Complexity on Philip Sheldrake

Control, agency and complexity — Phil Windley and Philip Sheldrake in conversation

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I discussed the topics of sovereignty, agency and complexity on Medium.com with Phil Windley in December 2020 in follow-up to my September 2019 post: Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty (first published to the AKASHA Foundation blog here ). Medium.com isn’t a great interface for following such threads, so the conversation was drawn together first on the generative identity website , and now reproduced below.

Google on collaboration – a new study

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

First published to Gigaom Research .

Our customers often tell us that encouraging and enabling collaboration has dramatically improved their business. We decided to dig a little deeper by conducting some original cross-industry research that measures the power of workplace collaboration in concrete terms.

This is how Google introduces the findings of its recent survey of senior staff and C-suite executives at 258 North American companies across a wide range of business sectors and sizes. (PDF of full report .) The primary conclusion is presented up front:

… collaboration has a significant impact on business innovation, performance, culture and even the bottom line.

This is quite right and quite wrong. Collaboration is at once driven and the driver; it is both a cause and an effect. As is culture come to that. Effectively, Google must grapple with two distinct appreciations of business among its customers and prospects.

Simply complex

If there’s one thing that differentiates organization this century from the last it’s that we may now acknowledge complexity and do something about it. We increasingly have the technologies to help navigate complexity. Choosing to do so offers competitive advantage for the time being; there will soon come a time when failing to do so renders an organization unresponsive, fragile and, consequently, bust. (Note that complexity and complication are different things.)

Talking garbage and the purpose of business

Fri, 15 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The third in a series on the topic of the purpose of business. Follows:

Business exists to establish and drive mutual value creation. Steve Denning challenged this statement, preferring Drucker’s assertion that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. I responded, and he has challenged my response:

we may be talking about different things: theoretical purpose of a firm and how to run it

“satisfying all the stakeholders” isn’t a viable heuristic to run a firm. See Making Management as Simple as Frisbee

“satisfying all the stakeholders” was tried in mid20thC. It led to Garbage Can firms.

[tweet tweet tweet ]

Garbage

Steve refers to “garbage can firms” in his Forbes article, Is The Tyranny Of Shareholder Value Finally Ending? , an eloquent take down of prioritizing the pursuit of shareholder value. When it comes to garbage it quotes a trio of academics – Cohen, March and Olsen – who in 1972 explained:

Debating the purpose of business

Thu, 07 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The second in a series on the topic of the purpose of business:

Steve Denning published an article to the Drucker Forum last week, How The Internet Is Forcing The Humanization Of Work , an argument founded on Drucker’s assertion that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

Steve found my post on the purpose of business post-Drucker via a thread with Kenneth Mikkelsen and tweeted his comments. His first quotes my re-definition of the purpose of business:

[The] Problem with “establish and drive mutual value creation” is that it doesn’t tell me what anyone has to do.

and then :

“Delight customers” as the goal is crystal clear as to what everyone has to do.

and lastly :

Since power has shifted from seller to buyer, “delighting customers” sets priorities right, for firm to survive

I share Steve’s optimism that we may be on the cusp of the potential to possibly humanize work (can my optimism be more tentative?!), but I cannot subscribe to his rationale.

What, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The first post in what turned out to be a series of three on the topic of the purpose of business:

Peter Drucker asserted that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. He was right at the time in offering previously inward-looking firms a more appropriate beacon. His dictum is, however, wrong for our time.

The assertion is insufficient in sustainability terms; ie, being concerned with the health and resilience of living systems such as organizations, society and the environment. A customer-centric outlook is too simplistic, simply failing to recognise complexity, and therefore at threat from business that has progressed beyond Drucker’s heuristic.

An open letter to Paul Polman, Unilever – from Enterprise 2.0 Summit, London

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit at the British Academy in London today, courtesy of Kongress Media and Agile Elephant . In conversation with Lee Bryant , Matt Partovi , David Terrar , Damian Corbet , Céline Schillinger , Johan Lange , Janet Parkinson and Anne McCrossan , a common theme is emerging – we need such events as this, and the deep and wide potential of Enterprise 2.0, to extend beyond the inevitable echo chamber of today’s eager community.

Deliberate and emergent, by design

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been trying to reconcile the apparent tensions between the deliberate and emergent strategy schools of thought. After all, it’s a fundamental question at the heart of organizational life today.

Defining deliberate and emergent strategy

The deliberate strategy process is the one with which most people are most familiar if only because it dominated 20th Century organizational life and still does. A senior team reviews the market, the trends, the SWOT, the fruits of R&D, etc., and formulates strategy – where to play and how to win – that the wider organization is then charged with executing. And based on nothing more than atavistic agricultural habits that are now largely irrelevant, we exhibit a predilection for going through this process with a calendar based drumbeat.

