partum intelligendo

Egypt - social media was not a silver bullet

I've just seen another article about how social media caused change in Egypt. (I'm not going to link to it - or any of the others - as I don't want to encourage the causal thinking behind it.) The other element I've seen mentioned as important in the Egypt changes earlier this year is that "everyone stayed on message."

Now, the former element had a role to play - but it's too tempting to assign it too much importance in the piece. The second - staying on message - is just wishful thinking on the part of someone who wants to convince their salary-payer to stick to the script - which is a dangerous and seriously wrong interpretation that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny of the facts.

There are two important elements here that intertwine:

• Social media increased the level of interaction between people and groups - creating favourable conditions for conversations and information to flow quickly and to wider audiences than was previously the case. It created an echo chamber that would respond to whatever messages started to resonate with the people interacting in the networks. In that sense, it seems to be a preferable, but neither necessary nor sufficient condition for mass change.
  
  One of the products of a spread of mass social media in Egypt was creating an environment in which events that were small-scale could serve as catalysts to the change. There were probably many potential catalysts, but notice is usually only given to the ones that actually take hold and trigger events. Any full-scale analysis of the Egyptian situation would need to look at huge volumes of data, paying particular attention to the outliers - to events that were briefly talked about but petered out before taking hold on a large scale.
    
• Messages - in fast-changing, diverse situations like a fermenting country - are rarely designed, planned and executed. Or at least, they may be, but that's rarely a successful strategy. The second fallacy I mentioned above arises from looking at an end result (i.e. an apparent clear message*) and thinking "How was that successful?". That thought, for people who spend their lives planning communications, leads to the assumption that the communication was planned - and that everyone stuck to the message. (It's tempting, but roughly equates to assuming that life is the product of "Intelligent Design".)
  
  Instead, I offer this: in the vast, inter-connected echo chamber mentioned above, many and diverse messages appeared from thousands of different people. Some were picked up and re-transmitted, increasing the echo factor and making them louder. As this happened, weaker messages that did not have the same appeal diminished, making the dominant messages seem even louder - increasing the number of people hearing them. At some point, these messages reached critical mass, drowning out other messages (which would still have been being generated, but would have had a higher bar to reach in order to be heard) - and outsiders observing the system at that point would note that "everyone is on message."

While this doesn't apply everywhere - bounded applicability after all - I do think that if you're facing a dynamic, fast-moving complex environment, planning can only show you roughly what not to do and broadly what might be worth saying. More specific than that, I don't believe that analysis and planning can take you.

Instead, I think a better, faster and more effective route is to take an evolutionary approach - diverse (but coherent) vehicles and messages, fast feedback loops to show what effect is being had and then rapid adaptation. Not with the goal of finding a single message or a best practice, but to develop a constantly evolving, more resilient approach.

*Which I would disagree with at the most basic level - the appearance of a clear message is more down to misinterpretation from a non-Egyptian cultural perspective, missing nuances and differences in varying communications.

A new bad correlation, courtesy of Tim Harford

When we do SenseMaker™projects, one of the things that regularly crops up is the difference between correlations and causation. It's often the case that people read more into correlation numbers than is appropriate. And I always like having good examples for strong correlations that can be over-interpreted. Up until now, I've tended to fall back on divorce rate and national statistics.

But now, courtesy of the excellent Tim Harford (who's "Adapt" I'm enjoying as a well-written layman's guide to approaches to complex systems and environments), I've got a new one. I won't spoil the surprise - go read it here. The cheap and short version - size matters...and correlates.

Dots to be joined...

It's been a busy couple of months - with a number of things that I'll be putting up here in the coming weeks. Including, excitingly, the next pilots for the Children of the World project...

In the meantime, however, some apposite quotes around ways of making changes and the work we've been - and are - doing at the moment.

"[He] started in the wrong place. He didn't look around, and watch and learn, and then say, 'This is how people are, how do we deal with it?' No, he sat and thought, 'This is the people ought to be, how do we change them?'

Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

"'A healthy galaxy is forever poised on the edge of chaos, transixed between the sterile wasteland of order and the mad wilderness of rampant entropy.' ... [The organisation] was structured to thrive on diversity, multiplex thinking, multicultural societies.

