepreneurial behaviour from high tech start ups to local shops.  This week is a mixture of training, advocacy and investigation.   Just driving around (not an easy feat in Bogota) and visiting different places, talking with people has no substitute.  We found an inspiring Professor looking after the education of children confined to hospital and that triggered the idea of using them as citizen journalists to capture the stories of post cardiac surgery business people.  That is not central to the project, but it could produce highly relevant material.  The great thing about micro-narrative research is that the incremental cost of capture is low so you can afford to play a few hunches.

This cultural mapping of cities and populations is becoming somewhat of a speciality of Cognitive Edge and with SenseMaker® we have the only tool that can handle distributed ethnography.  More critically the only tool that empowers people to interpret their own narrative rather than surrender that right to a computer algorithm and/or expert.  Allowing an authentic voice to be spoken and heard was one of my main motivations when all of this started a decade or more ago.  Its also pleasing to find more and more people discovering the need both at government and industry level.  Hearing people in their own voice is the first step to understanding, insight and dare I say it: wisdom

The fact that information could now move quickly, if not then in real time, to allow executives to manage international organisations produced fascinating changes in behaviour and expectation.  It didn't matter if it was corporate reporting or supply chain management (the two areas in which I built software and service offerings) all the neat and tidy systems diagrams broke on the rocks of human response.   Either defiance or workarounds, and with the growth of Process Re-engineering an underground of informal networks that made systems work despite themselves.  So called efficiency improvements often created huge workloads for those informal networks thus rendering them less effective (and come to think of it less efficient as well).  The resulting stress and focus on short term measurement had a negative impact on intrinsic motivation, customer service, innovation and so on.   In this context the recent growth of sick stigma is a positive sign: at the end of an idea's life cycle things that clearly have not worked are taken to excess as people desperately try to avoid admitting they got the whole thing wrong.

So given all of that it was not surprising that I got engaged in the then emerging ideas around knowledge management which in turn took me to narrative and complexity but that is a story for another day.  What struck me then was the complete failure of people to take context into account.  People would find an outcome they liked and assume it could be achieved by copying current practice without acknowledging the evolutionary context that had given rise to it.  Communities of Practice grew (as I remember it) from the popularising of Étienne Wenger' study of Boeing (Yes I know it was not his first work).   The popularising distilled an academic research paper into a series of simplistic recipes that combined with Lotus Notes to create a whole movement which is still around to this day albeit in a much diminished form.

Now at the time I was one of the few (very ,very few) voices that challenged the fad for communities of practice and also Nonaka's SECI model which appeared to be used as a sacred object in the KM Community.  To be the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness may result in satisfaction later but at the time there is always a danger that some dancer will require your head to be cut off as a reward.  If you substitute IBM Management Consultancy for dancer then I escaped but it was a close run thing at times.  (Note: Painting Salome by Pierre Bonnaud and that look so reminds me of John)

In respect of communities of practice my main objection was the failure to pay attention to context, something that is generic to what I call a crude empirical model of management science research.  The point of the Boeing case was that the various practices were the result of complex and deeply contextual evolutionary history.   If you wanted to gain similar benefits then you needed to follow a similar journey to allow a contextually unique solution to emerge.  It was around then I started to use the mantra Replicate the starting conditions not the end point to make the point strike home.  Cynefin developed in this context as I started to argue that informal communities had to be managed as a complex ecology and that formal communities should emerge.  One of the first Cynefin papers Complex Acts of Knowing is all about that process and how to make it happen.  It is also a pragmatic approach, it starts from reality rather than from an idealistic design of how people should share what they know.

Context came up again in my keynote to KM Europe.  Nancy in her response chided me somewhat for criticising past not current knowledge management practice.  She also mentioned the use of Facebook like capability by the various intelligence agencies as one example of this.  Interestingly she made the point that no one really participated until the Mumbai bombing at which point everyone helped everyone else.   While the participants were talking Nancy and I chatted, we have known each for some time and have a high degree of mutual respect despite some major differences.  I raised the question of context using Weick and Sutcliffe's work on high reliability organisations as an example.  I argued that the cases they study in the main work in crisis or near crisis situations, have crew type structures and the like.  So I can replicate the behaviour of fire fighters if I burn the office down, but I can't transfer practice from one context to another.  We were agreed, and also that both of us think Weick is brilliant, but Weick writing with Sutcliffe is less so.  Nancy suggested that Sutcliffe had managed to popularise Weick's work, I think I was less complimentary!  I'm afraid that I also disagree with her that KM has changed that much, too many people in KM are now within IT Departments gaining black belt certification for me to accept that.  There are exceptions, but there always have been.

