On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Proposal to stop referring to the pandemic in the past tense and climate change in the future tense.” —@BethSawin

That you tried your damndest
only to fall ill now
is no reason to feel shame
after so many months
of masks and social distancing
of shots and canceled plans
it is not that you failed
but that your society failed you.

—@PlaguePoems

The shame should rest
Where the blame does rest
Yet those who should hang their heads,
abashed at the unexpected harvest their actions did sow
Do not see the ripples in the pond,

while, those who bobbling in the wake,
hear the peal of memory,
“I made a mistake.”

—@Bitsy15CS

Scientific American: Facial Expressions Do Not Reveal Emotions

Emotion AI systems, therefore, do not detect emotions. They detect physical signals, such as facial muscle movements, not the psychological meaning of those signals. The conflation of movement and meaning is deeply embedded in Western culture and in science. An example is a recent high-profile study that applied machine learning to more than six million internet videos of faces. The human raters, who trained the AI system, were asked to label facial movements in the videos, but the only labels they were given to use were emotion words, such as “angry,” rather than physical descriptions, such as “scowling.” Moreover there was no objective way to confirm what, if anything, the anonymous people in the videos were feeling in those moments.

The Tell of Captain Walker by @whatsthepont

Over the last 2 years of the pandemic I spent a reasonable amount of time sitting around a fire pit (old dustbin) in the garden talking and telling stories with close family members (totally Covid rules compliant). I suspect a lot of people did this sort of thing. I’m wondering if the pandemic version of the tribal story circle has cemented a few new (and old) stories in family histories? We’ve got an explanation of how Wolves were domesticated with cheese & onion crisps (apparently), that will stick in my mind … but that’s another story.

Sackville Attic by Christopher Pratt (1935-2022). Image via @Canadian Paintings

Three years ago, in confronting the post-truth machines, I wrote that we cannot let the algorithmic overlords control the conversation. Education on the nature of disinformation is essential. This is what new media literacy should focus on, not just understanding the latest tools and platforms.

Meanwhile, in Canada, we observe that conspiracy theories abound in the public mind.

New Abacus Data polling reveals some pretty sobering findings on the state of the Canadian political landscape. According to the survey, 44 percent of Canadians now believe that a secret group of elites is controlling elections, recessions and wars. Thirty-seven percent are inclined to believe the racist “white replacement theory”. The poll also found that 13 percent think Bill Gates is tracking us with microchips, while another 21 percent are unsure if he is actually doing it but believe such things are possible. —Policy Mag 2022-06-18

It looks like the forces that promote the strategic and purposeful production of ignorance are winning. Even our mainstream political parties are promoting insurrectionists like the highly organized convoy protesters.

“I have been involved in major planned and unplanned incidents in this country, across this country, and internationally,” he said. “The level of organization, the level of counter-intelligence, the level of logistics, the level of planning, the level of financial resources, the level of commitment – individually and collective – was on a scale that I had not experienced.” [ex-Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly] —Globe & Mail 2022-06-02

Our natural stupidity is becoming a threat to our democracy.

“The only people maintaining their smarts are the few people willing to constantly exercise their smarts. Meanwhile, we have a population that is becoming more out of shape and lazy with their own mental faculties … The bigger problem is that other humans are aware that it can make us dumber and they are opportunistically exploiting our natural stupidity to influence our behavior.” —Natural Stupidity is more Dangerous than Artificial Intelligence 2017-10-17

It’s time to collectively wake up — and pre-bunk — these threats to our democracy.

The military is beginning to understand that some of its leadership practices need to change as its challenges increase in complexity. Future warfare will increasingly move toward the complex domain.

“Complex contexts cannot be solved; they can only be managed. In a context with variables and relationships that are constantly shifting, leaders are unable to assess the situation and apply the appropriate solution. Instead, they must begin by intentionally probing the environment and conducting small, experimental actions to generate insights they can then analyze for patterns.” —Modern War Institute at West Point 2022-06-15

Major Heloise Goodley, UK army chief of general staff’s research fellow at Chatham House, says that new skills are needed for the modern, machine-augmented battlefield.

“The proliferation of automation and artificial intelligence has not decreased the requirement for a human component in war, but it is changing the decision making and cognitive skills required of those soldiers. The army needs soldiers who have the intellectual and psychological aptitude to work in an increasingly automated operational environment, the very computer skills Generation Z have become derided for.” —The Independent 2019-01-05

Source: Army Times 2019-03-28

According to this US Army education series, leadership skills for complex tasks are focused more on the getting teams to work together than individual strengths.

‘On the other hand, complex contexts are dynamic and unsolvable by nature. Leaders operating in complexity need traits that enable them to build strong teams that can react nimbly when situations change. Traits focused on team building, interpersonal skills, and communication are therefore better in complexity because it is teams, not individuals, who generate success. In Army doctrinal terms, these traits include “creates a positive environment,” “communicates,” “builds trust,” “develops others,” “mental agility,” “sound judgment,” “empathy,” “interpersonal tact,” and “innovation.” The former set of traits is important for solving known problems, while the latter set is necessary to determine what the problem is and empower a team to address it.’ —Modern War Institute at West Point 2022-06-15

These skills are similar to those determined to be important in the modern workplace. For example, what are often considered ‘feminine’ traits are what leaders need today, as shown in this 2013 Inc. magazine study.

“32,000 study subjects were asked to classify 125 traits as masculine, feminine, or neutral. Another 32,000 were asked to rate the importance of the traits to effective leadership. ‘Feminine’ traits were more likely to be strongly linked to leadership.”

This study concluded that seven of the nine top leadership traits — perceived as feminine by respondents — are also seen as the most important.

Feminine: Plans for Future, Communicative, Reasonable, Loyal, Flexible, Intuitive, Patient.
Masculine: Decisive, Resilient

Image: Inc. Magazine

Today, there are increasing measures in our societies and economies to get back to normal. But will our institutions — like the military — and our organizations — such as transportation companies — be ready for whatever next shock will hit them? Do they think this pandemic will disappear and we will never face another one in our lifetimes? As Dave Snowden said in a discussion session in 2020, “Covid is God’s gift to humanity, because it’s a wake-up call”.

Complexity and chaos are the new normal as climate change drives more crises our way — pandemics, refugees, environmental disasters, and the overall degradation of our environment. To prepare for chaos, we need people who can act. We will need leaders who can also deal with complexity. They will have to be constantly experimenting and probing their ecosystems. Organizations who are serious about surviving in the ‘post-covid’ normal will have to take a hard look at their leadership and management structures. The time to change is now, not when the next crisis strikes. The military seems to understand this.

