GO forth and Complexify!

A while ago David Snowden of Cognitive Edge commented that Chess and Go can be used to highlight the differences between the “Complicated” and “Complex” domains respectively.

happyseaurchin commented that it would be good to understand more about Go and then talk about it, and I decided I was the man to make such a thing happen given I have played Go since my teen years.

This week at KMLF in Melbourne, I had the opportunity to run a session and it seems everybody enjoyed it very much. I had such a great time I am looking forward to opportunities to run another one and spread word, both about Go and Complexity theory.

Below are the slides from the presentation. Apologies for the fonts. It seems Slideshare didn't like the one I used in PowerPoint. I will post an animated version with audio in a few days when the editing is finished.

Stuart French KMLF Complexity And The Game Of Go

View more presentations from Stuart French.

For more about Go, check out the article on Wikipedia or an interactive tutorial. This 10-day introductory course is for the brave souls who would like to get a good grip on how such a simple game can be so complex!

Trust, weak ties and building effective networks

The public has recently been introduced to the concept of the Dunbar number through a series of news articles about how we are all really only capable of maintaining relationships with around 150 people. Some have even suggested that we should limit our Social network connections in order to not break this number.

I read a great blog post by Jacob Morgan today that spilt some light on the way I was thinking about this issue and how networks are powerful way beyond those we actually know and interact with regularly. A response to his post by Robert Paterson claimed that Dumbar's number was still relevant because trust is critical for influence. As such I thought I would wade in with my 2 cents worth which I share with you below.

Access to a wider network of weak ties allows the "long tail" to be mined, both for information and for opportunity.

I agree with Robert in terms of trust to a certain degree, however trust takes time to develop and often it is credibility that can hold sway in a distributed network.

Each member of the network makes a value judgement as to whether their help is valuable enough to warrant their time and resources. Due to the nature of weak ties and early signal detection, sharing a very simple piece of information may have enormous impact for the searcher, giving a higher value to the effort.

Both the credibility felt by the remote giver and the indebtedness perceived (due to the effort and resources already invested into the network by the searcher) should also weigh into the value equation.

So building a network involves building credibility and indebtedness (some would say loyalty) which then through closer interaction may lead to trust and the two remote parties possibly becoming part of each other's "Dunbar group".

What do you think? Should we limit ourselves? If a valuable benefit comes to you at little cost from somebody you hardly know and share little in common with, is it any less valuable to you? And given your differences to them present a similar value, is trust as important as credibility and indebtedness at a distance?

Write your responses on $100 notes and mail then to me! I'm saving for an Apple iSlate :-)

QUiCK THiNK & CoNVeRSaTioN!

Well, although I began the QUiCK THiNK idea just to get people to think for 90 secs, many wish to share their answers and discuss them with others. The resulting excellent conversations between my Facebook friends from around the world and difference backgrounds has really excited me. Not just because people are interested, but because of the diverse views that are being respectfully shared.

My Facebook profile though, is just too restricted to do this justice. I have created a Facebook Group called QUiCK THiNK so anybody who wishes to can join in even if they aren't my friend on Facebook which I keep mainly for family and very close friends.

I will still post the QUiCK THiNKs on Twitter and Facebook, but I encourage those who want to talk about them to join the QUiCK THiNK Facebook Group and see how other people THiNK too!

Take time for a QUiCK THiNK each day

What is knowledge?
Wow, what a question. What an important question. And yet such a hard one to answer.

I have heard David Snowden say that we have struggled as a civilisation for thousands of years to try and define "knowledge" and failed, so I along with David are highly sceptical when some management consultant spouts out a definitive explanation. Until Cognitive Neuroscience moves down to the detail of tracking individual neurons, nerves, synapses and hormonal systems I don't think we are even capable of guessing at the answer, and even then....

But despite this I do run across people every day who make simple mistakes, in business, in hockey, in relationships, in life, because they haven't sat down and thought about what it is to know and to think.

I constantly need to remind myself to reassess assumptions, to question social norms, to overcome mental shortcuts and stupid thinking. So I thought I might at least help my readers move a little way toward understanding knowledge through a daily reminder to quickly think about a question.

Ask yourself a question
We are all capable of so much more than we actually achieve. My hope is that if everyone just takes 60-90 seconds of their day to think about something to do with how they think, both individually and as a group, then I have made a difference in the world.

So keep an eye out on my Twitter stream @DeltaKnowledge for the QUiCK THiNK tweets each day. I hope they get you thinking!

National Culture's effect on E2.0 Implementation

A while ago I wrote this post about culture and its effects on Enterprise 2.0 implementations.

In the meantime, Mark Masterson wrote this cracker on his ideas about English versus German cultures and if Social Software would work the same in non-Anglo Saxon cultures.

