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The art and science of the possible

~ A celebration of non-zero sum thinking

The art and science of the possible

Tag Archives: complexity

Lightfoot strategy

22 Friday May 2015

Posted by lnedelescu in business, complexity

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complexity, Emergence, strategy

Light Foot Strategy

There are many models for strategy under uncertainty but few useful metaphors. Just what does strategy under complex, unpredictable conditions look like? Picture yourself attempting to cross a fast moving stream by stepping on small, irregular, slippery and so unstable rocks. Your vision is clear: get to the other side of the stream. You could sit there and contemplate a viable path across the stream, but your plan will be sketchy at best. For one, the water partially obscures many of the stones you’re about to use, making it impossible to make accurate predictions in terms of stability. Off you go. You find out quickly that the best approach is keeping a lightfoot and moving very fast. You never want to lean all your weight on any particular stone. You use each stone with the assumption that it will roll – and so you minimize your time spent on each step. You improvise – you focus on the next viable step, and only see the few stones around it.

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A consulting industry first: strategy architected around complexity principles

25 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by lnedelescu in complexity, consulting, design thinking, innovation, knowledge, management, problem solving, strategy

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Alignment, complexity, Criteria, Innovation, Performance, Peter Drucker, phase transitions, Portfolio, Qualitative Leaps, Quantitative, strategy

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When people ask me what it is that I do, they often act surprised and sometimes suspicious upon hearing my answer: “I solve wicked problems with undefined parameters”; yes, really.

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Tools are only as effective as the mindsets that employ them

13 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by lnedelescu in complexity, design thinking, Organizational Development, technology

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CES 2014, Common Sense, complexity, Design Thinking, Karl Popper, Network Theory, Organizational Development, Roger Martin, Technologization, Tools

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With the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas attracting worldwide media coverage last week, let me be the one to posit that technological innovation is only as effective as our mental models are able to keep up.

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Management consultants as educators

24 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in business, consulting, management

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Amit Goswami, Best Practices, business, Clay Christensen, complexity, Consultants, Cybernetics, Dave Snowden, Distinctions, Educators, Gurus, management, management consulting, Management Thinkers, Methods, models, Peter Checkland, Peter Drucker, Recipes, Roger Martin, Russell Ackoff, Systems

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I have heard my share of reservations about management consultants. Many see business consulting as a shallow field devoid of real substance. As the old saying about no smoke without fire goes, there is likely good reason for the distrust of this modern profession. The great Russell Ackoff himself distinguished between two types of consultants: self-promoting gurus and educators.

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A brief history of complexity and the mechanisms of resilience

04 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in business, capitalism, complexity, consulting, future, innovation, society, technology

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complexity, Craftsmanship, Reliability, Resilience

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Resilience will receive a lot of attention as the complexity of our world increases. Below is a brief description of the logical correspondence between complexity and resilience, followed by a succinct primer on mechanisms of resilience. But first, a bit of history is in order.

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The future of government

03 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in business, society

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21st century, complexity, cost-reduction, DARPA, development cycles, Government, Lean, Resilience

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I see two key challenges for 21st century governments: lean operations and resilient design. While based on fundamentally distinct mindsets, mastering the two practices would drive similar benefits, primarily cost-reduction.

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A significant update to my list of foundational thinkers: F. Buckmister Fuller

21 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in business, capitalism, complexity, design thinking, future, human capital, society

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architecture, Buckmister Fuller, complexity, Design, Foundational Thinkers, specialization of labor vs. holism, Systems

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I have just come across the incarnation into words of a beautiful positivist and humanist mind of the highest caliber: F Buckminster Fuller. Apparently he is 50 years ahead of my timid attempts at using the converged wisdom of complexity, design and systems to contemplate our society’s potential pitfalls and ways to overcome them. And so, my initial list of foundational thinkers (Ackoff, Jaques, Prigogine and Vester) has just been expanded. I will be studying the implications of Fuller’s profound insights in the near future, but, for now, here is a quotation that takes the duality of my caution-opportunity message in the discontinuity disorder and post-causality pieces even further:

“We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. . . . In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war“. – F. Buckminster Fuller

Beyond expertise: how I freed my mind from mechanistic thinking and opened up to paradox, validity and complexity

17 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in complexity, innovation, knowledge, paradox, problem solving

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Air Traffic, Autonomy, complexity, Corporate Career Path, Limits of Expertise, Limits of Knowledge, Optimization, Professional Fulfillment, Sequential Planning vs. Adaptive Emergence, Subject Matter Expert

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So you think you’re an expert and pretty much have a handle on your domain and the keys to a comfortable ride through life? What if waiting for that 3% raise a year is a form of subtle imprisonment? What if there is much more satisfaction in seeing your life and career as the cumulative list of things you still have to learn rather than as the accumulated knowledge that keeps you safe and comfortable?

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Self-awareness: a phenomenon exclusive to the natural world?

13 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in human capital, learning, science, society, technology

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Artificial Intelligence, Cognition, complexity, Double Loop Learning, Intentionality, Meaning, Natural World, Neural Algorithms, Perception, Purpose, Reality, Reflexivity, Self-Awareness, Singularity, Social Science

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Self-awareness, key to intentionality, meaning and purpose, may be restricted to the natural world. In social theory, reflexivity refers to a circular relationship between cause and effect in human systems. The latest in complexity and cognitive science – themselves related disciplines – appears to confirm this assertion by social scientists. By the simple act of perception humans can alter the reality they attempt to observe, and in that sense reality and sentient man can be said to intertwine. Out of this inference an emergent phenomenon we call the future limps forward.

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The rising toll of the (still) predominant mechanistic mindset in a complex world

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in complexity, Crisis, democracy, future, society

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causality, Cause and Effect, Charles Handy, complexity, David Hurst, democracy, Ecology, future, Mechanistic, Mindset, Resilience, Robustness, Society, Thinking

Mechanistic_Thinking_EA

Thesis: there is I believe a meta-societal, global shift from robustness to resilience (see this for an intuitive illustration of the difference). This is fueled by an underlying transition from a mechanistic (Industrial Revolution) to a complex-adaptive (Conceptual Economy) worldview.  We have managed to design robust systems (economy, air traffic, healthcare, energy), but not resilient. Robust systems are great for quasi-stable environments, but the price for not having resilience in highly dynamic, networked environments is staggering: $12 trillion for the 2008 financial crisis, and counting. Unless we learn how to design resilient systems, likely through the application of complexity principles, democracy itself may be at risk.

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