So in my final summing up I referenced back to the danger of taking practices that work in the context of a crisis and assuming that you can replicate them outside of the practice.  Even in a military environment peace and war time practice differs greatly.  I argued, as I have argued for years, that people will also collaborate to survive, the issue is how to get them to work together and share knowledge before the crisis hits.  That had been my argument about micro-narrative and portfolio safe-to-fail experiments.  Context, is well context and we have to work with it not ignore it.

The same preference was clear in David Gurteen's slides for his talk today.  There was a picture of excited happy people in a knowledge cafe, followed by one of people slumped in boredom or asleep in a lecture theatre.  I suspect he was trying to argue for the former over the latter.  Now I've seen as many people going through the motions in a workshop as I have asleep in a lecture.  I've also seen people animated and excited in a lecture (both as receiver and giver).  There isn't one right way I'm afraid, its a little more subtle than a crude dichotomy.  

Now regular readers will know I don't like either/or positions in most cases, preferring a both/and approach.  Cynefin is all about that, it doesn't reject process based approaches, it legitimises them within boundaries. Context is king, but I will return to that tomorrow, picking up another of Nancy's comments.

So I don't oppose conversation, far from it.  A large number of our methods include large group facilitation as well as a host of facilitation techniques including the ever popular ritual dissent.  Anyone coming on our old introductory and advanced courses will know that; those coming on the new Cynefin & Sense-making programme will have more if anything. That said all of those techniques focus on increasing scanning, forcing diversity and contrast into the conversation.  Fundamentally letting people be comfortable leads to complacency and premature consensus. 

Now in the keynote I had been arguing that most knowledge management programmes start in the central box of the complex domain model.  My keynote in terms of action had argued for two pre-processes:

1. A portfolio of parallel safe-to-fail experiments designed within a set of constraints to ensure diversity
2. Self interpreted micro-narrative, a form of distributed ethnography which is what SenseMaker® is all about.

It's a variation of the version I presented last week in Kraków in the context of SCRUM/AGILE.  Now both of those techniques are about increasing diversity, avoiding pattern entrainment, increasing scanning range.  

A point I made in the discussion that followed was to repeat a point I had made in the keynote namely humans at the start, humans at the end.  That was a reference to the fact that in SenseMaker® humans do the primary interpretation of the micro-narrative, but also the secondary interpretation exploring patterns in the resulting database which as far as I know is not an expectorant!  The main contrasts with the process of starting with a conversation are:

• You get a broad range of views over wider populations that can be brought into a workshop without the danger of group think or dominant personalities.  In this respect we follow the Wisdom of Crowds rules.
• Capture can be continuous which allows for early detection of issues and opportunities and it not dependent on gathering people together.  As such it illustrates a difference between complexity and systems thinking.  The latter assumes that there is meaning to be discovered that can determine future action, its causal in nature.  The former understands that change is continuous and small changes can produce significant differences in short order.
• The actual cost, once set up is significantly less that even a single workshop let alone multiple ones.

Now once you have then, the conversation and large group techniques come into play, including our workshop based approach to designing safe-to-fail experiments.  With a narrative database ideas that arise in the conversation can be tested for coherence against the database, bringing a broader population into play.  Nancy mentioned one of the claims of Future Search namely that it achieves the "whole system in the room".  Now that I would dispute that, what you have is a group of people who are a part of the system and become normed through the group process.  Add in the micro-narrative and you get a lot closer, but only if you continue the capture ensuring fast feed back loops between and within the system.  

Now I had seen the Russian films after the got to the camps before, I'd read the books and had a reasonably working knowledge of the horrors of the place.  But none of that really prepares you for the experience of walking through the pictured gate for the first time and realising you are in a location were 2.5 million people were gassed and a further half million died from disease and starvation.  One thing that brought the horror of the place home to me was the sheer banality of some of the documents, the sort of bureaucracy that would normally be considered tedious but necessary; recording arrivals, personal details and the like.  However in this context  it was sinister. The methodical gathering of hair, its bundling and sales, the piles of childrens' shoes and those pictures of people walking to the gas chambers.   OK I had seen them before, but in Birkenau they are positioned at the actual location.

The guide made an important distinction up front between concentration camps and extermination camps.  The former as she made clear (and to my national shame) were created by the British during the Boer War, the latter seems to be a uniquely Nazi approach.  OK genocide is unfortunately too frequent in human history, but its controlled organisation into a limited number of factories (there is no other word) is different.

The evidence of evil is all too pervasive.  This speech by Obersturmfürer Hössler to a group of Greek Jews struck me at the time - I got the wording from WIkipedia as I did not record it at the time:

On behalf of the camp administration I bid you welcome. This is not a holiday resort but a labor camp. Just as our soldiers risk their lives at the front to gain victory for the Third Reich, you will have to work here for the welfare of a new Europe. How you tackle this task is entirely up to you. The chance is there for every one of you. We shall look after your health, and we shall also offer you well-paid work. After the war we shall assess everyone according to his merits and treat him accordingly."

