Common Sense, Complexity and Leadership
Posted: January 23, 2012 Filed under: complexity, social systems | Tags: common sense, complexity, decision making, developmental design, Duncan Watts, evaluation, leadership, social networks, strategy, systems thinking Leave a comment »
Bye, Bye Common Sense
Great leaders are often ascribed traits that include ample common sense. But what passes for common sense is often a grab bag of miscellaneous, inconsistent ideas that are context dependent and less useful in the complex environments where leadership is called for most.
common sense |ˌkɑmən ˈsɛns|
noun
good sense and sound judgment in practical matters: use your common sense | [ as modifier ] : a common-sense approach.
Today Research in Motion announced that its founder Mike Lazaridis and his co-CEO Jim Balsillie would be relinquishing their roles with the company. In their place, a ‘pragmatic, operational-type guy ‘was installed. Presumably, Thorsten Heins has the common sense to lead RIM after the founders lost theirs. Yet, the pragmatic, common sense that RIM is looking for might not be what they need given the complexity of the environment they are leading in.
Common sense is a false lure in complex systems. In his recent book, Everything is Obvious *Once You Know the Answer, social network researcher and Yahoo! Research scientist Duncan Watts eloquently critiques the concept of common sense, illustrating dozens of times over how “common sense” doesn’t fare so well in decisions that go beyond the routine and into the complex. Indeed. the very definition of the term implies that the problems that common sense works towards addressing are relatively simple and pragmatic.
Certainly, navigating daily social conventions might lend itself well to what we might call common sense. Watts refers to sociologist Harry Collins’ term ‘collective tacit knowledge‘ that is encoded in social norms, customs and practices of a particular world to describe common sense. However, what becomes common is a byproduct of many small decisions, dynamic and flexible changes to perspective, an accumulation of knowledge gained from small experiments over time, and the application of all of this knowledge to particular, context-dependent, situations. This constellation of factors and its interdependent, contextual overlap is why artificial intelligence systems have such a difficult time mimicking human thought and action. It is this attention to context that is most worth noting for it is this context that keeps common sense from being anything but common:
Common sense…is not so much a worldview as a grab bag of logically inconsistent, often contradictory beliefs, each of which seems right at the time but carries no guarantee of being right any other time.
Watts goes on to argue:
Commonsense reasoning, therefore, does not suffer from a single overriding limitation but rather from a combination of limitations, all of which reinforce and even disguise one another. The net result is that common sense is wonderful at making sense of the world, but not necessarily at understanding it.
Thus, we often concoct a narrative about the way something happens that sounds plausible, rational and be completely wrong. Throughout the book, Watts shows how often mistakes are made based on this common sense approach to solving problems.
When it comes to RIM, some have pointed to the late Steve Jobs’ assertion that they would have difficulty catching up to firms like Apple given that the consumer market is not their strength, the enterprise market is. Yet, Steve Jobs didn’t let the fact that Apple was a computer company stop him from making music players (the iPod), mobile phones (the iPhone) or becoming book, music and movie vendors (iTunes). A read of Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson reveals a man who was able to lead and be successful through what appeared to be common sense, yet was decidedly uncommon among media and technology leaders. That is why Apple is where it is and why so many other technology companies lag behind them or simply disappeared.
The reason is that common sense in leadership looks as simple in hindsight only, not in foresight or even in the present moment. This is one of the big points that Watts makes. He uses the example of Sony’s MiniDisc system that, when introduced, had all of the hallmark features of the innovations that Apple introduced (novel, high quality, portable, smaller, visible advantages over the alternatives), yet it was a spectacular failure. Canadian management consultant Michael Raynor has called this the strategy paradox. When qualities such as vision, bold leadership, and focused execution — all the commonsensical aspects of great leaders — are applied to organizations it can lead to great success (Steve Jobs and Apple) or resounding failures (RIM?).
