Complexity

Complexity

a new understanding of my confusion

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In my last post on adapting to chaos I asked — what changes in our sensemaking practices should we incorporate to adapt to a world that is often more chaotic than complex? I received 12 comments here and another ten comments on LinkedIn. Confusion was one theme commented upon and Chris Corrigan referenced an excellent post on that topic — escaping confusion.

In the domain of Confusion the first and most important action, I believe, is an awareness that you are there. Without awareness you are lost. Any action that you undertake from that place is likely to be based on conditioning without any sensitivity to your context and that can be incredibly dangerous. In fact if you look at Dave’s central domain map you will see that Confusion is adjacent to the Clear, Complicated, and Chaotic domains. The division of the central domain into Confusion and Aporia implies that you cannot get to Complex from Confusion without taking what Dave [Snowden] calls the Aporetic Turn.

Nollind Wachell, with whom I had many discussion on Google+ several years ago, commented that,  “In effect, often true growth and development doesn’t occur without some form of pain and suffering because it’s needed to wake a person up, slow them down, and help them perceive and see things that they were blind to before. Something that I think needs to happen (ie an awakening) in not just America but in many places around the world, Canada included.” Perhaps we need the shock of confusion in order to move toward Aporia and then wake up. Nollind also suggested a 2007 MPRA paper, Triple-Loop Learning as Foundation for Profound Change, Individual Cultivation, and Radical Innovation.

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adapting to chaos

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I’m finding it difficult to write here these days. And I have written a fair bit as this is post #3,685. Given the turmoil with our American neighbours it’s hard to focus on much else. Just in my professional networks on both sides of the border I personally know people who have lost their jobs, their clients, and any ability to plan for the near future — all in the past month.

I should be writing a book. I even have a publisher. But I won’t. At least not at this time. Most of my thinking time is focused on the aggressive behaviour of our once-ally, the United States, and the continuous threats to our sovereignty. The fact that Trump was re-elected still shocks me. It shows how flawed the US electoral system is, and I know that we have enough of our own flaws here in Canada. I spent most of my initial career as an Infantry officer, training to fight the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. It seems that my later years in life may be fighting, at least economically, the Russian regime and the American administration that supports it.

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defeated by the pandemic

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Following up from yesterday’s post — fix the networks — this presentation at XOXO Festival 2024, by Ed Yong tells the story about how the pandemic defeated him. Yong wrote many articles focused on making sense of the pandemic for The Atlantic from 2020. In 2021 Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. His first premise is that succeeding or failing to deal with a pandemic is a choice.

For me, just the fact that Yong wears a N95 respirator mask while presenting, makes this worth watching. It’s real leadership by example. With no previous journalistic experience, Yong set some rules for himself, especially after winning the Pulitzer. These are good rules for any writer.

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fields of knowledge

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Stay in your lane. Stick to your knitting. These are perhaps the worst cliché words of advice anyone can give in our interconnected, networked world.

For much of history, particularly since The Enlightenment, our societies have been quite adept at creating classifications and creating fields of work and study.

At the end of the day, fields represent a specific kind of research machinery: a collection of rallying cries, norms, funders, and bureaucratic arrangements that are designed to output new insights about the world at large. Fields rise and fall on the strength of their ability to deliver knowledge and useful ideas. Researchers – particularly the good ones – coalesce around productive fields because they are also the most effective engines for pursuing the questions they want to pursue. At the end of the day, that is what matters. —Field Essentialism

Fields are often created to be useful but they can also be used for power and control. I remember visiting the Apartheid Museum in South Africa and one of the rooms showed all the laws around race that had been in place during the apartheid regime. These started as a few laws but more kept being added as there was no way to make a complex field merely complicated.

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a rude awakening

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“It might be down to the time of year; it’s always quieter in the summer months but it feels a bit different right now.