"Nice trick. Starting is easy.

"It's keeping it going that's so hard."

Heaven, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

"In a world where everything is connected, advance signs of change, of turbulence, are likely to appear only when we look in unexpected places."

The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo

"Narrow-gazing not only leads to kinds of misfires, it also fatally constrains the ability to imagine good ideas or policies. The chance for real brilliance or flair is usually best seen out of the corner of the eye."

The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo

"[Chinese students instinctively knew] the environment contained clues to what was about to happen. If you stared at a single spot in the world around you, that incipient sensibility would be dulled to the point of uselessness."

The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo

Yup, as I've said before, Joshua Cooper Ramo's book is great - my copy has pages and pages of underlined phrases. Read it. Just read it.

Moving from robustness to resilience – new Risk and Resilience video available from Cognitive Edge

Firstly - thank you to Harold and apologies to others: the link to the slides that I posted on Friday didn't work. It's fixed now, so they're accessible from Capturing an organisation's narrative.pdf (3573.9K).

There's an excellent new video up at Cognitive Edge's website and on their YouTube channel:

Today Cognitive Edge is happy to present a short video introducing the importance of organisations making strategic moves from systems built around principles of robustness, to systems that are built on the principle of resilience.

Traditional management has tended to focus on developing robust systems which try to prevent failure. However, in light of increasing interconnectedness of events and the complexity this introduces, the ability for systems to plan for the avoidance of all foreseeable incidents has become limited.

In this video from Cognitive Edge, called Risk and Resilience, Dave Snowden highlights the strategic importance for organisations to refocus on the creation of resilient systems. Whereas robust systems try to avoid failure, and become crippled in the event of it, resilient systems accept that failure is inevitable and move from focusing on prevention to focusing on early detection of events and fast recovery from them.

This video can be found in our Videos section. You may also follow this link to all the Cognitive Edge videos on YouTube, for our previously released videos on Introducing SenseMaker®, How to Organise a Children's Party, and the Cynefin Framework, amongst others.

Details of Dave's regular one-day seminars entitled "Leading Through Complexity" can be found here.

[From Moving from robustness to resilience – new Risk and Resilience video available from Cognitive Edge]

Resilience is a topic I've been thinking on recently - and there's a blogpost due on exactly that shortly. (But there are a couple of projects that need attention first...)

Business approaches for "complex" problems

With Andrew Moore at DAV Management, I've written a piece recently: "New approaches to 'big' problems".

It's a business piece talking about how new complexity-based approaches can offer major benefits in terms of better insights, reduced costs and greater customer loyalty over the traditional approaches to the problems. In particular, we talk about:

• using customer experience to drive innovation
• building empathy with your customers
• how to build early detection of (and hence fast response to) problems into your customer processes
• supporting sales reps when they are operating separately and in very difficult (complex) environments

And how the same, radically-different approaches offer better results than standard research/survey instruments for lower long-term costs.

 

European capacity for sensemaking and complexity

We're building European capacity for our clients and our projects!

I'm delighted to make the official announcement that UK-based Narrate and Netherlands-based Top Innosense are partnering to create the sense-making capability that can support the projects that we're seeing across Europe. With experts like Harold, Ton, Erwin and Aart-Jan, we're looking forward to sharing some of the projects we've each been doing for clients around customer insight, employee engagement, social media and more.

The Top Innosense team describe themselves thus (via the not-entirely-clumsy Google Translate):

TOP innosense helps organizations make better use of the insights, ideas and intelligence of large groups of people. And we usually mean big big.

Whether it's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of civilians, hundreds or thousands of employees or patients per day, TOP innosense can help you understand what's happening and what drives them. And then we will help you to translate this knowledge into action. So:

• Are you looking for an effective method to develop new products and launch?
• Want your competitors by better understanding the needs, opinions or suggestions of your customers?
• Would you really let your citizens participate in the city?
• Do you understand the numbers behind your last patient satisfaction survey?
• Want to make better use of the knowledge of your employees and / or the aging wave cope?
• Are you looking for an effective method to develop new products and launch?
• Want to adjust your strategy in time to adequately respond to future developments?
• Want to improve your service and your service portfolio innovate?
• Want to identify dangerous situations before something really goes wrong?
• Do you know of employees who leave your organization hold?
• Or do you have another challenge facing the familiar management tools not answer that?