Strategic flexibility, making small adjustments consistently, and imaging scenarios for the future in an ongoing manner are some of the potential ways to limit the damage from common sense (or use its advantages more fully). This requires feedback mechanisms and close monitoring of program activities, developmental evaluation, and a willingness to tweak programs and design on the go (what I call: developmental design) . It’s not a surprise that this incremental approach to development is consistent with the way change is best produced in a complex adaptive system.
By recognizing that common sense is less than common and is certainly not consistent, program designers, developers, evaluators and other professionals will be better positioned to provide true leadership that addresses challenges and complexity rather than adds to the complexity and creates more problems.
Photo: Goodbye to Common Sense Space by Amulet Dream from Deviant Art
Women and Leadership in Times of Complexity
Posted: December 5, 2011 Filed under: social systems, systems thinking | Tags: Annie Lennox, Aretha Franklin, complexity, design, design thinking, leadership, Rosie the Riveter, social innovation, wicked problems, women 2 Comments »
We Can Do It by J. Howard Miller
“The Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves” – Aretha Franklin & The Eurythmics
The old cliches of where a woman’s place ought to be have changed to mean: anywhere she wants to be. Women are poised to drive change in the age of complexity leading us all to consider why this might be the case and what we can learn from it.
There was a time when women repeated the line in graphic artist J. Howard Miller‘s famous piece: We Can Do It! Now, as Aretha and Annie sing, they are doing it for themselves…and in spades. The ‘it’ is leading and innovating in times of great complexity and change and not necessarily by role, but by action. When the challenges of ‘wicked problems‘ become great and pervasive, it is women not men who are stepping up to lead and that might have a lot to do with design. How?
Design and design thinking is fundamentally about strategies used to create, shape and influence. There are many definitions of the concept, but generally speaking it is about finding / clarifying problems at their root, framing them within a larger context, and addressing them using empathic methods. Quite often this involves intense engagement with the issue and those whom the issue most affects and these are areas where women are doing well.
Drawing on the growing literature base on design thinking and a series of ongoing interviews I have done as part of the Design Thinking Foundations project, there are three areas that sit at the core of this way of approaching problems. As it turns out, women are pretty good at all of them:
- Empathy. Getting to learn more about the person / people who are designing for / with by stepping into their shoes is a powerful vehicle for gaining insight into the nature of the problem at hand, its frames, and possible ways forward. Research looking at males and females consistently shows women expressing higher levels of emotional empathy than men (e.g, ). More recent work has begun to explore the ways in which women relate empathically to others, whereas men are more prone to what can be called Machevellian tendencies;
- Literacy. By this I refer to a constellation of skills that sit at the intersection of craft and knowledge to address a particular problem. A designer’s literacy most often includes creativity and the ability to analyze problems. These skills can fall within artistic realms, but also scientific and mathematical realms. Here in Canada, a recent report on the state of education finds that boys are lagging in literacy scores and, for the first time, science scores. They are tied with girls in math. The report (PDF-summary) adds greater weight to the shifting nature of boys and girls.
- Engagement. Designers — whether they are introverts or extroverts — need to be able to engage in diverse social situations in order to create useful products and services. Early work on online social networks is suggestive of this, building on a body of work looking at the strength of associations between gender, emotion and socialization (see 2010 chapter of the same name)
It used to be that women would express these three areas in social roles that were of lower status than men and generally following male leads (e.g., homemaker, assistant). However, the balance is starting to shift and women are no longer waiting for men to give things up, they are taking things for themselves. Indeed, women are becoming the new leaders and are designing themselves lives that will keep them in this position for the foreseeable future if indeed design is the new competitive advantage as has been suggested by Roger Martin at the Rotman School of Business in Toronto.
Lest we think this is isolated to Canada or the United States, the rise of women and girls is being seen globally. Earlier this year, the Economist explored how Asian women are marrying less and marrying later. One of the reasons is that they are no longer tied to men in the same way and are less willing to fill a role that sees them often as less than in their marriages. Indeed, Asian women are eschewing the practice altogether in rates never before seen and may be on the cusp of instilling deep and profound social change.
