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It's time to think about what companies really are, and to design with that in mind. Companies are not so much machines as complex, dynamic, growing systems. As they get larger, acquiring smaller companies, entering into joint ventures and partnerships, and expanding overseas, they become "systems of systems" that rival nation-states in scale and reach. So what happens if we rethink the modern company, if we stop thinking of it as a machine and start thinking of it as a complex, growing system? What happens if we think of it less like a machine and more like an organism? Or even better, what if we compared the company with other large, complex human systems, like, for example, the city?

organisations are complex; activities are complex. For some time in middle of the previous century, managers tried to ignore this fact and establish perfect processes. Today, we slowly start to acknowledge the fact, that our work environment is complex, interdependent and constantly changing; we need to work together to create a transparency what is changing and how we can best adopt to new situations.

In my last blog post on connected companies, complex systems, and social intranets, I wrote a little bit about the appropriateness of mechanical metaphors and models in complex times. While I never used the term explicitly the competing metaphor to the mechanical, which Ephraim picked up on in his comments, is the organic.

The 21st Century: Analysis and Definitions
Are You Ready For The 21st Century ?

February 2009
A Future in Crisis

Intuitively, people everywhere are now sensing that they are living on credit … borrowing from the future in terms of the economy, the environment and sources of energy. People from all walks of life are beginning to realize they are borrowing from an uncertain future to finance current levels of prosperity. It's becoming clearer and clearer that the current models for society are mortgaging the quality of life from future generations in order to fulfill current desires.

Thus, mental models are beginning to change, and people don't want a range of disparate studies on various disconnected problems; rather, they are seeking concrete analyses and approaches that can help redirect or remedy difficult and complex situations.

This section of the web site offers readers a framework that explores some new mechanisms for addressing the complexities of the emergent post-industrial society.

Updated design principles Speed of change, ubiquitous connected networks and intensified complexity arising from abstract, distributed knowledge flows are key features of the emerging wave of smart working. Design principles for performance environments therefore additionally need to focus on complexity, the changing nature of knowledge as power, network viability, mobility and social learning.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: Our life is the creation of our mind." ~ BUDDHA

While the Buddha may have said that over 2,500 years ago, today's neuroscience is helping us to understand the mind's complex hard-wired mechanisms with stunning speed.

A 2007 study, conducted by Norman Farb at the University of Toronto showed that most of us are not consciously focused and are on "auto-pilot" 46.9% of the time. Our minds are wandering, not attentive to the tasks at hand or on immediate outside experience, instead we're looking into our own thoughts.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about flow as being in the moment. What does this really mean? How might it be relevant for the day to day challenges of organizational life?

How do we move in organizations? Do we give into tides of constraints dotting the shores with recognizable successes and failures? How do we discern the faint melodies of possibilities offered by shifts of how and who we are… and what place should we assume in the ecological menagerie of conditions, gifts, talents and opportunities enlightening our constellations?

Story-based tactics, processes and tools help us probe the complexity of organizational life.

Thomas Van Der Wal. Social Tools Need to Embrace Granularity What we have is partial likes in others and their interests and offerings. Our social tools have yet to grasp this and the few that do have only taken small steps to get there (I am rather impressed with Jaiku and their granular listening capability for their feed aggregation, which should be the starting point for all feed aggregators). Part of grasping the problem is a lack of quickly understanding the complexity, which leads to deconstructing and getting to two variables: 1) people (their identities online and their personas on various services) and 2) interests. These two elements and their combinations can (hopefully) be seen in the quick annotated video of one of my slides I have been using in presentations and workshops lately.

Innovation opportunity: Turn products into services   How can your products be turned into services, and your services re-thought to make them even more comprehensive? This growing area offers many opportunities for innovation, says Jeffrey Baumgartner.   Bridging the innovation planning gap   Open innovation: How to develop a successful technology licensing program   In innovation, the simple trumps the complex

In more complex terms, interaction design is a discipline that borrows from product, industrial, graphic, interface and web design, as well as cognitive psychology, human computer interaction, computer science, information communication technology (ICT)-and architecture. Interaction design is never the same thing in two different places. As many histories of interaction design exist as there are disciplines that borrow from them.