TOP innosense then you've come to the right place!

 

Over-simplifying the cutbacks

Reduced budgets are producing some interesting approaches to the necessary decisions to be made.

A recent visit to the Blackberry Clinic in Milton Keynes showed me one of them: it turns out that the local PCT, having to cut budgets by a substantial percentage, had gone for the simple approach - stopping all treatment in the last couple of months of the financial year, no matter what stage patients were at. The first cutoff came for referring patients from GPs, the second a few weeks later when treatment itself stopped. It meant, of course, GPs handwriting letters to take straight into the clinic on the last day, desperately getting people in ahead of the deadline.

It's a similar situation to that being considered in North Ayrshire - if the education budget's too small, make the school week four days instead of five and raise the starting age to six.

In terms of the Cynefin framework, both strike me as being at the extreme of simple responses to making necessary cuts. Many other organisations (and probably other areas within those organisations mentioned above) are taking a more complicated approach - analysing, streamlining - but staying within the current structures and bounds. Still working on the premise that these things are predictable.

A complex approach might offer something new - but requires a shift in thinking. It offers, ultimately, the potential for substantially new ways of providing services with fewer resources. It is not, however, entirely possible to predict at the start of the process precisely how the service will be provided at the end - it requires a degree of perspective shift that can be uncomfortable and a willingness to trust early on - it demands courage of those leading an organisation.

The best place to start is small for many of these projects, of course. Develop the tools and attitudes needed for radical complex change in niches where it can provide major benefits, but where the difficulties will not impact too strongly on either people or reputations. With the learning that those early projects bring, it becomes a more confident and straightforward act to start on more significant projects - where the impact and the payback starts to show.

There is potential to take the cutbacks and develop very different delivery services - but trimming away, whether done at the most basic level or after much analysis, is unlikely to bring those benefits.

Complexity

The joy of "No"

I ran an innovation session recently for a client's senior management team that featured an exercise that a lot of people shy away from. There is a great tendency for lots of people to stress positivity - building on ideas, reducing criticism, etc. I can understand that - but it's also unrealistic to stay in that positive mode. It creates an unrealistic situation, but more importantly it means that ideas and proposals are not robust, the people owning them are unrealistically optimistic and that there are traps in store.

I liked this recent article in the FT: Employee ideas thrown to the dragons - real challenge to the ideas, once they've been put together and had a chance to hone them. I suspect that one of the elements of this that works is making the challenge fun, making it part of the game.

The exercise I used is a Cognitive Edge one called Ritual Dissent. As the name suggests, it works by making it all part of a ritual. My experience has been that, once everyone's over the initial shock of "no positive comments, just criticism", the process turns into one that's full of fun. People can give full rein to their inner cynic, people don't take offense at the criticism because they know that's "just part of the game".

The room the other week was full of laughter, challenge and, by the end, more realistic, robust ideas that had been through an initial picking-apart and already knew what elements needed further work.

And let's face it, it's not as if new ideas won't get challenged anyway once they're presented to senior managers to try and secure budget. If they've been living in a little zone of unrealistic positivity until then, that challenge will hurt...

Complexity

Missing the point - rules that confuse

In rules-based organisations, there is a real tendency to add new rules to suit new situations and when things are not going according to plan. It's not, however, effective.

Rules are like scaffolding around a building - they should be used for a while to support the building of the main structure, or in specific circumstances but not as a long-term strategy. Adding scaffolding to scaffolding creates a more rickety structure, increasingly unstable and susceptible to changes in the overall environment. And for people within the organisation, more rules simply gets more and more confusing.

[Picture from Britain being overrun by street signs | Reuters]

The other problem with lots of rules is that the response is usually to try and look for opportunities to get round the rules, as however well-intentioned they may be, they get in the way of the actual work getting done. They indicate a lack of trust - that people won't do the right thing without being told exactly what to do/not to do.

