Cognitive Edge News
Cognitive Edge Guest Blog
Our guest blogger for the next two weeks is Viv Read. Viv is the Director of Emerging Options Pty Ltd. She has extensive experience in workplace reform, organisational transformation, positioning and strategy development, as a consultant and manager for over 30 years in Australia and South East Asia. In the past seven years she has applied Cognitive Edge tools and processes in projects including climate surveys, stakeholder consultation, strategy development, impact evaluation and innovation. Viv has co-facilitated Cognitive Edge accreditation courses in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong.
15 March 2010
On being a disruptive technology……
As I am nearing my 40th year of self employment, being a disruptive technology is a helpful notion – especially for those who have wondered for many years what it is I exactly do!
Over the years I have tried a variety of ways to provide an answer – while ‘free range feral’ appealed to me at one time, it probably would not have engendered confidence in potential employers. Charles Handy used the term ‘portfolio worker’ to describe people whose life was a mix of activities, paid and unpaid. While this provided a veneer of respectability for the somewhat unemployable, it still did not answer the question. I finally reverted to’ I do stuff’ – some of which I get paid for’.
So it was with a great sense of relief when I first encountered Dave, and the Cynefin framework in 2003 and discovered a way of describing and revelling in being disruptive – not for its own sake, but with purpose and intent. Disruption is a life long theme for me… something which came naturally and was unable to be tamed. Now I had a way of describing it.
14 March 2010
Cynefin jigsaws?
I grew up with jigsaw puzzles – my mother was disappointed when a birthday or Christmas passed without a new jigsaw puzzle somewhere among the presents. I’ve found nothing as effective to help me wind down while on holiday than unpacking a new jigsaw puzzle, sorting out the edge pieces and settling down to start looking for the patterns. And I still remember one weekend when I was scheduled for a brain scan on the Monday after the weekend, and the only way I could think of to get through the waiting was to focus on a new type of circular puzzle I had never built before.
Jigsaw puzzles are not all born equal, and it’s about much more than size. A large puzzle just requires more patience than a smaller one, but need not be harder to figure out. One of the strangest ones I ever saw, and which I regret not buying to this day, had the same picture printed on both sides, in portrait orientation on one side and in landscape on the other, and you had to figure out which side up the pieces had to go. In the round puzzle I mentioned earlier, it was not even possible to identify all the edge pieces from the word go, as many of them did not have obviously straight edges.
11 March 2010
The vexed issue of language
In our work at the Foundation, we have developed a language of our own with phrases like “speaking Greek to the Italians”, “polishing shoes” and others. The phrases function like metaphors and are short-hand for ideas we have discussed at length previously – the one about speaking Greek to the Italians refers to using Cynefin language when speaking to people who are not part of our team and therefore are unlikely to understand what we are talking about. Most families develop private languages like these; they play an important role in establishing membership and identity.
The same applies to fields of knowledge, of course. The discipline-specific discourse provides more precise language tools than the language in common use. Effective use of the discipline discourse is a crucial element of what students must learn in order to acquire an identity, first in the academic world and later as a professional in their chosen field. As an internal consultant, I learnt early on that the skill to rapidly acquire a new discourse is vital in getting access to any new community you want to work with. The downside, as Dave pointed out in his blog earlier this week, is that the use of language can also be used to exclude people from a community.
9 March 2010
What do you mean, evidence?
When I was a statistician, I had almost complete professional freedom, as the people I worked for or with did not consider themselves qualified to judge whether the approaches I took were the right ones. In the world of education, the opposite happens – as everyone has gone to school for more than a decade, everyone considers him- or herself an expert on how it should be done, and therein lies the rub. Many an intervention is tried, and even implemented on large scale, because it sounds like a good idea, with very little evidence as to its suitability for the particular context.
So the Foundation I work for set out to generate evidence to support solutions in all our programmes. That turned out to be easier said than done in something like a bursary programme. The sample sizes required to achieve acceptable power and discrimination using traditional statistical methods were simply prohibitive in terms of cost. All the ethical issues familiar in social research presented themselves; for example, how can we not provide the support we believe can make a difference to the bursars’ success just for the sake of having a control group in the experiment? And if we see something is not working, how can we not intervene just to get good data?
I'm sitting in my room at The Residence in the 
I think Hugh must be living a parallel life at the moment! This was today's Gaping Void cartoon and it represents one of those interesting questions on engagement with others. Now to make it clear, the fact that a criticism or disagreement appears stupid, may just mean that I (or you) have failed to understand it. However there have to be limits, and I think the disengagement point is where this cartoon represents your state of feeling about the other party. Fortunately its rare!
An interesting day yesterday in New York. I was part of a small but select group discussing the information ecology of crisis management. I knew two of the participants (