While many of our professions and organizations can deal with some complexity, few are adapted to deal with chaos on a large scale. Chaos — violent political action, climate change, pandemic — require structures that promote curiosity and resolve. With frequent chaotic events to deal with, we have to organize in temporary, negotiated hierarchies that can quickly form and re-form in order to test novel practices. The ability to do this requires diverse thinking, open structures, and trust among those doing the work. Now is the time to get these in place.

The digital networks that now connect all of us globally can give us a new sense-making platform that many of us and most of our leaders ignore or use inappropriately. I have said many times here that leadership today is helping make the network smarter, stronger, and more resilient. One person cannot lead in a connected world, even in the military. If they try, they become the knowledge bottleneck.

Making our networks smarter is one aspect of leadership in our digitally connected world and so is convening the best parts of our networks in order to address complex issues and make decisions. In crises, sometimes perfection is the enemy of the good, so having a diverse, knowledgeable, and experienced group of advisors becomes critical.

Leadership today should be a temporary privilege and a permanent responsibility.

Ten years ago I wrote — work is learning, and learning is the work. I have been asked to speak about this topic at the LernOS Convention on 5 July, which I will present online. Let’s see what has transpired in a decade.

The first paragraph is even more pertinent today, especially given the global experiences of distributed work — We have come to a point where organizations can no longer leave learning to their HR or training departments. Being able to understand emerging situations, see patterns, and co-solve problems are essential business skills. — where social learning becomes critical in knowledge sharing and learning in the complex domain.

This is how I described the situation ten years ago, with notes added underneath from the present perspective.

• Our world is getting more complex as everything gets connected
  • The idea of The Entanglement is that the world has become so complex and interconnected that the individual disciplines developed during The Enlightenment — like medicine — are no longer adequate to help society in our collective sensemaking, especially during global crises.
• Complex problems require more implicit knowledge
  • What do the terms implicit, explicit, and tacit knowledge mean? It seems that many in the knowledge management discipline do not — the codification of knowledge.
• Implicit knowledge can only be shared through conversations & observation.
  • Sensemaking’s secret weapon — “It is not being in the know, but rather having to translate between different groups so that you develop gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other”
• Collaborative and distributed work is the norm.
  • Distributed work is here to stay
• Knowledge-sharing and narration of work make implicit knowledge more visible.
  • Working collaboratively & learning cooperatively — Social networks can provide inspiration but sensemaking requires the resolve to solve problems. This means the integration of learning and working. Flipping from learning to working is a continuous process on a daily basis.
• Transparent work processes foster innovation.
  • Knowledge flows at the speed of trust — Openness enables transparency and knowledge-sharing, which fosters diversity of opinions, and these reinforce social networks. It is only over time that trust emerges.
• Learning is part of work, not separate from it.
  • Yes — Work is learning, and learning is the work.

Image: Red42

Nick Milton refers to an interesting knowledge management concept — “‘personbyte’ – the amount of knowledge one person can reasonably learn in a lifetime. In the craftsman economy of 100 years ago, a personbyte was enough knowledge to create an impressive artefact — a steamboat, a canal, or a suspension bridge. Nowadays one personbyte is nowhere near enough to create modern products, or deliver modern services.”

So why do we have individual performance appraisals?

W. Edwards Deming called annual performance appraisals one of the five deadly diseases of management. Performance ratings are nothing more than a lottery, Deming said in 1984.

ANNUAL RATING OF PERFORMANCE

• Arbitrary and unjust system
• Demoralizing to employees
• Nourishes short-term performance
• Annihilates team work, encourages fear.

Yet performance appraisals continue in most organizations.

This does not mean that individual work has no value. For example, creativity needs just enough social connections, as well as time alone to produce. The challenge in doing creative work is having just enough regular social connections with just the right group of trusted, but diverse, people.

While work is collaborative, we still need to get out and find new ideas from our social networks, and also spend time reflecting and testing new ideas in trusted community spaces. Restricting this daily dance — between curiosity and the resolve to solve problems — by only measuring individual performance ignores the critical role that social learning plays in getting work done.

Work is not an individual effort. It is a combination team-community-network effort.

Two years ago, just after the pandemic was declared, I suggested that we need to go beyond civil society, governments, and markets — toward a commons or noosphere — to deal with the entangled complexities facing us. My assumptions at that time have not changed much to date.

1. The three organizing forms for society, chronologically — Tribes, Institutions (Governments), Markets — are widely applicable across history.
2. Each form builds on the other and changes it.
3. The last form is the dominant form — today that would be the Market form (market volatility today is increasing inequality and turmoil)
4. A new form is emerging — Networks (Commons)‚ and hence the T+I+M+N model.
5. This form has also been called the noosphere.
6. I have found evidence that what initiated each new form was a change in human communication media — T+I (written word), T+I+M (print), T+I+M+N (electric/digital).
7. I believe we are currently in between a triform (T+I+M) and a quadriform (T+I+M+N) society, which accounts for much of the current political turmoil in our post-modern world.
8. This model can help inform us how to build better organizational forms for a coming age of entanglement.

I am less inclined to include the tribal form of organizing as pertinent — after having read Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything — but the continuing dominance of the market form and the incompetence of the institutional (government) form to deal with our global changes continues. This was recently highlighted by Dr. Henry Madison on a long Twitter thread. This is the most succinct explanation of how our market-dominated society operates, and why this is not sustainable.

Why don’t governments protect us from Covid? Because market economies replaced societies, and they don’t have a public. Only individual consumers. No geographical or ethnic or any other identifier for people, except as customers of a global market.

Many wonder when the Covid debacle will end, any day now surely governments will come to their senses. (In Australia this MAY still happen.) But we may have reached a tipping point. And the idea of ‘endemic’ Covid might hold the key to understanding where this might go. As Katherine Wu showed, ‘endemic’ can mean many things. But historically it practically meant a disease that couldn’t be eliminated. And just about always, that meant a disease left to fester in poor countries we didn’t care much about.

We told these poor countries to ‘live with’ these diseases, because we couldn’t be bothered helping them to control them. But with the politics of market economies, there are no countries. Just global markets. How we used to just treat other countries s now how we’re starting to treat our own people. They’re all just market economy consumers, where they are is irrelevant. You can see this with the amount of labour we import, which our lockdowns highlighted, when they couldn’t come.