 

So (with notable exceptions that are genuinely complicated, not complex) more rules will reduce people's engagement/morale/whatevernamewe'regivingitthisweek and will make the organisation more brittle.

The alternative? Foster a culture that is mostly ideation(based on obligation to each other in a social environment), with rules saved only for particular rare instances.

Complexity

Next Cognitive Edge European network meeting - Hamburg in May

Last Friday saw what was by all accounts a great Cognitive Edge European network day in London. And there was general agreement on the next one - Christoph has volunteered to investigate venues and host the next one:

Date: Monday 16th May 2011

City: Hamburg

As always, more details will follow, along with confirmation shortly that that's where we'll be. For now, put it in the diary...

Complexity, SenseMaker

Masterclass - "a total lifechanger" for internal communications

I was talking with a client recently who asked me about the internal comms masterclass where we first met. Ark Group had asked me to run a masterclass that had got some great feedback and he wanted to know when he could send some of his team on a similar one.

We're talking about running a tailored version of the original one in-house for him, but I've decided that we'll run a public masterclass ourselves as an experiment as Ark have pulled out of the communications arena altogether.

As it's the first one and we want to keep it tailored to participants' needs, we're going to limit attendance to 10 people in the first place. I'll be leading it, but we'll be having some guest speakers along the way.

Date: Tuesday 22nd March 2011

Venue: Central London

Time: 9.30-16.00

Cost: £310
Early bird registration (before 8th March): £250

You can book online at Eventbrite: More for less - a one-day masterclass in internal communications

And we can adapt and offer it for in-house communications training - just ask.

The details:

In the current climate, individuals and organizations are under increasing stress. As a communicator, you are being asked to deliver more results in less predictable environments with fewer resources. Whether an experienced professional or a recent recruit, this masterclass will equip you with ideas, practical techniques and clear next steps.

It is perfectly possible to deliver "more for less" - what it requires is a new set of persepectives and tools to address employee engagement and internal communications.

This one-day masterclass will help you

• Understand and define the realities of internal communications in the current climate
• Generate understanding, buy-in and collaboration inside the organization
• Deliver and evaluate real behavioural changes
• Collect more content than you know what to do with
• Understand the limits of what you can do and can't do

Previous comments about Narrate masterclasses:

• Totally innovative! I’ve never done anything like this and enjoyed it. Am bursting with ideas for how I can apply this in my workplace – thanks for showing me all these things!

• A total life-changer!

• Excellent away-day. Practical and theoretical. Grounded in lots of examples and stories. Liked that it was a small group as lots of opportunities to share and network.

• A very useful course and I have learnt a lot of things that I can take back to the office re. communications.

• A very good course that I will recommend to colleagues.

An interactive day, focused and adapted to meet participants’ specific situations and challenges, it includes practical tools, principles, guest speakers and examples of communications from different sectors – to ensure that as a participant, you come away with pragmatic, useful material to put into action the minute you get back to your desk.

Masterclass leader:

Tony Quinlan, Principal Consultant and Chief Storyteller, Narrate

Tony is a business alchemist who founded Narrate in 2000 to create more effective, healthier organizational cultures and communications. He’s passionate about breaking out of rigid, purely rational communications to create real cultural and behavioral change. A member of the Cognitive Edge network, he is always exploring new ideas and practices, looking at current business practices from a different perspective. If you want 12-step models and the “same old, same old”, then you’ve got the wrong man.

A frequent keynote speaker and conference chair, Tony writes on communications, branding and culture for international publications and blogs at www.thenarrateblog.com. Today, he is a writer, keynote speaker, communications coach, masterclass presenter and international consultant. But he has also been a radio presenter, radar designer, TV tuner, dishwasher, lift attendant, software programmer and presented live public roadshows to 8,000 people at a time. Needless to say, he has stories about all of them.