"Now, would you please all get undressed. Hang your clothes on the hooks we have provided and please remember your number [of the hook]. When you've had your bath there will be a bowl of soup and coffee or tea for all. Oh yes, before I forget, after your bath, please have ready your certificates, diplomas, school reports and any other documents so that we can employ everybody according to his or her training and ability."

"Would diabetics who are not allowed sugar report to staff on duty after their baths"

Otherwise there was just too much.  I know that I don't regret going, but I am not sure I could go again.  How the guides manage it I don't know and the inane and intensive questions they have to put with must make it doubly difficult. 

I can't really add to the material, I do know that everyone should go.  It is not enough to know something in the abstract, its too easy to excuse.  We exist in the world and we understand through engagement.  To be there decades after the horror is not to claim any similar experience to those who suffered, died and in too few cases survived.  However to have been there teaches you more than any reading or watching of films.  Knowledge has to be physically situated to create learning.

I had already opened my keynote yesterday with a reference to the dangers of using manufacturing models for all aspects of software delivery.  Given the desire to move manufacturing models across, explicitly in the case of KANBAN and SCRUM, this means I am running against the norm a little but less than you might think.   Whether you put things on cards and move them around between columns or take the Product Owner's specification (the use of 'Product' gives things away) you are assuming a degree of definition and agreement that places the requirement in the central box of my complexity three by three.  As the sprints progress through linear iterations then the results are realised by a "self-organising" managed by the SCRUM Master, they are operationalised in varying degrees and shift into the complicated domain.  They move from exploration to exploitation and SCRUM, properly understood is a means of moving something from the complex to the complicated domain.  KANBAN can be used in any Cynefin domain, but has to be used differently - I will save that for another day.

The sprint allows for iterations and changes and is exploratory in nature, but it is constrained by the teams commitments, the nature of the backlog, the project managers, stakeholders and the like.  All in all the language, construct, metaphors and process is a manufacturing one.  The granularity of the requirement also has to be of sufficient size to justify its entry into the process in the first place.

Now all of that is well and good, but what we are missing is the bottom left, high exploratory, edge of chaos state in which there are many competing hypotheses all of which have similar levels of coherence.   They may be very finely grained, contradictory and often unarticulated.  

Now this is where two different sets of Cognitive Edge capability come into play.

Firstly one of the basic switches is from serial iterations to parallel safe-to-fail experiments.  They may not be big enough for a conventional sprint, although I think there is some work to be done here on a mini-SCRUM (tag rugby metaphors are coming to mind).  There are some basic principles that apply to those experiments. 

1. They must all be safe to fail, but there must be several of them running in parallel
2. There must be contradiction, if one succeeds another should fail and so on.  Otherwise you are not scanning widely enough.
3. They must be finely grained, pragmatic and short term in their experimental phase
4. Some of them should be oblique, focused on related problems not the problem itself.
5. Some should use naive capability - people with deep expertise in a related field that might give new insight.  I have used architects in screen design for example, or biologists to look at engineering problems and liturgical design specialists to look at knowledge transfer.

One big plus point with this parallel and portfolio  type approach is that senior funders will grant that some should be high risk, high return.  They understand portfolios its a pattern so play to it.

Secondly and critically is the new work we are using to create a version of SenseMaker® that will capture user requirements not as a response to a question about a product they might want, but as the fragmented day to day experiences, frustrations and desires of user lives over time.  As patterns form (in SenseMaker® through the human metadata approach statistically) those cluster patterns can become 'products' in the mini-sprint situation or even a full sprint.  You can even write them on the cards.   Leave the system in place and you can measure impact of development.  Software to my mind should be measured by how it changes user stories, not on satisfying a product or requirements definition.

I will write a lot more on that second one as we progress to a launch shortly, but the principle is there for now.  Anyone who wants to know more can come on the new Cynefin training programmes where the domain models are now taught and there is a whole day on the use of SenseMaker®.   The next one is in San Francisco, followed by London and Melbourne.

And just to repeat, this post represents a continuation of early thinking.  More to do, more to listen to, more to say, more to write.

I've got a pile of back copies of the New Statesman with me to read and I caught up on the spring double issue on the flight this morning.  One of the book reviews asks the question that forms the title to this post.  One interesting statistic and I quote in full:

Analysing the backgrounds of 178 jihadis, Gambetta and Hertog found that 44 per cent had studied for an engineering degree - while engineers comprised an average of only 3.5 per-cent of the male workforce in their home countries.