This morning I was talking with Emanuele Quintarelli from Rome about the impact of cultures on Enterprise 2.0 success and his concerns that the local corporate culture had more impact than the national one did.

My discussion with him turned into a bit of brief description of Culture-as-Cognition and how it can be applied so I thought I would copy them here for you all.

Hofstede's work is totally brilliant, eminently usable and absolutely wrong!

Here's the thing. There is no such thing as "culture". It is not a thing in the same way that a river is not a thing. We look from a distance and see a flow of water, but actually, that water you see now will never pass that point again.

There are flows in the current that form eddies and turbulence that are static in the way they fill the space and exert forces on things that come in contact with it, like a boat.
You can describe generally how the boat will react, but there is no way of knowing for sure from minute to minute and even in 2009 we have many boating accidents.

A while ago, this site grabbed my attention. Have a read. It is about how a snow flake forms and it is almost identical to the cognitive science view of culture.

Each snow-flake is individual, however thousands can look almost identical if they individually go through the exact changes in temperature, humidity and pressure as they fall. Their life journey.

In the same way, people as just people, but they interact mentally with the world in a way that create common attributes (like the arms of a snow flake or the standing waves in a river rapid).
You can gauge these commonalities (that's what Hofstede's tools do), but in the end each individual is capable of anything, so it is easy to fall into an "ecological fallacy", where we assume the attributes of the individual based on the average of the group they belong to.

The power of the corporation is that it tapped into the large currents. The beauty of social computing is that now all those little eddies and changes in currents can be tapped into and surfed on.

What this means for me, is not that Social computing will work or not work in a given country, like Mark says, but more that how those tools are used will be different in the different environments. A different part of the river will have a totally different landscape and therefore different external forces working on the current. Likewise I have seen different companies using the exact same wiki software in TOTALLY different ways. Ways that for them make sense. That is why the concept of sense-making is far more important than outmoded concepts like Best-practice or Six Sigma when it comes to complex systems. And as Snowden says, any system with people involved is a complex system.

To use a more collectiveist defintion of the word colture. The enterprise "culture" is often stronger, especially on the negative side if there is distinct lack of trust or taboos about corporate communications at a social or informal level.

• The key is not to talk about how we in engineer an E2.0 system to work in a certain culture.
• The key is to talk about how we engineer an E2.0 system to adapt and evolve into whatever that microculture (using the term loosely) will find beneficial. It is about managing the evolutionary capability of the company (to quote Snowden again).

This is one of the reasons I have a problem seeing the tool and the adoption process as separate things. In my mind they are tightly coupled in a complex space. We need to focus on the adaptive capability of both which is why I tend to talk about the company rather than the tools of the projects that implement them.

So, what's wrong with Hofstede?
Well nothing for top-down strategic appraisal of national-level cultural commonalities. But the real world of culture is bottom up. Each man for themselves!

We already know that social tools like this perform sub-optimally when implemented from the top-down rather than organically from the bottom up.

The problem with generalising tools like Hofstede is that they can stop people trying in the first place because they assume the average culture will not suite the tool or system. No trying means no experimentation, no experimentation means no adaptation, no adaptation means no novel applications or beneficial outcomes.

Some of my favourite Enterprise 2.0 resources

This morning I am helping run a "Discover your inner Geek" session for the KM Round Table in Melbourne.

As such I thought I would list here some of my favourite Enterprise 2.0 blogs and sites. Enjoy! It is by no means exhaustive (I have hundreds listed and I feel bad leaving so many great ones out) but this should get you started on your E2.0 journey.

Firstly the more official ones. Prof Andrew McAfee is the gentleman who came up with the concept of Enterprise 2.0 and his blog frequently discusses the definition of Enterprise 2.0, and when it is (and isn't) applicable for use.

Secondly is probably the home of natural complexity both in theory and practice. David Snowden's work on Sensemaking has helped me form an understanding of the changes in management theory and how these possibly disruptive ideas can be used to make the most of the new global business environment without simply trusting in new tools or techniques because they worked in another context. His blog is called Cognitive Edge and the site also includes podcasts to help get you up to speed as you drive/train home each night. His recent discussion about the difference between Go and Chess is a favourite.

One of the people who takes Andrew McAfee's ideas and expands on them is CNet author Dion Hinchcliffe. Great big picture guy. You will find his work at various places like the CNet site, his main blog is here and his Web2.0 blog is here. All are worth keeping a tab on every now and then.

One of the guys in this space who thinks a lot about how all this interacts with the culture of your organisation, and more importantly how you should see your organisations culture, is Stephen Billings. Check him out here.

James Dellow from Headshift is somebody with broad experience, but especially in the Intranet and Government sides of enterprise social computing. Known as Chieftech, I highly recommend his blog here.