Overall agenda:

9:30 Registration and refreshments

10:00 Introductions and objectives

• Making the course relevant

10:15 Thinking about internal communications

• Principles and goals

10.45 The role of the internal communicator

• Opportunities and obstacles
• Skills and support
• Collaboration and confidentiality

11:20 Morning Coffee Break

11:50 Communications in challenging times

• Mergers, redundancies and acquisitions

12:30 Innovative internal communications

• Better results on lower budgets
• The communications mix

13:10 Lunch

14:10 Dealing with major comms projects

• Values, change and organisational myths

14:50 Understanding the internal audience

• Using internal surveys
• Evaluating with meaning

15:30 Discussions and Next Steps

16:00 Close of Masterclass

Customer insight - hearing their stories, their complaints their way

Customers (or clients or patients or...) are naturally full of stories about services that an organisation offers. And they regularly share them, particularly the stories from which we can find opportunities for improvement - complaint stories or call-centre phone calls.

These are actually more valuable than most focus groups or questionnaires - they reflect actual day-to-day usage and experience, rather than prompted specific examples. There are, however, two difficulties with them:

1. Our natural tendency to re-interpret the story or to categorise the teller in terms of unhelpful stereotypes. (A few years ago, we collected video stories from a wide range of people that experienced a client's range of services. Playing them back to senior execs turned out to be too basic - they slotted them into their pre-existing stereotypes: "he's a whinger," "that one's a never-good-enough," etc)
2. There are too many of them and it's difficult to see how they relate to each other except to divide them up into handy "buckets" - Inaccurate Sales, One-off Breakdown, Unrealistic Demand, Broken Product, After-Sales Service. (I use my own categories that seemed to fit the complaints 20 years ago when I worked with Canon on copiers, printers, fax machines, etc)

With a high volume of negative customer feedback, the learning opportunities are therefore lost.

But with minor modifications, it's possible to get some highly valuable feedback from this, including:

• Tracking of improvement/deterioration in customer perception of the organisation
• Specific highlighting of key problems that repeat in different areas
• Simple solution suggestions, derived from the complaints themselves
• Identifying the "understanding gap" between customers and the organisation
• Better product design and marketing decision-making

Ultimately, for an organisation suffering from a groundswell of complaints, it should be possible to see fast, low-cost potential interventions to turn around a declining perception.

Rather than just gathering the raw data on complaints, customers should be given the opportunity to signify their complaint - where does it sit in this triangle? Is it about product/service/support?

Signification - when done properly - means that it can't be re-interpreted in the organisation. And also means that overall patterns can be built up - and then only significant stories reported and addressed, rather than having to deal with each complaint on an individual basis.

 

 

Equally, where there already exists a large volume of customer responses, a different approach could be taken:

• Distribute subsets of the material (complaints, suggestions, responses to competitions) to willing participants in key groups of stakeholders
  • e.g. Marketing, Customer Services, Call Centre, Product Design, Sales force, Manufacturing
• Have those groups signify the material they've received (making sure there's overlap between the subsets so that some material is signified by everybody)
  • an additional twist might be to ask them to signify the material as they think the customer might have signified it. (Although that is more powerful with material that has been signified by the customer)
• Analyse for overall patterns - again, often challenging the expected results from an emergent picture.
• Analyse and compare patterns across stakeholders - when Call Centre sees problem X, Product Design sees Y and Marketing sees Z.

Often, from these emergent patterns and the qualitative information beneath come solutions that are substantially more straightforward and effective than traditional system-wide approaches. It is one of the perversities of working in complex rather than complicated problems - the answers can be simpler and cheaper to implement.

For instance, a batch of stories that address a fundamental misunderstanding of the product (perhaps due to over-enthusiastic advertising) might initially appear to be about a product defect. Spotting a correlation or cluster of stories of significance and then examining only the handful of stories at the centre (rather than having to trawl through the thousands that might come in from a global customer relations site) would provide context for how the product is perceived, along with qualitative information to show where the misunderstanding came from. And a discussion can then take place - it may be that, now they understand what customers expect of the product, designers can easily introduce new features that will meet that expectation; or it may be that an advertising campaign needs to be amended, or different responses needed in the call centre when customers call in.

Having real customer feedback that shows the problem from the customer's point of view that is difficult to re-interpret or twist for internal politics and that includes context can therefore make for a faster, more responsive, more customer-focused organisation. The potential is huge - generating real and lasting competitive advantage from a pile of customer complaints!

