Managing Complex Systems

From One to Many: Egocentricity and Allocentricity in the Design of Collective Intelligence Systems

By Noah Raford  ·  July 23, 2011  ·  Managing Complex Systems

In his essay Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage, the great anthropologist Victor Turner wrote, “as members of society, most of us see only what we expect to see, and what we expect to see is what we are conditioned to see when we have learned the definitions and classifications of our culture.”

This is a good definition of egocentricity; the process of experiencing the world from a single point of view. As human beings, we tend to see what we expect to see (which, ironically, is often given to us by...

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Learning to See the Unseen

By Noah Raford  ·  July 14, 2011  ·  Managing Complex Systems

In 1979, the American psychologist J.J. Gibson published the book, “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception”, in which he argued that, “knowing is an extension of perceiving” and that perceiving, “goes far beyond the sensory act of seeing”. In seeking to understand the question, “what is visual perception?”, Gibson came to the radical conclusion that perception is not about what is seen, but rather, that which is unseen, i.e., our ability to infer the reality of objects that are hidden or occluded from our...

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Foveal and Peripheral Vision Threats

By Noah Raford  ·  July 11, 2011  ·  Managing Complex Systems

What are the nature of the threats we face in the 21st Century?

Dave and I were at a defense conference on complexity and collapse recently, where senior intelligence, military, academic and business people debated this very question.

One attendee told a story that stuck with me. He had been an intelligence advisor for almost forty years. In the 1970's and 1980's, his job was to correlate intelligence about threats from Soviet invasions or nuclear strikes.

"In those days," he told us, "everything was easier."

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Is software development complex?

By Joseph Pelrine  ·  June 25, 2011  ·  Managing Complex Systems

One of the main premises of the Agile software developments methods ist that software development is a complex domain, and not an ordered, production line type of system such as automobile manufacturing. Unfortunately, the typical Agilist perception of complexity is not quite aligned with any of the main scientific definitions of the term. Agile literature abounds with romanticised, subjective interpretations of terms such as complexity, self-organisation, emergence, which can only be understood by remembering that ‘a little...

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The Scale of the Whole

By carol Mase  ·  March 29, 2011  ·  Managing Complex Systems

Giving a talk next week on innovation and design thinking has me turning to Bill McDonough for inspiration. His work and words align well with what Cognitive Edge practitioners bring to our clients, so let me explore that a bit.
Design = Intention
What is our intention? Perhaps the greatest shift we bring to our clients is the ability to stand in the complex and work from there in the complicated and simple. So our intention could be to recognize and work on complex human systems from within the complex adaptive system that they...

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