Group items tagged

daviding says: The web page has a link to a PDF, in which the footnote reads: "This paper is Chapter 1 of Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, by Jeff Conklin, Ph.D., Wiley, October 2005." If the challenge of a wicked problem wasn't enough, communicating a potential solution each new person coming to the problem creates its own issues. Dialogue mapping could provide some assistance in at least reducing the learning curve of the new participant on options, alternatives, paths and considerations already covered.

For a more detailed discussion of wicked problems, see Wicked Problems and Social Complexity, CogNexus Institute's most downloaded white paper. Problem wickedness demands tools and methods which create shared understanding and shared commitment. Following Horst Rittel's analysis, we have developed "Dialogue Mapping", based on Rittel's Issue Based Information System (IBIS), which provides an elegant way of dealing with the fragmentation around a wicked problem. Because the group or team's understanding of the wicked problem is evolving, productive movement toward a solution requires powerful mechanisms for getting everyone on the same page. There will be volumes facts, data, studies and reports about a wicked problem, but the shared commitment needed to create durable solution will not live in information or knowledge. Understanding a wicked problem is about collectively making sense of the situation and coming to shared understanding about who wants what. Dialogue Mapping is such a method, because it is an approach which is rooted in maximizing communication and coherence among diverse stakeholders. Dialogue Mapping -- the process of crafting IBIS maps interactively with a group -- is not a process in the traditional sense: it is a structural augmentation of group communication. It provides a group with an enriched Dialogue environment which both de-emphasizes personal dynamics (e.g. right/wrong or win/loose dynamics) and creates a coherent shared space for crafting and negotiating shared understanding.

In a surprise verdict that stunned even the defendant, a justice of the peace has dismissed a slate of raw-milk-related charges against Ontario dairyman Michael Schmidt and simultaneously delivered a boon to Canada's food-rights movement. Mr. Schmidt supplies raw milk to a small network of people with ownership shares in his dairy cattle. He was facing 19 charges related to public health and milk marketing when, looking grim, he took his seat before Justice of the Peace Paul Kowarsky in a Newmarket courtroom yesterday morning. Throughout the three hours it took Mr. Kowarsky to read out his 40-page verdict, the outlook for Mr. Schmidt's cow-sharing operation flip-flopped from promising to doomed and back again. But Mr. Kowarsky ultimately acquitted the farmer, a rising star in the growing international farming and food-rights movement, on the basis that the unique structure of his operation does not violate Ontario's stringent milk-marketing laws. Nor does Mr. Schmidt's provision of unpasteurized milk (which is illegal to sell in Canada) to shareholders endanger public health, Mr. Kowarsky said. The judgment, the culmination of a legal battle that was launched in 2006 after a raid by the Ministry of Natural Resources on Mr. Schmidt's farm in Durham, Ont., does not mean raw milk can be commercially sold in Ontario. The decision also remains open to appeal. However, it gives a boost to the burgeoning sector of creative farm-to-consumer food delivery-programs, including "cow-shares," which have grown in popularity as mistrust in the industrial food system has increased. "What I did foremost was make sure that farmers have the rights to engage in private contracting with consumers who make an informed choice," said Mr. Schmidt, who called the ruling "brilliant" but admitted he "didn't expect such a clear verdict." He has battled with public health officials and government milk regulators since the first crackdown on his raw-milk operation, in 1994. Unpasteurized pro

daviding says: The difference between selling milk and contracting for cow-share memberships can be seen as a shift from the presumptions of industrial production towards a service system. The regulators are trying to protect bulk distribution of raw milk from anonymous sellers to anonymous buyers. In Michael Schmidt's milk house, the cow-share owners not the provider of the product not only as the person who owns the farm, but also the original producer (i.e. the cow).

daviding says: Wisdom and knowledge are sticky to experts. However, the advent of "open content" on academic materials challenges the traditional way in which universities interact with students.

"The Internet disrupts any industry whose core product can be reduced to ones and zeros," says Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton. Education, he says, "is the biggest virgin forest out there." Ferreira is among a loose-knit band of education 2.0 architects sharpening their saws for that forest. Their first foray was at MIT in 2001, when the school agreed to put coursework online for free. Today, you can find the full syllabi, lecture notes, class exercises, tests, and some video and audio for every course MIT offers, from physics to art history. This trove has been accessed by 56 million current and prospective students, alumni, professors, and armchair enthusiasts around the world. "The advent of the Web brings the ability to disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field," says Cathy Casserly, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who in her former role at the Hewlett Foundation provided seed funding for MIT's project. "We're changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge." But higher education remains, on the whole, a string quartet. MIT's courseware may be free, yet an MIT degree still costs upward of $189,000. College tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1990, and our nation's students and graduates hold a staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt. Once the world's most educated country, the United States today ranks 10th globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees. "Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies," says Jim Groom, an "instructional technologist" at Virginia's University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days' growth of

daviding says: This article published in the Rotman Magazine on "Wicked Problems" is available on the Ideo web site. Designing a system for scale is a practical and interesting challenge.