Complexity, SenseMaker

Details for the Cognitive Edge European Network meeting

As promised, here are more details of next week's European Cognitive Edge network meeting, kindly hosted by Mark Woodman.

Date: Friday 18th February 2011

Venue: Middlesex University, The Burroughs, Hendon, London

Time: 10.30 to 16.00 GMT

If you're coming, can you please register at EventBrite here as we want to have an easier system of keeping track of who's coming than collating email replies.

There’s a Google map for the location at:

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/aboutus/Location/hendon/index.aspx

That page has a link to printable guide to getting to us at:

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/Assets/msex_product_WEB.PDF

Attached is Mark's own marked up map showing Hendon Central Tube (Northern Line Edgware branch) and Hendon overground station (First Capital Connect from either St. Pancras International or Luton Airport Parkway). On my map routes from the stations are in red. There is a 183 bus near the Hendon overground station that comes right to the door of the University, but for most people the walk from Tube or train is 8-12 minutes and more predictable.

Complexity, SenseMaker

Egyptian reflections

Slightly brain-fried after two and a half days of an excellent conference - great minds, lots of challenge, but just enough gaps between the discipline/subject experts for me to ask questions. And now on my way to the House of Lords for a lecture by the excellent Peter Hennessy (now Lord), so a hastily typed note that will need unpacking at some point in the future.

One of the applications we've talked about for SenseMaker is the pre-hoc/post-hoc approach. Collecting large volumes of signified data from the day-to-day experiences of a group to see general patterns is useful and illuminating. Where it becomes more interesting is after a major event has taken place within the group - and then having experts and/or decision-makers revisit the micro-narratives and then signify them with the benefit of hindsight.

From there, it should be straightforward to build algorithms that spot emergent patterns within a large dataset that then issue alerts - emphatically not prediction, or even anticipation, but "anticipatory awareness". It's been a project that excited me, but requires a degree of serendipity for it to happen.

I was enjoying the conference so much, it didn't dawn on me until this morning that in December 2009, as part of the Children of the World pilots, we collected almost 2,000 narratives from pupils in Egypt. To my naive eye, in the space of 10 minutes, I could see some significant signals within the data, but this requires some more analysis - particularly to compare those patterns with others that might be in the Jordan and KSA data that we also gathered for Children of the World...

If I'm not going into the local schools on Friday for National Storytelling Week (which I may), you can expect to find me in front of a SenseMaker screen shouting each time I spot something.

Can you tell how excited I am at this??

Complexity, Complexity, SenseMaker, SenseMaker

Solitude standing

A colleague in an organisation I partner with recently asked me for a CV for the website. So far, so normal. Then they asked for a list of presentations - something I've never really pulled together before. So I delved through the conference folders to find those times when I've stood at the front of a conference hall.

It turned out to be broader than I remembered and I'm rather proud of it, so I thought I'd share it. (I've taken out duplications like all the multiple workshops on storytelling, internal communications and change, along with repeat appearances at conferences.)

Presentations

 

• Working effectively through times of change, Knowledge Management in the Public Sector conference, September 2007
• Understanding employees and organisational culture, Association of Police Public Relations Officers annual conference, November 2008
  
• Mapping mentally complex situations, Innovative Visualisation and Cartographic Language conference, Luxembourg, April 2009
• Complexity and Creativity keynote presentation, Annual conference of creativity academics, University of Greenwich, July 2009
• Challenges and opportunities in a crisis keynote presentation, Local Government Communications annual conference, Nottingham, May 2009
• Retaining essential business capital, Knowledge and Content UK conference, London, June 2009
• Change management in the public sector series of workshops, Ark Group, London, Singapore, Leeds and Manchester, 2005-2007
• Developing a knowledge sharing culture, London, January 2005
• Narrative for public policy, US State Department Strategic Communications network, October 2009
• An introduction to narrative, Royal Navy Information Operations training programme, November 2009
• Putting the public in the picture, Local Government Leaders programme, Harlow, December 2009
• Internal Communications masterclass, Ark Group, London, January 2010
• Narrative in Leadership, Informatology conference, London, April 2010
• Babies, bathwater and targets - future trends in healthcare, Henley Alumni conference, September 2010
• Why good research isn’t enough, Higher Education External Relations Association annual conference, December 2010

You did that on purpose!

