Tom Graves

Courtesy of a link by fellow enterprise-architect Sally Bean, I’ve just spent the past couple of hours viewing and then reviewing an online seminar on complexity by one of the thought-leaders on complexity-theory and practice, Dave Snowden:

From Induction to Abduction: a new approach to research and productive enquiry

This seminar will provide a summary of both the theory and practice of a new approach to research based on the large scale capture of self-interpreted micro-narrative.  The approach has been described as the first technique for distributed ethnography and has been developed over the past decade with project based funding from the US, UK and Singapore Governments in the context of risk assessment, horizon scanning, cultural mapping and weak signal detection.  It allows the linkage of research with knowledge management and impact based measurement.  Current projects involve measuring the impact of development projects in Africa, narrative based knowledge management for the US Army in Afghanistan and cultural mapping of various inner city communities within the UK.

The theoretical origins lie in the application of complex adaptive systems theory to social systems together with new understanding about the nature of human decision making from the cognitive sciences. The seminar will summarise the theory, but will also use a series of projects to combine theory with practice.  One of the goals is to create learning systems that work on continuous capture of material in the field as it happens linked with a capacity for feedback loops and sophisticated representations that allow people to learn by doing, building on the micro-narratives of day to day experience.  Narrative forms of knowledge lie between the experiential and the symbolic, allowing complex interactions and interventions in multiple social situations.

Abductive reasoning is, as Dave explains, “the logic of hunches”, and plays a key role in helping to develop understanding of how themes emerge in social contexts such as in business and elsewhere. It’s all fascinating stuff – very strongly recommended. The depth and versatility of the techniques will be a real eye-opener to anyone who hasn’t previously seen Dave’s work, and its applicability to whole-of-enterprise architecture and the like should be self-evident.

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Came across this comment whilst exploring laptop.org.au, the Australian arm of the One Laptop Per Child movement [my emphasis]:

Learning is our main goal. … Epistemologists from John Dewey to Paulo Freire to Seymour Papert agree that you learn through doing. This suggests that if you want more learning, you want more doing. Thus OLPC puts an emphasis on software tools for exploring and expressing, rather than instruction. Love is a better master than duty. Using the laptop as the agency for engaging children in constructing knowledge based upon their personal interests and providing them tools for sharing and critiquing these constructions will lead them to become learners and teachers.

So why do we think it should be any different for adults in our organisations? – that ‘duty’ will somehow necessarily be a better motivator than love of the work itself?

Then crosslink that with Daniel Pink’s summary of recent research on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivators. From that, we discover that monetary bonuses and other ‘external’ motivators not only don’t help in knowledge-work, they actually make performance worse. What does work is ‘motivation from within’ – especially a commitment to the work itself for its own sake.

Crosslink that with what we know about the skills-learning process, and especially about the need for a ‘commitment of the heart’ – a commitment to the skill itself – to enable the capability to deal with real-world complexity in the context of that skill.

Crosslink that with what we know about the role of vision as a unifying force for and within an enterprise.

Crosslink that again with one of the core themes from the current version of ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library – the key international standard on IT service-management), that people do not want products or services as such, they want “satisfaction of a perceived need”; then note that this applies to all people within the enterprise as much as to the enterprise’s clients.

Given all of that, what types of motivation are provided or applied within your own organisation? Is there much evidence of awareness that “love is a better master than duty”? And if not, what would you need to change in the business-architecture or enterprise-architecture – such as in performance-metrics, performance-appraisals and the like – to support more of ‘love’ within the work itself?