The reason modern governments decided to ‘live with’ a lethal virus, is because that’s what they’ve always done, when it was other countries. And now the globalised market (as they see it) is reaching its apogee, the distinctions between rich and poor countries are reproduced *within* rich countries as well.

It’s an evolution of the same colonial model, now within our societies, not just between countries. Note the obsession with ‘jobs’ in the Covid recovery, the only territorial remnant people are now allowed is their attachment to a workplace.

You’re interchangeable now with the poor in countries who have historically been plagued with malaria and other endemic diseases, which is why you’re now told mass infection here is ‘endemic’ too. Your government doesn’t defend you as an Australian, because we’re not citizens now, we’re all (global) employees. Every bit of agency and identity people have, including their relationship to their own land, has been increasingly replaced with a global job market.

Look at how often conservatives say ‘move to where the jobs are’, and how transport infrastructure is one of their greatest passions. The hyper-mobilisation of humanity, nobody should ‘work from home’, because their home now is increasingly their job. Their identity is as an employee. You’ll be treated like a citizen in a developing country now, because to the market economy, that is in fact what you are. What all of us are. This is the endgame of neoliberal and libertarian politics, where it was always going to arrive. —Twitter 2022-06-02

We need to move beyond government and beyond markets. The answers will not come from government or from the market. They will come from networked committed people. The challenge will be to ensure that these groups do not become tribal populist counter-movements, as we have enough of these already. Saving democracy is a worthy objective. ‘Draining the swamp’ and ‘freedumb rallies’ are not.

Let’s not give up on how the internet has connected citizens around the world. Instead of leaving social media platforms, have better conversations on them and look for new platforms to deeply consider how human civilization can advance. Consider blogging instead of posting long Twitter threads. First we can own our media, then own the conversation. A networked commons can emerge and deal with the critical challenges ignored by governments and markets.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” —Margaret Mead

Several years ago, the team at Innovisor asked — Why Do Organizations Led by Women Perform Better?

The new study puzzled Innovisor. Why do organizations led by women perform better?

Since we already established that the women on an individual level were not collaborating more than men, we decided to look somewhere else in our data.
Also because Innovisor had previously established that there was a correlation between organizational coherence and performance.

We decided to look into if organizations led by women were more coherent.

And they were! —Innovisor 2018-07-18

I have noticed similar other indicators, such as the observation that we collectively understand that what are considered ‘feminine’ traits are what leaders need today, as shown in this 2013 Inc. magazine study.

“32,000 study subjects were asked to classify 125 traits as masculine, feminine, or neutral. Another 32,000 were asked to rate the importance of the traits to effective leadership. ‘Feminine’ traits were more likely to be strongly linked to leadership.”

This study concluded that seven of the nine top leadership traits, perceived as feminine in our current age, are also seen as the most important.

Feminine: Plans for Future, Communicative, Reasonable, Loyal, Flexible, Intuitive, Patient.
Masculine: Decisive, Resilient

There have been similar observations with female leaders of countries.

“Consistent with our hunch, our most striking finding was about the times when women led very diverse countries rather than men. In these contexts, female leaders were significantly more likely than male leaders to have fast-growing economies.” —HBR 2019-02-07

And it seems that female managers are more effective at driving engagement.

“Another stunning finding is that employees of female managers on average are at least 6 percentage points more engaged than those who work for a male manager. In fact, out of the 12 different questions Gallup uses to diagnose a person’s engagement, employees of female managers outscore male managers on 11 of those items.

Only one out of three workers has a female boss today, yet women leaders eclipse their male counterparts in many of the ways known to inspire high levels of commitment, initiative, and loyalty in 21st-century workers. They more consistently cultivate the potential in their people by creating challenging assignments. They praise and value people for their efforts and contributions. They take steps to foster a positive and cooperative work environment.” —FastCompany 2015-04-29

As Innovisor noted, “organizations led by women were more coherent”.

For many years I have been interested in the role of communities of practice in knowledge sharing. I have been looking at how communities of practice can bridge our social networks with our work teams, helping us get the job done while being open to innovative ideas.

1. Sharing complex knowledge requires strong social ties, but only working with our peers may blind us to outside ideas.
2. Networks with diverse and weak ties are the best places to get new ideas, yet these are often unstructured and difficult to manage.
3. Communities of practice, which share strong & weak social ties and have some purpose & structure, can bridge the gap between getting the job done and innovating.
4. Therefore, encouraging and supporting communities of practice is essential for the knowledge-based enterprise.

Effective, or coherent, knowledge-sharing requires not just collaboration, but also cooperation and especially connections (communities). This is what makes a coherent organization.

The Coherent Organization — Internet Time Alliance

For over two years we have increasingly seen this term in social and mainstream media — Do Your Own Research (DYOR).

“The words imply a fundamental distrust in authority, and thus a shift to complete self-reliance. In the case of crypto, where there may be rewards but there are definitely massive risks, you should want to rely on your own judgment rather than someone else’s, who might be paid for their endorsement or simply be a fool.” —Ross Dawson 2021-05-31

Ross warns us that that not trusting experts could lead to massive trust issues in society and, “How this plays out will be a fundamental factor in shaping our future society”. I agree.

For the most part, the lack of trust has been brought on by the institutions and those within their hierarchies. Let’s just look at this pandemic and the medical guidance put forth by experts. This has been my sensemaking experience and my journey of doing my own research.

02 March 2020 — For my own understanding of the COVID-19 disease I start with centres of networked expertise — WHO, CDC, Public Health Agency of Canada. I trust these sources, and if you meet people who don’t, then avoid close contact with them.

05 September 2020 — I see information from the WHO and CDC as lagging indicators, and no longer my first stop to find out what is happening now. I am also starting to understand that public health experts and epidemiologists, while both medical professionals, can have widely diverging perspectives on this pandemic.

28 November 2020 — To understand our current situation we need to move to the edge or find others who are there already. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote — “I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over; on the edge you find things you can’t see from the center.” On the edges the answers may not be clear, but they are less obscured than in the centre. People on the edge mostly do not work for the likes of WHO, CDC, or PHAC.

15 March 2021 — This pandemic has shown the abject failure in communications from many of our institutions and authorities around the world. First they have to get out of their ‘ivory towers’ and meet people where they are. Leadership by walking around — physically or virtually —is necessary in our connected world. If our experts are not helping society make better decisions about health care, then what are they doing?

21 December 2021 — Only in the past month have public health authorities in Canada acknowledged that SARS-CoV-2 is primarily spread through the air, after more than a year of prevaricating by ‘Droplet Dogmatics’ in face of the evidence.