A lot of Asians are not marrying later. They are not marrying at all. Almost a third of Japanese women in their early 30s are unmarried; probably half of those will always be. Over one-fifth of Taiwanese women in their late 30s are single; most will never marry. In some places, rates of non-marriage are especially striking: in Bangkok, 20% of 40-44-year old women are not married; in Tokyo, 21%; among university graduates of that age in Singapore, 27%.(Economist, August 20, 2011)
One of the reasons is that women are more often placed in roles of great social complexity in the family/social sphere, yet without the power to make key decisions. This might mean child raising (often held as the ideal example of complexity), negotiating and planning social engagements, and doing much of the emotional maintenance in relationships. While these are not universal and suggestive of stereotype, there are libraries full of research that have found these roles tend to be persistent and consistent across most Western countries. Until now. These are also the kinds of skills that are needed in complex systems and to create means to navigate through them.
Women are no longer satisfied (nor should they be) with the roles assigned to them by men, but are shaping and crafting new ones for themselves and reclaiming and challenging outdated, sexist ones. A terrific example of this is the SlutWalk movement that started in Toronto in reaction to public statements by a police officer aimed at helping prevent rape that placed blame on victims, suggesting that women “stop dressing like sluts”. Here, women just took action and men followed.
As societies, we will (and do) need leaders and innovators who know how to manage complexity well and design solutions and women may be the first place to look because they are doing it already.
Like this:
The Complex Adaptive (Education) System
Posted: October 10, 2010 Filed under: complexity, Education & Learning | Tags: complexity, dominant design, education, innovation, leadership, learning, path dependence, university Leave a comment »
Education?
One of the great things about travel is that a person gets exposed to different media opportunities and (often) new perspectives that come with that. Today, I had delivered to my hotel a copy of the Ottawa Citizen, which featured a opinion piece by David Warren titled: “End Our Multiversities“. It was a very provocative, interesting piece. By interesting, I am not suggesting it was well-argued, historically accurate or reasonable, but it did make me think.
While Warren longs for the Middle Ages and grumbles about liberal education while (quite inaccurately) suggesting that all the world’s greatest universities are private, he brings up an issue that is relevant today for both public and private schools by seeking space for significant personal growth through education:
Now, do I propose that we go back to the Middle Ages? I would if we could, but since we can’t, I propose something more subtle: that we create the conditions in which significant intellectual and spiritual growth (as opposed to mere technological accumulation) would become possible again.
While I have little use for his recommendations or “analysis”, creating space for growth is important to consider and something I do agree with. Growth comes from change, adaptation and integration of new information (which is ironic, given Warren’s argument and desire to go back 500 years). Learning is, by its definition, designed around change, not stasis:
learning |ˈlərni ng |noun . the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, practice, or study, or by being taught : these children experienced difficulties in learning |[as adj. ] an important learning process.• knowledge acquired in this way : I liked to parade my learning in front of my sisters. [Oxford English Dictionary]
Education on the other hand, is less dynamic than learning, but still evolves to meet the demands of society, the market, and the educational institutions themselves. This is not perfect, it is not rational, or based solely on evidence or experience, and sometimes it works well in spite of that. Thus, to be effective at education and learning, the system must be designed to be agile and support change.
Craig Newell, before his untimely death [pdf], wrote about this need for adaptation by comparing the classroom to a complex adaptive system [PDF]. He argues that:
Complex systems are self-organizing and self-maintaining, but many also have the ability to adapt in changing environments. Complicated systems transfer and transmit energy and information; complex systems have the ability to transform. (p.7)
This is where I agree with Warren’s frustration with universities. Transformation is a very difficult thing to achieve and I am not certain that the modern university is doing a good enough job of fostering transformation in itself or its students. One of the main reasons is that education, like healthcare, has become institutionalized to the point of being bureaucratic (as in, being designed to support themselves before their intended audience).
