Uncertainty appears to the chief bugaboo of organizations. Max Miller, the Hamburg sociologist in his 2002 paper, Some theoretical aspects of systemic learning, abstracting organizational theorists (such as Simon and Weick), wrote, “If there is anything that defines the central problem of an organization, it is the inescapable and enduring struggle of coping with uncertainty. [...]
“Joinery” refers both to the craft of a joiner, someone who makes things by joining together pieces of wood, and to the premises from which the craft is practiced.
Complexity
IRB procedures expand to include “community-engaged research”
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 [...]
Five rules to reinvent Best Practices from Nick Milton
Wednesday Nick Milton in his blog listed these five “rules.” They made a lot of sense to me and so I am reprinting them:
There is a lot of pushback in the KM world about the term “best practice”. In the discussion groups, we hear people saying “we don’t believe in best practice”. Respected KM gurus [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Apple’s mac & os x used by cognitive-edge folks
Last week at this time I and a bunch of us were winging our way to Raleigh for a three-day Cognitive Edge course on complexity and sense-making. The company has been started by a couple of ex-IBMers and does extensive contract consulting with large corporations and governments. They work with our defense and agriculture departments, [...]
Rob Bell does a good job in describing “context” …
in this YouTube video from an appearance he made at last month’s Greenbelt. Describing and capturing context plays an important, crucial even, part in realistic evaluation and complexity.
In this snippet Bell begins talking about “out of the box.” But stick with it and he’ll take you on a word trip which illustrates very well what [...]
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 [...]