27 December 2021 — The past 20 months have witnessed a global crisis in leadership. We will not distribute vaccines to poor countries because we are letting the market lead our pandemic responses. Public health officials have held on to droplet dogmatism in spite overwhelming evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is airborne. Schools have been kept open while many children have not been able to get vaccinated. This pandemic has become a crisis in network leadership.

31 March 2022 — Twitter has kept me informed through this pandemic. I have been informed by subject matter networks of experts who share their knowledge with the public on Twitter. Learning in the complex domain requires different ways of organizing and conversing. Twitter will never be the journal of reference, but it may be the best first point of contact during a crisis.

06 April 2022 —As a society, we learned nothing from the influenza pandemic of 1918. For example, there are no monuments to the medical heroes of that pandemic anywhere in the world. It was as if society had suffered collective amnesia. Today’s situation may be partially due to society’s inability to talk about and learn from the influenza pandemic.

07 April 2022 — This pandemic has been managed in most cases from a perspective of making small adjustments and conserving resources. It has not worked. There was no global shut-down and half measures were the order of the day. Over two years later and locally we have the highest rates of infections and deaths since the pandemic was declared.

01 May 2022 — We are in an information war — one that pits logic and emotion against each other.

If I had listened to the institutional experts on how to deal with this pandemic I would have been misinformed and even disinformed. Instead I found a network of experts who shared their research expertise and made it accessible to the general public, mostly on Twitter. Did it take effort? Yes. Was it time-consuming? Yes. Did I have a choice? Not in my opinion. Avoiding the potential effects of long-covid have made it worthwhile so far.

I was not alone in my search for good data and better insights. My Twitter pandemic list still provides valuable and timely information. Others, such as NB Citizen Covid Updates (a medical librarian) have stepped up to collate and curate actionable insights for the average person. Perhaps ‘how this plays out’ will be more engaged citizens. I certainly hope so.

“I suggest that the leaders will be found among the aggressively intelligent citizenry, liberated from many tasks and obligations by technology freely shared; using data, information and knowledge acquired from open source databases, produced from the multiples of billions of dollars of public money invested through research councils, universities, social agencies, and public institutions.” —Peter Levesque 2004

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

B of E: The route back to 2% inflation − speech by Michael Saunders

“The share of the 16-64 population who are outside the workforce and do not want a job because of long-term sickness is a record high, with an especially sharp rise among women. I suspect much of this rise in inactivity due to long-term sickness reflects side effects of the pandemic, for example Long Covid and the rise in NHS waiting lists.”

“There’s a saying: ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’. There’s not one that says: ‘Adequate, properly scheduled time is the mother of invention’. I know. I looked.” —@SimonHeath1

“Don’t buy into ‘cognitive biases’
Academics invented the idea when observed human behavior didn’t match their mathematical models
Instead of thinking ‘maybe our models are wrong’, they assume humans are wrong
Their ever increasing list of ‘biases’ is evidence of this.”
—@alanklement

A story about something I’m still sore about by @trishgreenhalgh

Age 6, my homework was to learn a nursery rhyme.
I went home and applied myself half-heartedly.
My dad got involved. “I’ll teach you a good one”.
He taught me this:

Scintillate, scintillate, globular vivific
Fain would I fathom thy nature specific
Loftily placed in the ether capacious
Strongly resembling a gem carbonaceous

I loved it. Sneaky re-hash of well-known ditty.
Memorised it, skipped into school.
Couldn’t wait for my turn.
Go up and recited it perfectly.
Silence. No applause.

Teacher: you didn’t do the homework.
I explained – it’s a fancy version of Twinkle Twinkle.
“Patricia, you are a proper little madam. Why can’t you obey the rules? Now you’ve spoilt it for everyone in the class by trying to out-do them.”

HEY, teachers! Leave them kids alone.
Don’t punish the student who interprets the assignment creatively.
Don’t define the average as the benchmark.
Don’t tell girls it’s their fault they outperformed.
Don’t crush fun.

NYT: How Jack Welch’s Reign at G.E. Gave Us Elon Musk’s Twitter Feed

“Almost immediately after Mr. Welch retired in September 2001 with a $417 million severance package, G.E. went into a tailspin from which it would never recover.

His pupils, though, went on to run dozens of other major companies, including Home Depot, Albertson’s, Chrysler and Boeing. Most of them failed.”

“The opinion that art should not be political is itself a political opinion.” —George Orwell, via @dangerousmere

Theranos’ values:
– Integrity
– Excellence
– A team approach

Enron’s values:
– Respect
– Integrity
– Communication
– Excellence

It’s not enough to speak to values, you need to embody them.
Culture depends on values expressed in behavior.

Culture = Values + Behavior

—@drrwinters

Image: @uamemesforces

This morning I gave a presentation at the IOM Summit on digital work. My topic was — Digital Work is all about human connections. The key messages are ones that have been presented here.

• Knowledge flows at the speed of trust
• The importance of sparking curiosity
• How social learning powers distributed work
• How we are dependent on human connection
• Learning in the flow of work is connected, social, & human

I focused on the systemic barriers to getting work done and sharing knowledge between workers, more so than the individual skills necessary for work that requires — curiosity, sensemaking, cooperation, and novel thinking. These are skills that can be developed through the discipline of personal knowledge mastery.

I did not dwell on individual skills. If the organization is open to fostering more creative work and enabling cooperation across siloes, then individual skills will emerge through peer influence. People want to learn, especially if their work depends on it. This does not mean that people want to take more courses.

As W. Edwards Deming noted many years ago from his extensive observations and experience — 94% of work performance issues are a result of the system, not the capabilities of workers. This was the focus of my talk, even though I did not want to infer that developing individual skills does not take time and effort.

As Lilia Efimova noted in 2004, “To a great extent PKM [personal knowledge management] is about shifting responsibility for learning and knowledge sharing from a company to individuals and this is the greatest challenge for both sides.” This is true today. Taking responsibility for our own learning can be a challenge when we have been trained and educated to learn only what we are are told to. However, the power resides in the organization and its management. They have to move first.

A friend recently shared an article and the title immediately caught my eye — Personal knowledge management is bullshit. Of course I had to read it. The first line immediately stood out, “Personal Knowledge Management (“PKM”) is a trendy new term for techniques and applications designed to manage information.” I was first introduced to PKM in 2004 by Lilia Efimova and later by Denham Gray and Dave Pollard, all of whom had been writing about it for several years at that point. So I am not sure what the definition of “trendy new term” is in this case.

