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An overview of Systems Thinking, and how to apply the ideas of Complexity Theory to management of systems, with the results being called "Complexity Thinking"

But the second thing he explained to me was more subtle and way more powerful. He explained that I should start working on a project as soon as it was assigned. An hour or so would do fine, he told me. He told me to come back to the project every day for at least a little bit and make progress on it slowly over time. I asked him why that was better than cramming at the very end (as I was doing during the conversation). He explained that once your brain starts working on a problem, it doesn't stop. If you get your mind wrapped around a problem with a fair bit of time left to solve it, the brain will solve the problem subconsciously over time and one day you'll sit down to do some more work on it and the answer will be right in front of you.

What is it that drives decisions at the exact moment of choice and action? - even in the most mundane, everyday action? If the choice-point itself is a true moment of chaos - a point where literally anything is possible - then what is it that guides us through each of those infinitesimal yet ubiquitous moments?

Cognitive computing, as the new field is called, takes computing concepts to a whole new level.  Earlier this week, Dharmendra Modha, who works at IBM's Almaden Research Center, regaled a roomful of analysts with what cognitive computing can do and how IBM is going about making a machine that thinks the way we do.  His own blog on the subject is here.

2011 was the year of information. It seeped into our consciousness over the year, this idea that the volume of information now available in the world truly was overwhelming. 2012 will be a year where the value of information finally seeps into the public consciousness. The conversation will become about not only what we know but how we know that what we know is meaningful. We will shift from an orientation of quantity to one of quality. It's not that we won't use the Internet, it's not that Google will disappear - of course not.

Knowledge in a networked society is different from what many of us grew up with in the pre-Internet days. While books and journal articles are useful in codifying what we have learnt, knowledge is becoming a negotiated  agreement amongst connected people. It's also better shared than kept to ourselves, where it may wither and die. Like electricity, knowledge is both particles and current, or stock and flow.

We will see that the 1.5 kilograms (3 pounds) of bees in a honeybee swarm, just like the 1.5 kilograms (3 pounds) of neurons in a human brain, achieve their collective wisdom by organizing themselves in such a way that even though each individual has limited information and limited intelligence, the group as a whole makes first-rate collective. Like many other biologists, Seeley sees a bee colony as not just a collection of individuals but as a sort of super-organism. Thus the brain analogy above.

Managing Information Overload is without doubt one of the most important skills an individual can develop today.  With the massive increase in information availability, and with it bombarding us every day, we see people and organisations struggling to maintain their performance as they get weighed down.

For me my tweets and emails are streaming in. This causes several problems. 1. It gets harder to discern what actually is important. 2. It adds stress to your life. You feel like a rat that always needs to push the button for another pellet. 3. It makes it harder to deal with people around you like family and friends. After all, there's another tweet to read, another email to answer, another Quora question to ponder. 4. It makes taking the time to really ponder questions like these more difficult. 5. Sleep often is lost due to always trying to "keep up." 6. Health suffers because you aren't paying attention to that, or exercising, instead you are paying attention to the stream of info aimed at you.

Keynote talk at CSHALS 2012 in Boston on the Knowledge Reengineering Bottleneck: knowledge engineering in the linked data age.

The web is a blessing and a curse: there is simply too much information. And it's coming at us too quickly. Meanwhile, the tools we have to process the data flow are failing miserably, and yet, very few people are building us better ones. Instead, these days, it's far easier to build the next great photo-sharing app than it is a better Gmail. It's more fun to build a new social network for taking pictures of food than it is a tool that tells us exactly what we missed when we went offline for an hour. And no one, and I mean no one, is building a better RSS reader for a niche audience of serious news consumers. Where are the magical email auto-responders that answer, tag and organize emails for us? Where are the intelligent calendars that integrate with messaging systems (social, email and otherwise), capable of reading text-based communications and turning them into appointments and meetings? Where are the automaters, the filters, the noise reducers? Where's the Siri for everything?

Sense-making consists of both asking and telling. It's a continuing series of conversations. We know that conversation is the main way that tacit knowledge gets shared. So we continuously seek out explicit knowledge, in the form of written work or other knowledge artifacts left by others. We then have conversations around these artifacts to make sense of them. Finally, we share new, explicit knowledge artifacts which then grow our bodies of knowledge. Sharing closes the circle, because being a personal knowledge manager is every professional's part of the social learning contract.

What is critical thinking? According to my favorite critical thinking text, it is disciplined thinking that is governed by clear intellectual standards. This involves identifying and analyzing arguments and truth claims, discovering and overcoming prejudices and biases, developing your own reasons and arguments in favor of what you believe, considering objections to your beliefs, and making rational choices about what to do based on your beliefs.

Jonah Lehrer in his book "Imagine" introduced me to an interesting study by Beeman and Kounios. They showed, in brief, by using fMRI imaging and EEG measurements of brain activity, that we possess two different modes of problem solving: One dominated by the left half of the brain, and one dominated by the right half of the brain.

"NEXT UP: MACHINES THAT UNDERSTAND YOU AND EVERYTHING YOU CARE ABOUT, ANTICIPATE YOUR BEHAVIOR AND EMOTIONS, ABSORB YOUR SOCIAL GRAPH, INTERPRET YOUR INTENTIONS, AND MAKE LIFE, UM, "EASIER.""