I’ve had to— as they say in scoring large scale writing assessments— “recalibrate.” I’ve recalibrated my attitude toward IRBs and their need when it comes to evaluating interventions designed to better communities. I attended a session today at Light Hall on “IRB issues in community-engaged research” and sponsored by the Vanderbilt IRB. I had no [...]
Complex adaptive systems —
Category Archives: Complex adaptive systems
Attractors in community healthcare
As you know I’ve been attracted to attractors recently. I’ve found an example of attractors in patterning improvements in community settings. Russell Gonnering has a post over on the Cognitive Edge site on amplifying positive “attractors” to benefit community healthcare. He cites work by Marian Zeitlin and Jerry and Monique Sternin.
A Tufts University nutritionist, Dr. [...]
A way of thinking about values, themes & archetypes
Some of us have difficulty wrapping our minds around the values, themes and archetypes extracted from the narrative fragments collected during anecdote circles with the Cognitive Edge methodology. Why? For what reason? What purpose do they serve?
It just occurred to me that an analogy with an term from complexity science might help. It has helped [...]
What does training look like in complex environments?
This morning reading my emails from overnight I found a link to a post by Harold Jarche. He uses David Snowden’s Cynefin Framework as an illustration. I thought I would share it with some of my colleagues and wrote an email about it to them. After I was done, the email look like a blog [...]
Brief explanation of narrative fragments given in SenseMaker ad
One of David Snowden early, but recent, videos is this rather extended ad on the Sensemaker suite for analyzing “narrative fragments.” We saw what the software will do when we were in Raleigh at the end of October for the Cognitive Edge course.
Listen to the intro to get an idea of the value and usefulness [...]
Snowden’s “birthday party” story now on youtube
A version of David Snowden’s birthday party story illustrating the differences among chaotic, ordered and complex systems is on YouTube. It isn’t the most compete rendition of the story but serves as a good introduction to some key terms of complexity theory. For a fuller account listen to one of his podcasts on the Cognitive [...]
Been re-reading Ramalingam, et al’s Exploring the science of complexity…
to identify some measures and descriptive information we could use and gather for an evaluation project. Measurement methods such as sociograms— to see who is connected to who, particularly in terms of feedback and feedback processes; social network analysis (SNA)— to look at possible emergent properties of the networks; questions to use in structured [...]
A primer on emergence/complexity on the Fast Forward blog
A Rob Peterson is doing a three-part series on emergence on Fast Forward. He’s posted parts 1 and 2 which I found helpful as I try to get a handle on complexity or complex adaptive systems (cas) as an evaluator.
He uses this video clip from a Nova program. It conveys a little bit about [...]
Intuition plays a major role in making decisions in a parallel process
We are getting closer to finding out how our mind (in the broadest sense) operates in making decisions. And intuition plays a major role. For sometime now we have had Epstein’s dual processing model of rational and experiential cognitive systems and now we have a summary of the three decades or more of research by [...]
Planning not always effective for changing social complex systems
Is governmental agencies insistence on upfront planning undermining efforts to really improve education and preventing substance abuse in our communities? I came across a passage today in a 2005 publication of the Institute for Defense Analyses, Learning to adapt to asymmetric threats. A slew of retired Army, Navy and Air Force officers are credited with [...]