I shifted to the term personal knowledge mastery in 2014 in order clarify that PKM for me is removed from traditional Knowledge Management (KM) and that it is a discipline to be mastered through practice. My PKM is not connected to any given technology though I have used several over the years.

The observation that many PKM practices are connected to a signal technology platform seems to be Justin Murphy’s main complaint.

“There exists a minimal collection of software and web services which is certainly a boon for the vita contemplativa, but fancy and trademarked systems often do more harm than good. In fact, concern with software solutions and the disposition to manage arcane technical systems are both inversely correlated with the kind of spirit that tends to produce significant creative and intellectual work.”

I agree with Justin Murphy. In my workshops I present hundred of tools and platforms and encourage participants to try one or two new ones. I do not prescribe any tools, though I use Twitter to demonstrate how consumer social media platforms operate.

Justin makes a good point that collecting a huge amount of online resources does not help with sense-making.

“In intellectual history, the coin of the realm is the singular written work. The singular written work is a brute force attack, not a bureaucratic spider web. It is preciously rare—always has been and always will be. The ability to create singular written works is mostly impervious to education and technical supplementation; it is overwhelmingly what we used to call gifted or God-given and today call either genetic or inspired.”

In my Seek > Sense > Share framework, sensemaking is the most difficult to master. Much of my practice is posting half-baked ideas to this blog, which over time become books or presentations. Blogging is the core of my sensemaking so my more polished writing is not a “brute force attack”, but rather an exercise informed through disciplined writing. This is my 3,500^th blog post here.

Is PKM bullshit? Only when it is technology-centric, and not a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. The bullshit is believing in a technology silver bullet, but unfortunately BS sells. While organizations and individuals around the world use my PKM framework I am not getting rich on it. Some years have been a financial struggle. Hard work and discipline do not scale and that is what personal knowledge mastery is all about. This makes #PKMastery a hard sell.

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1962) The Wild Years

Sturgeon’s revelation states that “ninety percent of everything is crap”. The PKM field provides one more example.

Last year I wrote that this pandemic has become a crisis in network leadership because understanding what domain of complexity we are dealing with is now an essential requirement for decision-makers. At its outbreak the pandemic was chaotic and required immediate action. Developing vaccines went from complex to complicated. Dealing with people and how various groups reacted to the pandemic oscillated between ordered and unordered domains but has been mostly complex. Clear and simple communications can help to avoid confusion, though they have seldom been delivered.

I created a framework for learning in the complex domain, including examples of organizations that are designed to handle complexity and chaos. The image below takes the basic PKM model — with teams in blue, communities in red, and networks in green, along two axes — high & low structure, and low & high abstraction. These are split in half — one for the Complex domain, and the other for the ordered domains (Complicated & Clear). The Chaotic domain has unique conditions and requires a different approach.

There are — at least — two modes for each form required to work and learn.

Teams can be semi-permanent and collaborative in ordered domains but should be quicker-forming temporary negotiated hierarchies in the complex domain.

Formal communities can provide continuity in ordered domains but informal communities are needed to provide more flexibility in crossing expertise silos and disciplines.

Established knowledge hubs provide all the structured information that a discipline requires, like the Project Management Body of Knowledge, but open knowledge networks are better when facing the complexity of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic as they need to quickly incorporate new findings and knowledge.

These forms for complexity should be incorporated into how organizations are structured, how learning can be supported, and how professionals engage. Today, many of those in leadership positions remain confused, not understanding if they are dealing with complicated, complex, or chaotic problems. They think in clear — but wrong — images, not understanding their state of confusion.

Learning in the complex domain

This is a summary [not in the order/format originally presented] of a thread on Twitter by Yaneer Bar-Yam, Complex Systems Physicist.

We have a historic opportunity to change the direction of society from failure, causing illness, death and disability, on a spiral of devastation, to a new path that will lead to an exit from this catastrophic condition. Business needs guidelines that will enable safety for workers, customers, and the product supply chain, leading to improved economic function. Infection followed by infection, & disability accumulating from long covid organ damage after multiple infections, is untenable.

There are 5 pillars of prevention: Masking, Ventilation, Testing, Social distancing, and Vaccination. Each of these has multiple levels — from poor to outstanding.

• Masks: cloth > N95 > elastomeric > PAPR
• Ventilation: Ventilation > HEPA filters
• Testing: symptomatic > exposure > proactive > LAMP [Loop-mediated Isothermal Amplification]
• Distancing: limiting gatherings > lockdowns
• Vaccination: “over reliance on vaccination alone undermined its utility because of new variants that would not have arisen if we effectively used other measures to reduce transmission”

It is important to remember that scientists in general are passive observers. Biologists see biological phenomena not socio-technical advances or collective action, and surely not the opportunities of global enterprise engaging in coordinated action.
To know what can be done, use a startup mentality and galvanize multidisciplinary teams to meet the challenge. In this light passivity makes no sense.
—@yaneerbaryam

This is the key — in complexity and chaos, “passivity makes no sense”. Just today, one million deaths from Covid-19 in the USA were announced, while in most of North America, including Canada, there are no active measures to decrease infection rates. The passivity in my province is so pervasive that our Chief Medical Officer of Health has not appeared in public since 24 February. Meanwhile, “38% of all of Canada’s reported COVID hospitalizations to date have been in the last 4 months” —@MoriarityLab.

When we find ourselves in the chaotic domain, the optimal behaviour is to — Act > Sense > Respond. In the complex domain the optimal behaviour is to Probe > Sense > Respond. The leaders of our institutions are proficient at neither. Ethical action in the face of a clear and present danger cannot be incremental. We have met the enemy, and he is us. More particularly, the enemy is the design of every organization that we have created, from government, to public health, to workplace safety. They have all shown themselves to be inadequate for the task of dealing with this pandemic.

As Gillian Tett describes in The Silo Effect, “The paradox of the modern age, I realized, is that we live in a world that is closely integrated in some ways, but fragmented in others. Shocks are increasingly contagious. But we continue to behave and think in tiny silos.” We have to create organizations and institutions where knowledge flows at the speed of trust and passivity is unacceptable. As on a ship, the most important person is not the Captain or the Navigator, but the architect who designed the ship. We have the capability to redesign the ships that can get us through this pandemic and our next crisis. It’s the system, stupid.