... "Engineering is a subject in which individuals with a dislike for ambiguity might feel comfortable" they wrote.  According to a US survey, engineers were "less adept at dealing with the confusing causality of the social and political realms and .... inclined to think that societies should operate in an orderly way akin to well-functioning machines".

Now I think some of that is a little unfair to some engineers.   I've worked with a lot over the years and I've found that civil engineers in particular live with uncertainty on a daily basis and are story rich in consequence.  However the engineering metaphor that underpins modern management 'science' deserves all the criticism of those quotes and more.

Now I want to avoid the false dichotomy that is often made between techno-fetishist engineers on the one part and new age fluffy bunny lets be nice to everyone types.  The issue for me is when you bring in the engineers not if you do, and as importantly what you do in parallel.  So remember in the real world primary science comes before engineering, and architecture and design before the engineering drawings.  A lot of what we teach on the above referenced courses is not the engineering element, that is already handled well, but what comes before, what you need to do in parallel and how you learn in consequence.   I'll be picking up on those themes over the next week starting tomorrow understanding needs before you start to design the solution and the need for parallelism to come before multiple sequential reruns.

The descent to the River Mole passes through one of the longest established British Wineries and then, after a scary road crossing, leads to the stepping stones across the River Mole pictured here.  From there the ascent is brutal with over 200 steps and slippery slopes.  The sun which had been hidden on the level sections chose the ascent to make an appearance which was good for the camera, poor for sweat levels!   Box Hill on a sunny weekend is always busy and was suffering from a plague of Jane Austen fans trying to create the picnic scene from Emma.  I moved on at speed via the various scenes of a time when much of the downs were industrialised descend to the valley floor.   There is a long section here that follows the spring line as the top of the ridge is nothing but roads and that was attractive.  The late afternoon sun starting to provide interesting lighting effects, somewhat ruined by the growing intrusion of traffic noise from the M25 on the other side of the Downs.  Then a sharp climb to Colley Hill, which was hard as I was running out of energy bars!   After than it was all downhill to Merstham station and I made the train with three minutes to spare.  Thank God the cafe was open at Redhill and I had twenty minutes to get a sandwich and a drink - my first food since the previous day.

So over 18 miles and 3,000 foot of climb and descent.  A good day and I was not to stiff at the end, so the fitness regime is working.  However I need to increase the overall speed, especially on the uphill sections.  The next stage is going to be over 20 miles so I need to book a long day for that.

Photographs here

I was joint teaching with Joseph Pelrine, author of this article on Cynefin and software development courtesy of Agile Finland.  Out goal was to work out what a Cynefin/Agile course would look like and while we made progress there is more work to do.   I'm pretty clear in my own mind what are the key modules within our training set, and further that they need to be contextualised with more software examples.   I also came away firmly convinced that SenseMaker® has huge potential for requirements capture so we need to move on that in the next few weeks.

The problem I still have, and its been in various forms an issue for a decade, is how to manage the quality balance with openness.  Over the years I have seen a lot of our material taken up and used well.  I've also seen it compromised, trivialised and misunderstood.  I also don't want to get into the market of throwing together a collection of simplistic material and making a quick buck by franchising something that relies on its undemanding nature to promulgate without any need for quality control.

There is a quote than opens Annika Teder's web page that is relevant here:

The clay is rocks that has crumbled away in water and deposited as time went by.
 It takes a human being and fire to turn it into a living thing again. The creator’s will and choice define the birth of a new form. The Form is my Game.

I'm not going to expand on that for the moment, but I am going to think about it.  Any ideas welcome

I last saw Nabucco in the rain at Verona so a stuffy Royal Opera House was somewhat of a contrast, but the performance was much better.  It's the opera that made Verdi famous and while it is not his strongest I will always seek it out for the Hebrew Slaves Chorus.   I've seen two spectacular versions of this in Verona, but tonight it was poignant.  The chorus gathered together, clearly slaves, in the centre of a stark stage (pictured).  The greater intimacy of the opera house allowed the last chords to last, it seemed, for ever.

Mindful of the fate of Jerusalem,
give forth a sound of crude lamentation,
or may the Lord inspire you a harmony of voices
which may instill virtue to suffering.

Its one of those tearful moments in opera.  Verdi composed it just after his wife and small children had died, we played it at my mother's funeral and it is an alternative anthem in Wales.  The sense of loss it evokes is incredible and it was sung spontaneously by the crowds that accompanied Verdi's funeral cortege.

It was in part inspired by Psalm 137 By the waters of Babylon and has inspired many a musician since.  Just that one chorus summarises for me what opera is about, the music, voice and staging combining to express something beyond words or literature on their own. 

I may go again next Monday as this production deserves for thought.