I'm on the train to Gatwick Airport for an interesting conference over the next three days. The topic's going to be interesting - covering social media, behaviour change and, one of my current interests, how you work with a group who have a fixed narrative - a conspiracy theory of one sort or another - that misrepresents what is happening.

I've got a couple of initial propositions on that that I hope to be exploring:

My feeling is that conspiracy theorists tend to see results they do not like and assume that what they see was the result of deliberate, predictable action. To my mind, there are three places that this thinking is often flawed as over-rational:

• Complex vs complicated
  Predictable results are not achievable in complex situations, but the predominance of theories and discussion in most disciplines is that the world is complicated - and hence predictable. In a complex environment, patterns might be visible, along with the convergence of things that will bring some result - but what that result will precisely be is impossible to see. (Good current examples might be events in Tunisia and Egypt - certain signals indicated that a turning point was being approached, but the precise moment and the precise outcome is more difficult.)
• Intentional action vs unintended consequences
  Even when particular outcomes are predictable, there are usual consequences that are unforeseen - the complex elements of a genuinely complicated situation. Often, new technologies end up being used in ways that were not foreseen - precisely because of elements that designers did not see coming. Smart designers build products that have loose constraints, not tight ones, precisely so that users and the market can find the best applications. When policies or strategies are implemented, there are always elements that need addressing later - but they were rarely intended as detrimental offshoots in the first place.
• Target audience vs priority audience.
  There may be a particular audience that is prioritised for a variety of reasons. It's easy to then assume that other audiences are therefore being deliberately de-prioritised - or being targeted.

Examples like today's report in the Financial Times about the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in the USA is a good example of the underlying sense that things are rational and deliberate - and at the very least there will be a smoking gun - a single decision or moment to which everything can be traced back.
The difficulty is that, once a conspiracy theory or master-narrative is in place, it can be very difficult to shift - and rarely by counter-argument. I've blogged before about one of the best-known and most insidious examples - The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For a detailed story of where they came from - and a history of how they've been used since, I strongly recommend Will Eisner's great The Plot: The Secret Story of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'
It's going to be a fascinating few days.

More on Global giving

The other week, while researching this post, I came across some fantastic additional resources stemming from the GlobalGiving project.

This video is great

Even better yet, the GlobalGiving team have been very generous in putting up a complete overview of the project - from how they worked, to how they used SenseMaker and looked at the stories (complete with examples), some examples of how they're feeding back to the original communities and, most generously and invaluable to practitioners, the "Real Book" for Story Evaluation methods.

It's a wonderful and invaluable resource. Set some time aside (I'm hoping for June 2011, but that may get pushed back) to properly go through this.

Thank you to Irene, Dave and Marc for sharing it all.

It's not the information, it's not the overload, it's not even trying to be rational

Interesting article from the New York Times surfaced yesterday - "In New Military, Data Overload Can Be Deadly". It paints a picture of a difficult situation in Afghanistan where 23 Afghan civilians died as a result of a mistaken attack by US helicopters. In some ways, it reminds me of the description of the USS Vincennes incident Gary Klein refers to in Chapter 6 of the excellent Sources of Power - another situation where information was misinterpreted in the heat of a conflict situation.

What intrigues me is the interpretation of what was at root - and what would improve the situation:

“Information overload — an accurate description,” said one senior military officer, who was briefed on the inquiry and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case might yet result in a court martial. The deaths would have been prevented, he said, “if we had just slowed things down and thought deliberately.”

Later in the article, there's a recognition that it's not just overload - it's being able to distinguish between signal (useful, meaningful information) and noise (the stream of information). And often - as in this case - it's easier to spot the signals in retrospect.

Research shows that the kind of intense multitasking required in such situations can make it hard to tell good information from bad. The military faces a balancing act: how to help soldiers exploit masses of data without succumbing to overload.

The idea of "thinking deliberately" also seems to me to be optimistic - in fast-moving environments we are thrown even more onto pattern-matching than information-processing, as Gary Klein points out. His analysis of the USS Vincennes incident is that it was more about using mental simulation to evaluate and rule out possible explanations - this looks to be a similar situation.