“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” —André Gide (1869–1951)

Not only is there a lot of junk online — Sturgeon’s Law states that 90% of everything is crap — but there are active measures against our democracies to promote propaganda and disinformation. It’s not just the Russian troll factories either, but organizations like those funded by the Koch brothers in the USA.

• Hillsdale [College] is a conservative Christian institution with ties to the Trump administration. And the scholars behind the academy — Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff — are connected to right-wing dark money attacking public health measures.

• in March 2021, the dark money fund DonorsTrust spent nearly $800,000 to spread the narrative that the pandemic’s toll was actually due to government interventions

• In June, Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank at George Mason University heavily funded by the Koch network, began funding a database run by Emily Oster, an economist who has argued that the drawbacks of school closures outweigh the risks of COVID-19 exposure.

• the Foundation for Economic Education, another Koch-funded nonprofit, claimed that “naive government interventions” were responsible for a rise in global malaria cases and a spike in worldwide poverty.

• Such anti-public health intervention narratives have had a lasting impact.

How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On COVID

“Remember kids: You can’t fight disinformation if you don’t know what bullshit is being spread.” —Justin Ling

Agnotology is “the strategic and purposeful production of ignorance”. This type of coordinated disinformation is part of the array of post-truth machines that face us today. We can try to ‘pre-bunk‘ this disinformation but it’s like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. George Lakoff states that whoever frames the narrative first has an advantage and that negating a frame only activates and strengthens it.

One way of ‘framing first’ is modelling better, truthful, democratic, self-doubting behaviours. Robert Graves’ In Broken Images (1895) shows the power of doubting.

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

An example of modeling change was shared by Isabel Jordan showing that the hard decisions are often the right ones. Isabel refused to go along with the flawed assumptions that the pandemic is over and it is now safe to remove public health measures. Isabel, who identifies as a vulnerable person, resigned as a health conference organizer. It’s hard to go against the crowd, especially one composed of so many ‘experts’.

The decision was made some time ago to shift into an in-person conference with no hybrid version. At the time, there were still mask requirements in our province. When these requirements were dropped, I brought up at meetings and through emails the importance of keeping mask requirements at a health care conference — especially one that welcomed and purported to create an inclusive, barrier-free environment for patient partners attending. When it became clear last week that this accommodation could not be made, I had to make the decision that I could not attend in order to keep both myself and my family safe and made the further decision to resign from the steering committee.

We are in an information war — one that pits logic and emotion against each other. Two powerful weapons used against us by the social media algorithms are ‘Likes’ and ‘Shares’. To counter these influences, we each have a more powerful weapon — our own commentary. This is the power of blogs. With all the hype over social media and $45B buy-outs, we have forgotten how much influence a single blog, in a network of peers, can have.

I keep thinking I should write another book.

I keep thinking I should write poetry.

In the meantime, without any should, I blog.

I am a blogger.

That should be enough.

—Euan Semple (2022)

Writing a blog can be an important sense-making tool and is core to my personal knowledge mastery discipline. PKM and blogging are ways to model the behaviours of an engaged citizen of the world and counter the platform monopolists and forces of agnotology.

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” —The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge … I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.” —Ivan Illich

Why do we call them [public health] “restrictions”, anyway? Do you look at a life-jacket and think “there’s my drowning restriction”? —@HalifaxEditor

“I attended a conference recently; real people in a real room. My observation: we were all happy to be being together after 2+ yrs. But the conferencey part could have been online & frankly it would have been better to build fires, dance, eat, cook, sing, not stand at the podium.” —@NoraBateson

Productivity hack:
Whenever I need to learn about a new, complicated theoretical topic I just search for “critique of ”
Then I find 2-3 PhD dissertations on the topic, and read their introductions.
Those PhD introductions are usually very good, and succinct.
—@movito

The strengths of the academic enterprise

In passing I would like to mention that in a rather different sense such openness is a precondition for academic survival. Just for being different and doing things the uneducated cannot understand, the academics are hated and feared, vide Socrates, executed in 399 BC, Archimedes, killed in 212 BC, and, more recently, Hypatia, AD 415 barbarously murdered by a Christian mob. The original Oxford Colleges were buildings fortified in order to protect the students against the rabble, and if you think that that is old hat, I refer you to the DDR or the People’s Republic of China of only 25 years ago. It is a miracle whenever, these days, the academic world is tolerated at all; personally I am convinced that what tolerance there is would completely disappear, were the academic world to become secretive.

“Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Saturn in alignment.
(Taken in South Africa at 4:00 AM)
This hasn’t happened for 1000 years.”
—@StrictlyChristo

Photo: @StrictlyChristo

In Dare to Un-lead: The art of relational leadership in a fragmented world Céline Schillinger shares her personal experiences in several work environments and connects this to a framework of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. For example, Céline discusses her time as the Head of Quality Innovation & Engagement at Sanofi Pasteur and the creation of the Break Dengue global community to fight dengue fever. The book refers to a wide variety of management theorists and organizational development professionals who advocate for more freedom in the workplace.

A movement toward more liberty, equality, and fraternity at work starts, as we have seen, with an individual distancing themselves from a dominant model — one inherited from the past, which has become restrictive and counterproductive — with others eventually electing to do the same. At the beginning, there is personal risk-taking and a sense of both refusal and encouragement, even if this sense only takes the form of a voice in the change-agent’s head telling them “no”, partly in disgust at what is, partly in disbelief at what might be, partly in recognition of the rules and norms that constrain them. In The Rebel, an examination of the development of revolutionary thought, Albert Camus wrote, “I rebel, therefore we exist.” That phrase could sum up the essence of this book.

The book first asks, “Can there be liberty, equality, and fraternity at work?” It then goes into each of these aspects and shows how these can be created in the workplace. It looks at leadership, especially from the perspective of bad leadership in order to learn from examples, such as — the pandemic, bad business, bad science, bad actors, and bad bosses. Obsolete models — e.g. great man theory — of leadership in our institutions have driven populism and disengagement.

When leaders are treated as heroes, as better than the rest of us, there is a sheeplike tendency to meekly follow their lead. In the worst cases, cults can form around them, in which they can do no wrong. Either way, there is a danger that we diminish our own capabilities and judgment and that we abdicate our responsibilities in deference to the mythical leader.

The book is filled with examples, both good and bad. It also provides concrete actions. For instance, a collectively created ‘compass’ can replace command & control structures as everyone is aligned but can choose how they move forward. This compass has be a purpose that is “authentic, shared, and free of manipulation”. Equality can be promoted through peer leadership while it is fraternity, or the sense of community, that prevents fragmentation. Céline calls community the ‘present of work” as opposed to the often used consulting term, ‘the future of work’.