Scrum is a simple, team-based framework for solving complex problems. Scrum encourages common sense, direct communication and rapid self-improvement among the stakeholders. Although Scrum was originally created for software projects, nothing in Scrum is specific to software.

As enterprises gradually decentralize their operations and new networked business ecosystems start to find their way into profitable niche marketplaces, virtual, networked business teams gradually emerge as the wave of the future.

To be successful, virtual, networked business teams need a strategic framework in which to operate. They also need good planning and in-depth project analysis, effective and accessible technologies, constant coaching, systematic fine-tuning, feedback processes and the full understanding that their success cannot be determined by a pre-designated set of communication technologies by itself.

But, until now, projects supported by virtual business teams have not been brought back major successes. Virtual teams are having major problems and managing their progress has been a superlative challenge for most. Organizations face for the first time the need to analyze and comprehend which are the key obstacles to the successful management of effective online collaborative business networks. Though the answer is not simple, the solution is to be found in examples that are closer to us than we have yet realized.

Virtual collaboration for networked business teams is a complex and challenging activity in which there are major important components to be accounted for.

Virtual business teams DO NOT operate like traditional physical teams, as their requirements reflect a whole new way of communicating, working collaboratively, sharing information and mutually supporting other team members. The new technologies and approaches required to achieve this are completely alien to most of our present organizational culture. And this is why they fail.

Cooperative processes are not the automatic results of implementing collaborative, real-time communication technologies, but the result of a carefully designed and systematically maintained virtual team development plan.

For those of you who have alread

Three diagrams that synthesize the issues and causes of the current transformations



We need to better identify the transition taking us from an industrial to a post-industrial society if we want to make effective use of the tools that can help us better manage the new complexity.

Here are one hundred events which define the turbulent period we have experienced from 1980 to 2009. In this 30-year period we have watched the societal rupture that we are currently living through develop from a range of causative factors. The list of events is accompanied by a list of one hundred researchers and authors who are the witnesses to these events and whom we have cited in this document.

We can better understand the changes we are seeing and feeling if we analyze the activities through three filters : a technological dimension, an economic dimension and a societal dimension.

The Ten-Year Forecast Program provides a distinctive outlook on the changing global environment for a vanguard of players in business, government, and nonprofit organizations. Focusing on the next three to ten years, the program anticipates discontinuities and emerging dilemmas--discontinuities because they challenge business as usual and dilemmas because they demand new ways of thinking about complex problems. Together, discontinuities and dilemmas provide a vista of new practices and points of view that will shape tomorrow's organizations and today's choices.  

  Kathi Vian | Director, Ten-Year Forecast Program

I had intended writing a series of blog posts in the run up to the pilot launch of  The Smart Work Company's social learning platform in September. Turmoil in global financial markets, with the downgrading of the US credit rating and simultaneous shenanigans in the Euro zone, gives focus to the topics I want to explore.
The series, Smart Working in Turbulent Times, will include themes that I have talked about before in previous blog posts in a random way. My hope is that this series will pull topics together to create a rationale for smart working, to explore what it is, to make the case for why now (urgently) and to show how smart working practices can be enabled, drawing on researching new ways of working over a fifteen year period and years of practical experience of helping senior executives make the transition to new ways of working.
Themes
Off the top of my head, the themes will include:
What?
Context: turbulent times past and present - there are lessons
How organisations work (and don't) - relationship dynamics, power, culture, conflict, alliances, psychological needs, performance environments etc
Smart principles underpinning design for:
Viability (including emotional and psychological well-being)
Adaptability
Autonomy
Integration
Collaboration
Wirearchy
Distributed diversity
Collective intelligence
Social skills
Thinking skills
Leadership skills
Learning skills
Performance environments, including:
Cultural and social environment
Online place
Physical space
Whole system of leadership
How?
All this research and good practice that others have found effective in specific contexts and at specific times cannot be be copied or rolled out. What to do?
Draw out principles and interpret for your own situation
Create hypotheses about what is happening or what you want to happen
What might work?
What might enable or prev

Dave Snowden