One of the difficulties seems to be in presenting the information itself, rather than a combination of patterns within the information and anomalies. One of the approaches that were discussed back at the November event was for security and IED detection - capture quantities of data in advance of any event, then re-signify after an event to determine patterns that can be used later to trigger "anticipatory awareness". By dealing with patterns in data, rather than the raw data itself, should go some way to getting past cognitive biases. (They can't - and indeed often shouldn't - be dispensed with altogether.)

Across the military, the data flow has surged; since the attacks of 9/11, the amount of intelligence gathered by remotely piloted drones and other surveillance technologies has risen 1,600 percent. On the ground, troops increasingly use hand-held devices to communicate, get directions and set bombing coordinates. And the screens in jets can be so packed with data that some pilots call them “drool buckets” because, they say, they can get lost staring into them.

Which seems to call for a change in the way the information is presented to them - a la Klein's project on information presentation described in the book, or the sort of approaches we're talking about with SenseMaker™ these days.

As the technology allows soldiers to pull in more information, it strains their brains. [emphasis mine] And military researchers say the stress of combat makes matters worse.

But that assumes that you're working in a world of simply presenting dry information. From what we know about the brain, giving them "fragments" - bits of others' experiences, past mistakes and more - allows them to put the pieces together to make them relevant to their current experience. Part of the problem seems to be presenting them with information that is just that - dry information.

There is a further element that seems to me to be present here - the assumption that the information holds its own meaning, that it can be analysed to produce the answers in itself. It's the same reasoning that encouraged the development of software I saw last year that took the outputs from focus groups and presented back a representation of what concepts participants were addressing. It's too easy to miss the important (weak) signals in a piece of text or a photograph, just as it is to over-interpret meaning in trivialities. Better by far, to allow lots of people to interpret what they regard as significant, then allow patterns to emerge from the meta-data. If the emergent pattern shows up specific information, then is the moment to look at the raw data.

(It's worth bearing in mind here that the New York Times event is being re-interpreted by the journalists writing the article and any sub-editors/editors intervening in the process, so the actual military investigators' report may be rather different.)

Here, there and another one missed...

For the rest of this week and next, I'm going to be guest-blogging over at Cognitive Edge's guest blog, as well as here. I'm going to try to keep the blogs different, but I'm sure you'll understand if I just say - "I stand by what I said over there..."

And in an echo of yesterday's post, there's news about the Cognitive Edge accreditation course that's coming up in a couple of weeks. No surprise to anyone that's been on one of the courses, but it's now full. And this time there aren't likely to be any places freeing up.

Best book early for the next London or European courses then!

Complexity, SenseMaker

False images of the world

Great conversations at a two-day meeting in Miami. On the flight on the way over, I finally got around to starting Joshua Cooper Ramo's The Age of the Unthinkable (subtitled "Why the New World Disorder constantly surprises us and What we can do about it"). It looks to be an interesting reflection on diplomacy and international relations from a complexity perspective. I suspect it's broader than that, and I'm always slightly wary of books that claim to cover complexity and then turn out to be systems and solutions. This one starts well though: "The goal of this book is not to give stylized, simple answers - what honest thinker would hope to answer questions that are still being created and that exist outside our current language?"

A few quotes have struck me early on:

Our image of the world now, constructed by people we once thought we could rely upon for such work, is false, actually and philosophically false. It's time to replace it with an image that actually works. What we need is a framework for the sort of change that fits our world - and lays a foundation for the widespread personal involvement of millions of people that will make such change useful, durable and sustainable.

A dynamic and accurate view of power now can offer a way to engage our world that is not only more reliable but also - and this is crucial - more decent.

The temptation to read "reliable" as "predictable" is strong - and wrong. I can see where he's aiming but wonder whether "resilient" might have been better. But that's my trying to understand what he was aiming at, which I can't do.

I'd also add one further piece to that last sentence in the quote. From my experience, the ways to engage our world can often be more straightforward - and more social, making them easier and more personal than most people assume.

Complexity