With shrinking or static budgets, coupled with rising pressure to meet admissions targets, expand programs, while maintaining quality, universities are being forced to transform. The question remains as to whether this transformation will be accompanied with strategies to support the personal, healthy transformation-through-learning that education is supposed to provide, or whether it will fall to protecting the bureaucracy.
One of the serious challenges to this will be time. As mentioned in previous posts, time is becoming a serious challenge to our ability to learn and adapt. Time offers us opportunity to consider different options and relax, rather than do things based on stress. If we don’t provide the time to learn, our systems will transform by force of momentum, rather than conscious direction. Thus, if we are to create bigger classes, more requirements, greater professionalization, and less reflection time, momentum rather than contemplative inquiry will lead decisions. That will also create a less adaptive organization through adherence to path dependencies that will become more entrenched within the system. The dominant design [pdf] of a system created to support itself, rather than adaptation and creativity, will ultimately fail our students, our faculty and our society by limiting the innovation potential that comes complexity.
If that happens, then we will be going back to the Middle Ages, when everyone who went to school was the same, the lessons were limited to single subjects of interest only to the elite, and all the students were men. David Warren might be thrilled.
Leadership Systems
Posted: June 5, 2010 Filed under: psychology, research, systems thinking | Tags: leadership, psychology 1 Comment »
Leading the Way
What makes a leader effective vs. harmful?
Robert Sternberg, one of the prolific and widely cited psychologists in history, spoke to this issue at the annual convention of the Canadian Psychological Association being held in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Sternberg is the originator of the WICS model of leadership, which involves: Wisdom, Intelligence, Creativity, Synthesized.
In his 2007 review paper on the WICS, Sternberg describes the WICS this way:
According
to the model, effective leadership is a synthesis of
wisdom, creativity, and intelligence (WICS). It is in large
part a decision about how to marshal and deploy these
resources. One needs creativity to generate ideas, academic
(analytical) intelligence to evaluate whether the
ideas are good, practical intelligence to implement the
ideas and persuade others of their worth, and wisdom to
balance the interests of all stakeholders and to ensure that
the actions of the leader seek a common good.
What makes this model unique is that it combines individual characteristics with a sense of purpose for a “common good” and, in both cases, emphasizes individual agency. Sternberg knows of what he speaks and writes. Among his more than 1400 academic publications are large bodies of work that focus on human creativity, wisdom and learning, and intelligence. His Triarchic Theory of Intelligence has, along with the work of fellow psychologist Howard Gardner, transformed our understanding of human capability and broadened the focus away from the very narrow, culturally constrained, vision of intelligence that dominated much of the psychology literature in the 20th century.
People choose to be leaders
Sternberg views leadership as a choice, not something you’re not born with. It is also something that relies heavily on creativity, something that is inherently a personal and a social quality. The WICS, in its basic form is educational and transformative (my words not his). By linking creativity, perceptual and cognitive abilities, experience and synthesis, a systems-sensitive model of leadership is proposed via the WICS.
Other models can be criticized for their de-emphasis on time (past accomplishment) and over-emphasis on information and analytics to the detriment of wisdom. Intelligence, while inferred, can be viewed superficially as something fit for ‘natural’ leaders, thus reducing the role that personal choice plays in leadership. Creativity, also inferred, is another feature of leadership models that is often overlooked in favour of charisma. Most importantly, Sternberg’s model rests on the ability of leaders to do their work in the service of humanity and is careful to distinguish good leaders from bad ones; those that inspire sustainable good works rather than promote the opposite. It is for that reason that a Nelson Mandela is worth studying more than an Adolf Hitler.