If you are dissatisfied with current workplace and business practices that over-control people, then this book can provide some guidance. It starts with leadership.

When leadership demonstrates its capacity to change, when it builds bridges and encourages change by anyone from anywhere, when it nurtures the solidarity of the human community at work, then it is truly transformative, living up to its revolutionary potential.

Image by @gapingvoid

Stories are powerful ways of sharing knowledge

In 2006 while the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry was fighting in Afghanistan, Professor Anne Irwin observed how soldiers decompressed and learned through storytelling.

When they are out in the field and return from a patrol, the exhausted soldiers relax together in small, tightly-knit groups – Irwin calls them “nesting circles” – and recount the events of the day or the mission.

Each soldier contributes a story, an anecdote or even a joke, adding stock and spice into what becomes a collective stew of experiences, she said. They also playfully insult each other.

The storytelling not only helps forge the individual identity of each soldier, it builds interpersonal relationships that can have a bearing on how well the unit performs on the battlefield.

“Joking is a big part of it, and teasing,” she said. “It is not abuse. If you have been teased harshly it lets you know that you are part of the group.”

—John Cotter, Canadian Press, July 03, 2006

Even though these soldiers had all been formally trained and had worked and fought together, there was still a need to make sense of their continuing experiences. Informal and social learning can be the glue that helps keep them together during tough times.

In The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall tells us how stories make us human. While our memories get worse over time, our stories, as we remember them, become much clearer. “Memory isn’t an outright fiction; it is merely a fictionalization”, says Gottschall. This reinforces the need to capture stories as close to the event as possible, as the soldiers of the PPCLI did. Stories can then be powerful modes of sharing knowledge.

We know a lot about how to tell effective stories

Roger Schank has covered story telling and knowledge management in great detail. Here are some highlights from a 2010 DARPA presentation.

• Comprehension means “mapping your stories onto my stories”. It’s difficult to communicate with someone who has different stories.
• Stories: should be full of details but short
• Lecture: people cannot think about what they are thinking and listen to the speaker at the same time
• Stories, to be effective, must not be too abstract for the person listening. Listeners must be able to absorb the stories.
• In good stories, we do not give answers.time and place for telling stories are also important.

In Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory  Charlotte Linde discusses the importance of ‘occasions’ in sharing institutional memory. “Without the occasion, the story rarely or never gets told”. Linde concludes that, “A story not having a proper occasion on which it can or must be told exists in an archive if it exists at all. An institution not having a range of occasions for telling stories is not likely to be working its past very hard.”

Stories are powerful because we are hard-wired to believe them

“When we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to leave us defenseless.” —Jonathan Gottschall

Stories can promote both positive or negative behaviours

“While Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United States’ dehumanization of African Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans’ guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it ‘moral’ for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she ‘liberated’ millions of other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children.” —How Ayn Rand Helped Make the US Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation

Given the power of stories, a critical literacy skill today is the ability to deconstruct them. Thinking critically about how a story affects us emotionally is important before hitting the Tweet or Post buttons that are now so handy on our ‘smart’ devices. We have to constantly confront the post-truth machines. The medium is the message, and the medium of story is able to route around our rational brain and go straight to our most primitive feelings. We need to become story skeptics so all those emerging master storytellers on social media platforms do not lead us astray.

Today we need sensemakers even more than storytellers because stories can hijack our minds. We are more open to receiving stories than we are to understanding facts and logical arguments. First we have to make sense, and only then can we find unifying stories to help guide us. Stories that fuel the constant doubt and outrage online only serve to distract us. Whose story wins will depend on how smart we are. Let’s make sense BEFORE we make up stories to tell others.

In my last post on entangled thinking I referred to how the advent of Print almost 600 years ago changed the face of Europe. In 2006, as I was going through the editing and re-writing process for an academic article, I noted how limiting the print medium is, especially when transferring what was originally a series of blog posts to create the basis of the article. Adding hyperlinks was more natural to me than using the APA format, which I had used for many years, but I now viewed as a relic of a bygone era. What originally changed and flowed on my blog became a piece of static content. As a blog post, my article had built on previous posts and was open to comments and additions. With the print article, it seemed as if my learning process had been frozen in time.

We now have the printed word at electric speed which Marshall McLuhan predicted that —“At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.” On social media, especially Twitter and other short forms of posting, the written word gets pushed to its limit and reverses to a new form of orality.

I have found that the the best way to communicate with a distributed team is in writing, especially when you factor in multiple time zones. I think that good writing skills will become critical in a distributed workplace. In 2020 Prodoscore looked at 90,000 data points from 7,000 workers. One interesting finding was that high performers regularly used voice & video less often than low performers. The tool of choice for high performers was messaging & chat.

Having worked at a distance from colleagues and clients for 19 years, this makes intuitive sense to me. However, I came across some disconfirming evidence today, as this national teachers association states that it is time to — “decenter book reading and essay writing”.

“Members of our discipline have long recognized how print literacies work in tandem with multiple modes of expression (Multimodal Literacies Issue Management Team, 2005). Students should examine how digital media and popular culture are completely intermingled with language, literature, and writing. The time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education. Speaking and listening are increasingly valued as forms of expression that are vital to personal and professional success, and with the rise of digital media technologies, they now occur in both synchronous and asynchronous formats. The ability to represent one’s ideas using images and multimedia is now a valued competency in a wide variety of professional careers in the knowledge economy.” —US National Council of English Teachers 2022

Does this mean that writing skills are not as central to our work as other skills such as using images or creating video? Or does it mean that academic writing, which I complained about in 2006, has less value in a digitally connected workplace? Perhaps writing is not dead but rather it has just accelerated to electric speed.

About 500 years ago a new communications technology came along and changed the face of Europe — print. The Protestant Reformation saw the rise of religious wars, which were later followed by the scientific revolution and The Enlightenment. An age of exploration followed, which brought not just gold and silver to the coffers of Europe, but new foods such as potatoes from the Americas, to fuel the Industrial Revolution. These new foods increased the population and in turn brought about the demise of the indigenous people of the Americas.

Did print help to enable democracy, and is that why the founders of the USA put freedom of the press into their Constitution? If print enabled democracy, will the emerging digital (electric) medium destroy it? Yuval Noah Harari thinks this may be the case, “The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century — the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place — may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.” 