From Canberra, Stephen Collins is more at the marketing end of Web2.0, but his thinking is deep and clear and he is a great communicator. I enjoy his blog as a way to learn how to inform business people about E2.0 and this article is one of my favourites (partially because it touches on the impact of culture & implementation and some of my thoughts on it).

Wondering about how to make a business case for Enterprise 2.0 in your organisation? Check out this nice report by Louise Ross of the CIMA.

Finally, I encourage you to start building your network of peers. Once great way is on twitter and this page has a great list of E2.0 tweeters around the world. This is a Google Docs spreadsheet and you can add your own details here so others can find and follow you.

Hey Hey! Is Harry's taboo for you!

Seeing Cultural Differences
Cognitive science views culture as the combined mental maps (or schemas) built up through people's shared lives. Under this view cross-cultural interactions are a kind of collaborative, mutual learning experience. Each experience involves a learning or exchanging of ideas and maybe even social norms for both parties but it isn't a direct transfer. They are filtered by personal experiences, assumptions, taboos and world-views.

So how do you handle cultural differences that arise?

Hey Hey! We have a problem!
One example of this came up recently when Harry Connick Jnr was judging a Red Faces competition on a special comeback episode of "Hey Hey It's Saturday!" that involved a group of gentlemen (of Indian descent) with black make-up on their faces doing a terrible impersonation of the Jackson Five.

Bloggers, journalists and talk-back hosts have gone to town with their own versions of what happened, and whether it is defined as racist or not (both in Australia and the USA). You can read a few here, and the comments on this post give an idea of the American response.

One of the cultural learning mechanisms is the taboo. A topic that should be avoided if possible, or in the least approached with great sensitivity. Cultural groups not only develop different taboos (to cope with different shared traumas of their past), but they transfer these taboos in different ways.

Many Australians don't understand either the depth of racism against African-Americans in the USA, nor how recently it was still considered normal. You get a sense of of it in the movie "Remember the Titans", but a good percentage of people Down Under think racism died out soon after the American Civil War. To cope with this, several extremely strong taboos have emerged including the use of the "N" word and the practice of "Black-faced" entertainers.

The comment on this blog by toujoursdan who has lived in both New Zealand and the USA captures my thoughts nicely.

The Curse of Knowledge
The "curse of knowledge" is a concept from Chip Heaths book Made to Stick which basically states that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. This makes us bad communicators because we can't imagine others not knowing what we know either.

On "Hey Hey!" Harry took strong offense at such a taboo being played out and apparently enjoyed by the audience. Some accused him of being too politically correct, however from his culture, this was a truly offensive act and his response was proportionate and in fact I think he conducted himself with a level of dignity considering how he must have been feeling.

The "Jackson Jive" and also the shows producers had failed to take into account Harry's cultural background by allowing the act to go ahead. The Doctors, who tried to apologise afterward once they realised the offence, seem to have been unaware of their act being part of such a strong taboo.

On the other hand, Harry (and many of the US-based bloggers) seem also to have succumbed to the curse of knowledge.

1. They seem to consider that since it is such a powerful taboo for them then everyone in the world would know about it, and
2. They seem unaware of other cultures methods of transferring taboos.

The concept of the "Red Faces" segment is not a talent show (as this post suggests) but an invitation to do live skits that are socially embarrassing - thus the name. The results are often amusing to Australians not because of the content, but because they are things that aren't normally done in public. In this way, the skits actually act as a subtle social mechanism for discouraging these sorts of behaviour in normal life.

Many Australians commenting on talk-back radio today about the subject suffered the same problem, saying (from their point of view) it was inoffensive and that Harry should "lighten up" or be less politically correct.

Respect is the Key
Cultural misunderstandings like this happen all the time. The term Culture Clash is frequently used, especially in the business world where negotiations can break down over what seem to be small differences in opinion to one of the parties.

The key is Respect. Starting with an understanding that other people have different taboos and world-views helps us not be so shocked by their comments or behaviour and allows us time to find understanding and hopefully communicate our discomfort without damaging the relationship. Cultures should be seen as different, not better or one more right than another, just different.

Some say that respect must be earned. Here I tend to disagree. Trust is earned, but respect is something we bring to the table ourselves regardless of the other party. Our ability to constrain our offence and keep the lines of communication open will determine how well we interact with those of different cultural backgrounds, be it another country, a different company or the sports club down the road. Remember, the handling of the offence is a learning experience for those involved and handled well it can challenge false taboos or increase the awareness of useful ones.

All good and well. As for Daryl trying to handle such a difficult situation live in front of millions of viewers while keeping things light and funny, I take my hat off to him. I hope you do half as well next time your business negotiations run into foul weather.