Sat in on Scott’s class in Connections and Intersections this morning. I miss being in class! I love this kind of education where I don’t worry which part of this module I need to retain for examinations. We’re all just here, present, with open minds (hopefully).
Some notes:
Adam Kahane on Power and Love: Power is defined as Drive towards Self-Realization. Love is defined as Drive towards Unity. Do you focus on Being, or Belonging? [this made me think about a possible middle ground. What if Trust, for example, is a combination between Power and Love?]
With stronger networks, you get more flexibility, but also more risks (viruses). When something goes wrong within the network, it’s not clear who’s responsible. You can’t point to one person who’s responsible for the entire network failing, although you can assign blame [isn’t that interesting, that difference between blame and responsibility?]. Nutshell: Networks dilute individual accountability.
Cynefin Framework: Welsh for “habitat”. A quick in-class search gave my favorite buzzword: a framework for “sense-making”. Hello, old world of knowledge management and multi-loop learning!
The Cynefin Framework looks like this:
By Snowden, CC BY 3.0
Someone asked how one might quantify their position within the quadrants. Scott’s response: there currently isn’t a way to indicate your location. I always assume the point of frameworks is to put yourself in a frame, so there has to be some sort of metric. Why don’t we irresponsibly speculate, then?
To be fair, the very point of Cynefin Framework is to illustrate the complexity of decision-making (that Welsh word is often interpreted as “a place of multiple belongings”). What they are trying to avoid is for anyone to spend too much time in one quadrant to recognize other situations that may posit decision-making approaches from the other quadrants. This article probably explains it best.
So my best guess is this: Cynefin gives indication of your organization’s capacity for learning. Are there processes in place to harness collective intelligence? How do people “make sense” (internalize) information together? In Chaos and Disorder areas, nobody ever learns anything. In Simple, only the top Leaders learn, and the rest follow the prescribed procedures, i.e. routine tasks. And in Complex / Complicated, the whole network becomes smarter together, no? So they trust each other more, because if the entire organization knows their problems are too complex to predict, people need to rely on each others’ sense, or instinct. Which reminds me of my favorite question from Scott: If you trust someone, does it mean you know they will do the right thing, or does it mean you can confidently predict their actions?
Impending Question about Network:
It seems to me like all Networks / Connections, are self-perpetuating. That’s why we consider network strength, right. But what does it take to break a network? I’m gonna assume it’s one of two possibilities:
A Node (or some nodes) decides to focus more on Being than Belonging
Even if Nodes are assumed to perpetually choose Belonging over Being, they could decide to leave in order to join another network. Would this mean networks just replace each other?
Let’s also assume that either scenario is caused by a trigger. Perhaps an incident / conflict, or a change in dynamics, causing lack of interaction between certain nodes, creating weaker ties. Not that Weak Ties is a bad thing, sure, but when do they weaken sufficiently to become absent?
Anyway. I just think it’s important for leaders to sense when a node is being separated, or networks approach their breaking point.
Because any form of social change is simply a rearrangement of social networks, right. And most of us come in (an organization / team / place) to an already existing network, so then how do you ice out the bad seeds? Do you start building a new network, or do you just make sure some nodes get taken out?
Tika Anindya 