Growing Influential Networks Following are three approaches that specifically deal with the idea of humanizing big problems to influence people to change and grow influential networks. 1. Human-Centered Systems: Design for People, Not the System 2. Sticky Systems: Design for Scale 3. Reciprocal Systems: Connect by Sharing The Five Principles of Systems at Scale 1. Ask how the system feels, not just how it works. 2. Recognize that a good system is often the best influencer. 3. Let the user close the loop. 4. Go micro with the human factors. 5. Start with hope, and take the long view.

daviding says: There's a philosophical shift to move from information held in private within government departments to free-flowing content.

Web 2.0 technologies are now being deployed in government settings. For example, public agencies have used blogs to communicate information on public hearings, wikis and RSS feeds to coordinate work, and wikis to internally share expertise, and intelligence information. The potential for Web 2.0 tools create a public sector paradox. On the one hand, they have the potential to create real transformative opportunities related to key public sector issues of transparency, accountability, communication and collaboration, and to promote deeper levels of civic engagement. On the other hand, information flow within government, across government agencies and between government and the public is often highly restricted through regulations, specific reporting structures and therefore usually delayed through the filter of the bureaucratic constraints. What the emergent application and popularity of Web 2.0 tools show is that there is an apparent need within government to create, distribute and collect information outside the given hierarchical information flow. Clearly, these most recent Internet technologies are creating dramatic changes in the way people at a peer-to-peer production level communicate and collaborate over the Internet. And these have potentially transformative implications for the way public sector organizations do work and communicate with each other and with citizens. But they also create potential difficulties and challenges that have their roots in the institutional contexts these technologies are or will be deployed within. In other words, it is not the technology that hinders us from transformation and innovation - it is the organizational and institutional hurdles that need to be overcome. This paper provides an overview of the transformative organizational, technological and informational challenges ahead.

The original pointer to this report summary is from Jim Spohrer at http://forums.thesrii.org/srii/blog/article?blog.id=main_blog&message.id=191#M191 .

Key messages * There are three primary stakeholder groups that can guide the development of services science: academia, government and industry. Only by investing and working together in a coordinated manner can the maximum promise of services science be realised. * The global recession should sharpen government and industry's focus on services science as they seek solutions to invigorate the western economy, to make business more competitive and to learn from this latest setback. * Services science has the potential to establish a new industry of professionals (compare engineers, lawyers and computer scientists) whose expertise can be drawn upon to benefit the broader services-led economy. * The degree of human intervention required during the lifetime of an IT services contract is too high and is consequently both too expensive to be efficient and too error-prone to be effective. These shortcomings are directly related to the absence of scientific rigour in the design and delivery of these services. * IT is integral to services science, since modern service systems often have IT enablement heavily involved in service delivery. * IT service providers have the potential to benefit from services science by making their offerings more meaningful and resilient in a market that will increasingly demand more efficient service delivery. * Innovation in services delivery is at the heart of the vision for services science. The end goal should be a virtuous circle of innovation that can encourage new business opportunities and, in turn, create further innovation in the delivery of services. * Collaboration, investment and sharing of knowledge are vital to progressing services science research and development. * Significant challenges still need to be overcome to drive adoption of services science, not least of which is the complexity of aligning academic, business and governmental interests at a given moment in time. * Gove

daviding says: This is an interesting example of decomplexification (in the vocabulary of Tim Allen). Instead of integrating health services into a centralized facilities (i.e. complexifying), having doctors distributed nearer to the homes of patients can reduce costs. The difference between the era of Marcus Welby MD and today is that the Internet enables easy electronic sharing of patient records ... if the physicians and patients are willing to allow that free flow of information.

The primary-care doctor is gaining new respect in Washington. Battles may be breaking out left and right over the various health-care bills emerging from Congress, but reformers on both sides agree that general practitioners should be given a central role in uniting the fragmented U.S. medical system. This vision has a name: the "patient-centered medical home." The "home" is the office of a primary-care doctor where patients would go for most of their medical needs. The general practitioner would oversee everything from flu shots to chronic disease management to weight loss, and coordinate care with nurses, pharmacists, and specialists. A 2004 study estimated that if every patient had such a home, the resulting efficiencies might reduce U.S. health-care costs by 5.6%, a savings of $67 billion a year. [...] advocates say the new concept is designed to help patients, not insurers. It's more like doctoring 1950s-style, when a Marcus Welby figure handled all the family's medical needs. This time it's juiced up with digital technology. It also represents a politically painless way to streamline a disorganized and wasteful system that chews up a crippling 18% of the U.S. gross domestic product. That burden is felt particularly by private industry, which covers 60% of the nation's insured. Since most businesses try to ferret out waste and disorganization in their own operations, the medical home is a concept they can embrace in good conscience. One of the biggest advocates is IBM (IBM), which shelled out $1.3 billion last year on health benefits for its U.S. employees and retirees, equal to one month of the company's net income. Dr. Paul H. Grundy, 57, who holds the unusual title of director of health-care transformation for IBM, is a medical-home evangelist who led the company to start the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, a coalition of some 500 large employers, insurers, consumer groups, and doctors. Part of his goal, he says, is to show that "emp