Month: March 2023

Complexity

Complexity is the result from something with many parts that interact in multiple ways, following local rules that lead to nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, and emergence. Emergence represents the concept of being more than its parts, its unpredictable properties or behaviours created by the many interactions.

Human societies is one example of a complex entity or system. Both the Chinese Covid-19 protests and the 2022 Iranian turmoils are examples of how emergence can materialise from a state that at outset looks calm or stable.

Other examples of complex systems are traffic and traffic control, Earth’s climate and biological eco-systems, warfare, and firefighting. Of these traffic and traffic control are man made where safe and secure behaviour is maintained through simple rules. Earth’s climate is a different beast with its unknown and even unknowable relationships.

Digitalisation

What is less understood is that digitalisation is a complex undertaking. Digitalisation boils down to retrofitting human enterprises with new digital tools, tools made from computer software, tools enabling change of business and operating models.

There are several factors that contribute to the inherent complexity.

• Firstly, digitalisation impacts the interactions in human organisations that are complex systems before the technology arrived on the scene.
• Secondly, computer software captures and materialise human ideas and thoughts with the caveat that its impossible to predict the effect of an idea before its tested. The effect being that digital tools are shaped by their creation process and context.
• Finally, the fallacy that buying a off the shelf solution makes the organisational implementation or retrofitting easy.

All digitalisation initiatives begin with a promise that the new technology / solution and new ways of working will be for the better. In most cases the opposite is true, most often large scale digitalisation efforts goes wrong or at least run into severe problems.

“Helseplattformen“, a Norwegian health care digitalisation effort that has ended up in the news lately due to problems. The scope is a new integrated patient record system across multiple hospitals, specialists and GP’s in one of Norway’a health regions. According to the news from January 2023 3.8 billion NOK’s have been spent and its expected that additional 900 million NOK is needed (who belive in that?). One thing is the costs, more important is the impact on the daily health service production for 720.000 inhabitants.

This is just one example out of many. I have personally witnessed several dosens failed digital or IT related initiatives during my career, leaving us with why. Why do these undertakings run into trouble and why are we not able to learn?

The simple answer is that digitalisation is a complex undertaking as enterprises are complex adaptive systems with non-linear and unpredictable cause-effect relationships. To explore what that mean in practice is it time to turn to Dave Snowden and his Cynefin sense making framework.

Cynefin

Cynefin, pronounced kuh-nev-in, is a Welsh word that signifies the multiple, intertwined factors in our environment and our experience that influence us (how we think, interpret and act) in ways we can never fully understand.

Cynefin divides the world in two, the ordered world to the right and the disordered world to the left each world divided into two domains separated by a liminal zone. In the clear domain there is a direct response from what is sensed and an appropriate response and the domain is governed by best practice. When best practice fails, we fall off the cliff into chaos. In the complicated domain the relationship between what is sensed and the appropriate response require analysis and expert judgment. There can be more than one solution to a problem and it requires good practice.

In the disordered world we find the complex domain and chaos. In the complex domain there is no linear relationship between what can be sensed and the appropriate response. The only way to deal with the complex domain is to probe, then sense and finally figure out what to do. This is the domain of experimentation and its a domain that require exaptive (repurposing / innovative) practice. We discover that something we have can be used to solve something we never had thought about.

At the bottom we find the chaotic domain where the only way forward is to act, then sense and respond. When in chaos practice is made as we go.

The liminal zone is split in two; A – aporetic and C – confused. Being confused in context of Cynefin implies not knowing what domain we are in and therefore we end up using the wrong approach to the problem at hand. Addressing a clear problem as it was a complex problem by running experiments is not effective. The opposite is worse, addressing a problem in the complex domain as it was clear or complicate leads easily into chaos.

Being in the aporetic zone we know we deal with unknowns and even unknowables and choose to use that insight to our advantage by running parallel experiments. This is what agile software methods like Scrum do and it goes even further. Hackathons are structured visits to chaos where we do stuff and figures out what we learnt when finished.

By accepting that digitalisation is a complex undertaking that requires enabling constraints, exaptive (repurposing) practice and a probe-sense-respond approach is the key to success. We must stop approaching digitalisation as it is in the ordered world using linear processes and thinking.

Enterprise practice

Enterprises, they be in private and public sector trives in the ordered world. The beliefs in “ordung must sein” can be overwhelming. There are routines and processes for everything. That said, there are thousands of things that need to be done within an enterprise that fall into the clear and complicated domains.

Problems pile up when topics belonging to complex domain is approached and managed as it is complicated or clear. Digitalisation and software development are two such things. Some enterprises uses task forces when something serious have gone wrong. This is a wise thing to do when you have felt over the cliff into chaos and need to find a way back to order, but its reactive in nature and it will never prevent them from falling over the cliff next time.

The catch is that when a complex problem fails, the path toward chaos is linear. What and why it went wrong can be explained, but it can’t be prevented without deep change to the culture and governance model.

Enterprises must train their leaders and employees to work experimentally with digitalisation and improvement. Admiral Nimitz understood this 80 years ago, it should be within reach for todays enterprise leaders as well.

Enjoy the story and embrace complexity. Its a wonderful world of opportunities.

Nimitz

When the US Navy entered WWII in 1941 it was equipped with two new technologies, radar, and VHF radio. Technologies that were expected to enable better understanding of the battlefield and clarity in the decision making. It was the opposite that happened. The new technology contributed to confusion and disaster.  

Admiral Nimitz and his staff understood that something had to be done and decided that each ship should have a new function, a Combat Information Center (CIC). Since once size does not fits all, he decided that each ship should experiment with how to implement the function allowing them to nurture what worked. For more details read the book [link]. 

The output from the CIC was a plot representing the ships understanding of the battlefield, own and enemy resources from interpretation of radar and radio traffic.  There are many things that can be learned from this 80-year-old story. Firstly, that what Nimitz and his staff did was to use exaptive practice, they repurposed plotting that the Navy had used for decades. Secondly, he probed by running parallel experiment governed by enabling constraints e.g., that every ship should have a CIC, while its design was adapted to ship type. 

During 1943 as the experimentation continued the CIC evolved from being an information system to becoming a system of distributed cognition. This evolution came from practical combat experience leading to the CIC being tasked to use weapons in given situations. All in all, the CIC both clarified and simplified the work of ship command. 

Ultimately the CIC became a system of distributed cognition fully integrated with the ships command functions. The work of making sense of available information was shared across different roles that distributed the cognitive load, and allowed for rapid assessment, analysis, synthesis of incoming information using visual plots as a symbolic information system.   

Conclusion

The US Navy’s CIC is an example of how to address a complex challenge using Cynefin’s recommended approaches. Nimitz use of safe-to-fail experiments, exaptive practice and enabling constraints unlocking his subordinate’s creativity enabled new unanticipated solutions to mange shipboard information. Nimitz deliberately avoided imposing solutions and instead created the conditions for a solution to emerge. He provided direction and used regular feedback loops to amplify useful approaches and dampen the less useful ones. 

For those in doubt, this is the practice that digitalisation initiatives require.