Although the WICS is not new, the need to bring it back into focus and inspire people to lead and to nurture the four qualities within it are needed more than ever. A simple survey of the unfolding crises on the Korean Peninsula, off the coast of Gaza, and in the Gulf of Mexico one can see the need for better, wiser, intelligent and creative leaders.
Diversity and Structure Meets Systems and Design Thinking
Posted: March 2, 2010 Filed under: design thinking, public health, systems thinking | Tags: design thinking, health, healthcare, hospitals, leadership, management, systems thinking, Texas Tech Leave a comment »
The past few days I’ve had the privilige to speak to future healthcare leaders in the Health Organization Management Program at the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University. With every conversation I had with faculty, students, and researchers I was reminded of the value of diversity and the challenge that structure poses to encouraging the best aspects of diversity to emerge.
The positive side of diversity is that bringing together people from different backgrounds to bear down on a topic of shared interest in study (and practice) is an energizing experience. Last night I had the pleasure to speak to students who were getting their MBA’s with a healthcare focus. This group included pharmacists (and former deans), current physicians, training physicians, nurses, and even those who already had Masters degrees in other subjects like Public Administration. It was, by the standards of a usual healthcare education course, a pretty diverse audience. And as so often happens when diverse, engaged people come together, interesting conversation and learning happens.
The class was on systems thinking and its application to health care and public health and it provoked a series of discussions about how we too often structure our systems — particularly those in higher education and healthcare — to reduce the very diversity that leads to insights and engagement (the kind of thing we had last night). Because of issues of convenience, efficiency, and power (sharing or retaining) we often reject concepts that diverge from the norm, despite evidence or argument that they might succeed. An idea becomes habit and then soon is entrenched in what Jaron Lanier calls, ‘lock-in’. It becomes something we no longer question or we cease to challenge because it seems too hard to challenge.
A great example we discussed was the modern hospital. Hosptials are designed to reduce diversity in variation and service, create environments that support consistent ‘best practices’, and create a critical mass of service providers that is also efficient. While those ideas have some merit, they also embody an absence of systems thinking in their design at a fundamental level. Consider the very idea of putting all these people who are immunocompromised and often contagious together in one building. How wise is that?
Designing hospitals — or systems — like this suffers from a locked-in mindset that says healthcare needs to be delivered in large institutions for some of the reasons mentioned. It is so entrenched, that we don’t even consider that there could be many other ways to do this. Maybe some of those alternatives are more humane, safer and efficient. We don’t know, until we consider new ways of thinking and reclaim the diversity in the thinking that guides the structures we create.
Social Sense-making
Posted: February 4, 2010 Filed under: Education & Learning, psychology | Tags: diversity, education, innovation, leadership, learning, social, teaching, university 4 Comments »
What would a health system looked like if we built it around social interaction, rather than the image of the clinician left to make decisions on his or her own? Or for that matter, what would other systems look like if you replaced health with “education”, “research”, “business” and clinician with “teacher”, “scientist” or “salesperson”?
My guess is that they would be a lot different. Business scholar Russell Ackoff liked to quote research that suggested that 20 per cent of what is taught to students is retained, while 95 per cent of what is taught is retained. That is a remarkable statistic when you consider the numbers affiliated with formal education. But it fits with what we know about learning. At the University of Toronto, where I teach, it is not uncommon for there to be 25 students in a graduate course, 200 in a senior undergraduate course and in some rare cases more than 1000 students in an entry-level undergraduate course. In each case, there is but one teacher and many students.
But what would happen if we allowed students to teach and teachers to learn? Could you imagine a room of 25 graduate-level teachers working together to learn as opposed to one professor? This kind of mass knowledge sharing is akin to the wisdom of crowds idea, but offers a little more than that. It offers the opportunity for much more learning (because there is much more teaching) by getting more people involved and engaged. It enhances diversity and enables many more ideas about how to make sense of something.