Firstly, it feels like there has been a BIG pause because of ChatGPT and other LLMs. It feels like people are still getting their heads round what they can do, their effectiveness, quality, etc. And when they do look at it, they don’t ‘get’ how they’ll use it.” —Andrew Jacobs 2024-08-09

I have witnessed this same malaise in the business world for the past year. If it’s not an AI initiative, it does not get any attention. The bad and the ugly aspects of this new flavour of machine learning are dominating the IT sector and all it touches. Here are some recent examples shared in our community of practice.

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automation, algorithms, and us

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In March 2023 I wrote — understanding the hype and hope — of AI and I highlighted several insights from various experts.

The Good

  • “With an LLM even a problem with only one user, will be doable, enter your ask, and code gets written, problem gets solved. Runtime ends, app dies. Done. Single use apps are born.” —Linus Ekenstam
  • US Copyright Office —  “ … it is well-established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity.”
  • «And in ChatGPT + Wolfram we’re now able to leverage the whole stack: from the pure “statistical neural net” of ChatGPT, through the “computationally anchored” natural language understanding of Wolfram|Alpha, to the whole computational language and computational knowledge of Wolfram Language.» —Stephen Wolfram
  • “Allen & Overy (A&O), the leading international law firm, has broken new ground by integrating Harvey, the innovative artificial intelligence platform built on a version of Open AI’s latest models enhanced for legal work, into its global practice.”—David Wakeling

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better stories

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I watched and thoroughly enjoyed Ari Melber’s interview with author Yuval Noah Harari on MSNBC — Yuval Noah Harari on GOP losses, conspiracies, AI, religion & history. A few quotes stood out.

  1. “the most successful fiction ever created is not God, it’s money”
  2. “human beings think in stories, and the only thing that can defeat or displace a story is a better story”
  3. “the super-power of our species is not individual genius, it’s the ability to cooperate in large numbers. So if you really want to change something, join an organization or start an organization. But 50 people who cooperate as part of a community … can make a much bigger change than 500 isolated individuals.”

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frames for collective sensemaking

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“The communicative solution to pervasive misinformation is not better facts, but better frames”, concludes Kate Starbird (University of Washington) in Facts, frames, and (mis)interpretations: Understanding rumors as collective sensemaking. Starbird describes the case of a frame called ‘Sharpiegate’ during the 2020 US Presidential election.

We highlight how, prior to the election, elites in politics and media — including President Trump himself — set an expectation (or a frame) of a “rigged election.” As the election progressed, many of President Trump’s supporters went to the polls (or their mailboxes) and misinterpreted their own experiences through that lens. Later, they went online, sharing those experiences and seeing other “evidence” from around the country, which they interpreted through the same “rigged election” or “voter fraud” frame.

The entire post is worth reading. I want to highlight three insights Starbird found concerning rumors, conspiracy theorizing, and disinformation.

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manual sensemaking

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Sensemaking is a manual skill, which can be assisted with various tools, but the most important tool is our mind, using good practices.

Ideas often emerge in the complex domain, which is where people working in a network economy need to be active, probing, and playing. We also need to do shallow dives into the chaotic domain. Neither of these activities will be helped through automation. If anything, automation will make us lazy, or unaware.

The process of seeking out people and information sources, making sense of them by taking some action, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge, are those activities from which we can build our knowledge. Managing and sharing information, especially through conversations, are fundamental processes for sensemaking in the complex domain. Sensemaking is acting on one’s knowledge.

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keeping in front of change

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When the SARS-2 pandemic hit the global community, many organizations were able to quickly pivot to remote work, among other adaptations. This will likely not be the last pandemic and other crises will emerge that will require more adaptations to how work gets done. The AI tidal wave may even increase the pace of change. In these environments, learning and innovation have to be woven into the fabric of daily work.

“In a crisis, you should always deploy an innovation team alongside the business recovery teams … to capture the novel practices … put naive observers in alongside the incident team to capture the key learning points.” —Dave Snowden, Complexity Expert

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