However, a connected world is much more than digital networks and includes global transportation technologies that also enable the rapid spread of disease vectors as we have recently seen. During a pandemic too much control leads to filtered information, making it more difficult to quickly react to complex problems at the local level. Authoritarian regimes then are less able to address complex challenges — as we are witnessing with China’s Covid shutdowns at the moment.

Authoritarian regimes can lose the trust of the people when faced with complex decision-making. When trust is lost, knowledge fails to flow, hampering the regime’s ability to react even more. In the long run, will these regimes be forced to become more open because a complex world demands it?

The end of the Print age and the beginning of the Digital age marks the end of The Enlightenment and all the institutions and scientific disciplines it fostered. We are entering The Entanglement.

“As we are becoming more entangled with our technologies, we are also becoming more entangled with each other. The power (physical, political, and social) has shifted from comprehensible hierarchies to less-intelligible networks. We can no longer understand how the world works by breaking it down into loosely-connected parts that reflect the hierarchy of physical space or deliberate design. Instead, we must watch the flows of information, ideas, energy, and matter that connect us, and the networks of communication, trust, and distribution that enable these flows.” —The Long Now Foundation 2019-12-26

The idea of The Entanglement is that the world has become so complex and interconnected that the individual disciplines developed during The Enlightenment — like medicine — are no longer adequate to help society in our collective sensemaking, especially during global crises.

“Unlike the Enlightenment, where progress was analytic and came from taking things apart, progress in the Age of Entanglement is synthetic and comes from putting things together. Instead of classifying organisms, we construct them. Instead of discovering new worlds, we create them. And our process of creation is very different.” —Long Live the Entanglement

Networked individuals, outside established hierarchies of institutions and corporations, are the power behind digital media, I noted in my last post — we are on our own. How we move forward is up to us and we need to create new ways of thinking about how to organize and make sense of our world. My small piece in moving forward has been to develop the discipline of personal knowledge mastery so that we can Seek > Sense > Share together.

This post is a summary of ideas from several posts from 2019-2021, and continues my entangled thinking.

https://jarche.com/2019/12/from-enlightenment-to-entanglement/

https://jarche.com/2020/02/the-end-of-control/

https://jarche.com/2020/04/entangled-thinking/

https://jarche.com/2020/04/beyond-civil-society-governments-and-markets/

https://jarche.com/2020/10/complexity-rules/

https://jarche.com/2021/05/connections-trump-expertise/

https://jarche.com/2021/10/entangled-expertise/

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia highlights how much we are alone in this world. We have not advanced from the 19th century ideal of the nation state. Organizations that focus on our global common humanity, like the United Nations, have been useless in stopping the carnage in Ukraine. The fact that Russia, or any other country, has a permanent seat on the Security Council underlines the UN’s inherent weakness to deal with belligerent states. The weakness of the global order shows how difficult it will be to deal with the impact of climate change.

Most countries today have lifted public health measures to counter the SARS-CoV-2 airborne viral pandemic. Those people who are at-risk or immunocompromised see first-hand how our institutions and markets will help people deal with the impacts of climate change — they won’t. It has become obvious that we are on our own.

But we are seeing signs of self-organization as individuals contribute to the defence of Ukraine and citizens put pressure on their governments to help. We also see individuals freely sharing data, information, and knowledge on social media in order to better inform people how to deal with each new variant of the virus. People are building their own Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, using CO2 monitors and sharing their readings from public places, and collecting and sharing data no longer disseminated by public health authorities.

Networked individuals, outside established hierarchies of institutions and corporations, are the power behind all social media. Understanding the effects of pervasive networks like social media is now an essential literacy. Each citizen has to be informed through active engagement in a digitally-mediated society. We have to consciously develop expert networks that we do trust. This requires effort, such as the discipline of personal knowledge mastery. In the long run our networks can make our sense-making much easier. Without personal knowledge networks, we are at the whim of whatever current outrage is flowing through the social media platforms, or whatever disinformation is being pushed by vested interests.

We live in a world where one person, not necessarily in a position of power, can influence the course of history [e.g. Malala Yousafzai, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Emma Gonzalez, Greta Thunberg …].

“Never in the history of humanity has a single human being had so much power. Never in the history of humanity have YOU had so much power!

Optimistic or pessimistic, it is like being a spectator of a film of which we seem to know the ending, whether happy or unhappy. Today one must cease to be a passive spectator but an actor in this fast-changing world.”
—Bruno Marion (2014) Chaos: A User’s Guide

We can no longer afford to be passive spectators in a digitally connected world. We have to use “ridiculously easy group-forming” to our collective advantage. Also, we have to make efforts to avoid tribalization and the comforts of our echo chambers. For example, the centre-left and centre-right of the political spectrum often highlight their minor differences and turn them into great schisms.

“It would help if folks in the middle didn’t vilify those of us towards, but not in, the 15% [on the extremes]. Everyone knows those folks are irrelevant, but when we get lumped in with them by the centre 50%, it dilutes policy creativity and the possibility of better solutions.” —Chris Corrigan — Hold the Centre 

Continued from focus on the system.

“Over the long haul, even strong people can’t compensate for a weak process. Sure, some occasional success may come from team or individual heroics. But if you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.” —Rummler & Brache

The nine-box model is an effective model for unearthing systemic issues that influence how work gets done. It looks at Goals, Design, and Management from three levels — the Organization, the Processes, and the Work Teams. This is a tool I have used for several consulting engagements during my career as a workplace performance improvement specialist.

For example, if goals and priorities are not clearly connected & communicated, unclear processes can result, leading to ad hoc methods and an increased need for coordination, wasting time. Professionals may be getting the work done, 
but at what longer-term costs?

More detailed questions can be asked for each box as shown in the example below.

• Are goals clear?
• What are the spans of control?
• Is work open and transparent to all?
• Are priorities clearly communicated?
• Are feedback loops clear and used?
• How are decisions made and tracked?
• Is there a mix of asynchronous and synchronous communications?
• Does the hierarchy increase or decrease the flow of knowledge?
• Are rewards and consequences aligned with organizational goals?
• Are there systemic barriers that block or slow capable workers?
• Are workers managed based on a framework that supports autonomy, competence, and relatedness?

Just mapping these nine boxes can provide a much clearer image of how the organization works, or perhaps does not. From here, we can start to address systemic issues and not focus on individual performance. Our organizations are human-made tools for getting things done. In A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan (1967), John Culkin wrote that, “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” As on a ship, the most important person is not the Captain or the Navigator, but the architect who designed the ship. We have the capability to redesign the ships on which we work.