The process of making sense of complex data is something that has received greater attention as of late. Authors like Dave Snowden, Gary Klein, Brenda Dervin and Karl Weick have all worked to develop theories of how we make sense of things. All have merits. But one thing that seems to be missing, or at least not as prominent, is the role of “the social” in mediating that process. That is, how we collectively generate meaning from diverse swaths of information through social interaction.
If we learn more by teaching than being “taught” then learning in itself must be better suited to social interaction than passive absorption of information. This suggests to me that we might be better off understanding the role of social networks in fostering learning and supporting the development of leadership opportunities than how those teachers or leaders convey information in the first place. Relationships and connections seem to be as important as the content that is delivered in any given educational interaction.
So instead of thinking of attending a seminar next time, why not offer to lead one and encourage your audience to participate and teach you something. You’ll all be better off for it.
Storytelling in the Age of Twitter
Posted: November 27, 2009 Filed under: complexity, Education & Learning, public health, research, Social media, social systems, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: complex adaptive systems, complexity theory, health, innovation, knowledge translation, leadership, narrative inquiry, research methods, Social media, storytelling, systems thinking, Twitter 1 Comment »
Storytelling has been on my mind this week. Not the kind of stories that many of us had a children like those in Mother Goose, but rather the ones that we more often tell through chance encounters in the hallway or Tweet about over the Internet. However, like Mother Goose many of the stories we tell include narratives that feature archetypes and draw on a long history of shared knowledge between the storyteller and her or his audience. Unlike in cultures where storytelling is fashioned in a manner that requires sustained attention and considerable skill and practice (think of the many First Nations & Aboriginal communities worldwide or the Irish Seanachaidhean), tools like Twitter, blogs and Facebook enable us to tell stories in new, short form ways to audiences we might not even know about. Sorting through the tweets of 150 different people per day requires a process of sensemaking that is different from those used to ascertain meaning in a long form story. Both are valuable.
Although it is tempting to privilege long-form storytelling, the kind found in essays, feature films, and books, it may be those tweets that better fit with our cognitive tendencies for sensemaking. If you think about your average day, you might interact with a few dozen people face-to-face and perhaps many dozens more through your social networks. How many of those interactions featured a full-fledged story; one that had a clear start, middle, end and coherence that could only be gathered from the story itself, not past relationships with the storyteller? Probably very few. Instead, we much more often speak, write, and even film in narrative fragments; small chunks co-constructed and contextually bound. Think about any buzzword or catch phrase and you can see this in action. From ‘whassup‘ to ‘getting Kanyed‘, these terms have meanings that go far beyond the obvious and can be conveyed with one or two words. Twitter represents this very well with its 140 character limit.
This past week I spent three days with a great group of people getting learning about complexity-based approaches to sensemaking using narrative fragments, software and a variety of facilitation techniques aimed at taking the science of complexity into the practical change realm with the folk at Cognitive Edge. What this accreditation process did was provide a theory-based set of tools and strategies for making sense of vast amounts of information in the form of stories and narrative fragments for purposes of decision-making and research. What this method does is acknowledge the complex spaces in which many organizational decisions are made and, through the Cynefin framework, help groups make sense of the many bits of knowledge that they generate and share that is often unacknowledged. It provides a theoretically-grounded and data-driven method of making sense of large quantities of narrative fragments; the kind we tell in organizations and communities.
From a systems perspective, viewing knowledge exchange and generation through the narrative fragments that we produce is far more likely to lead to insights about how the system operates and developing anticipatory guidance for decision-making than waiting for fully-formed stories to appear and analyzing those. This, like nearly everything in systems thinking, requires a mind-shift from the linear and whole to the non-linear and fragmented. But thanks to Michael Cheveldave and Dave Snowden and their team this non-linearity need not be incoherent. I’d recommend checking out their amazing website for a whole list of novel and open-source methods of applying cognitive and complexity science to problem identification and intelligence.
Thanks Michael and the Toronto knowledge workers group for a great three days! I’m looking at my tweets in a whole new way.