Emergent strategy adherents on the other hand insist that such practice is pure fancy. It’s divination beyond the realm of even the most cogent, gifted and able senior leadership team. The deliberate strategy process supports C-title egos and little else. Rather, we’re better off making the organization sensitive to even the slightest changes, the weakest of signals, and developing an organizational fabric with the agility to react appropriately, to exploit opportunity and close down risk.

The Future of Organization – a video presentation on the major themes and some new provocations

Fri, 23 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a lot to think about when it comes to the future of organization, and plenty to be optimistic about. Saying that, like any and all topics worth grappling with, it takes a bit of time to get up to speed on the depth and breadth of things. As a member of the advisory council for the Future of Work community, and part of the steering group for The Responsive Organization community, I know I’m not the only one looking to communicate these ideas effectively.

Mike Grafham and I talked about compiling a three-minute explanatory video, and I failed woefully at such brevity. This 42-minute video presentation aims to provide a relatively speedy immersion in some of the main themes, spanning human rights, complexity science, the death of heuristics, the six influence flows, personal knowledge mastery, social physics, trust, the digital nervous system, Web 3.0, performance and learning, public relations, collective intelligence, sociocracy, Holacracy, podularity, wirearchy, emergent civilzation, self-organization, organized self, socioveillance, the middleware corporate, Bread incorporated, distributed autonomous corporates, and the Mozilla manifesto.

[embed width=“960”]http://www.vimeo.com/96201589[/embed]

Stowe Boyd's manifesto and The People's Front

Thu, 02 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Stowe Boyd recently published “A Manifesto For A Third Way Of Work” (although the title will change ). The manifesto forms the basis of the book Stowe plans to write throughout 2014, crystallizing the perspectives and insight he has forged and assembled over the years. And if you’ve read Attenzi – a social business story then you’ll know Stowe and I think alike on many matters.

[Update 20th March 2014: the title changed to A Manifesto For A New Way of Work .]

Here are the major theses, and I have identified with an asterisk the four I have chosen to argue below.

_____

Dissensus (versus Consensus)

— active and directed dissent is a better way to counter the cognitive biases of groups and individuals, and to sidestep groupthink; essential to increased innovation and creativity truly driving business

Cooperative (versus Collaborative)

— sidesteps the politics and collectivism of consensus-based decision-making, and shifts to looser, laissez-faire cooperative work patterns

Creativity (versus Tradition)

— new solutions to problems are needed, and traditional approaches may not only be broken but dangerous

Autonomy (versus Heteronomy)

— paradoxically, as we come into a time when we acknowledge that we are more connected to each other than ever before, a great degree of autonomy will become the norm; old demands to subordinate all personal interests to those of the collective will be displaced by a personal re-engagement in our own work and a commitment to a deeper work culture that transcends any one company’s corporate culture

You have to deal with both complication and complexity, so you'd better know the difference

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Schumpeter column in The Economist got it wrong: “It’s complicated. Management thinkers disagree on how to manage complexity. ” The column comments on the recent 5th Global Drucker Forum – Managing Complexity and describes organizations as having two choices, deal with complexity or simplify.

Those that deal with complexity “may look complex and unwieldy but they have an inner logic and powers of self-organisation.” In contrast, “the second, rival solution to dealing with complexity is to impose simplicity.”

But to present the situation as ’either / or’ is simply misleading, and I think it comes down to a failure to appreciate the critical difference between complexity and complication, a difference that must be well understood when redesigning the way your organisation works.

Setting the standards for influence

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a special advisor to AMEC (the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication), wearing a CIPR hat as and when. I’m part of a working group assembling recommendations on the topic of influence for deliberation at the AMEC European Summit in Madrid this June. We have input from IPR, PRSA, Womma, SNCR, IAB and other groups, associations and institutes.

I took an action to create “something to shoot at”, and I distributed the following over the weekend. On the basis that we’re an open and transparent working group, I thought I’d post it here too. Do get in touch if you’d like to tell me what you think. Now’s the time for dialogue – particularly if you can’t attend the Madrid summit – ahead of the standards setting.

Q&A with Influencer Marketing Review

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally published by Influencer Marketing Review .]

This is the third installment of our ‘Q&A with the Review’ series in which we talk with prominent members of the influencer marketing community about their work and thoughts on the industry. Amanda Maksymiw and Duncan Brown helped us get the series started, and now we’re grateful that Philip Sheldrake, author of The Business of Influence_, is joining us for our third Q&A._

IMR: Thanks so much for joining us, Philip. And congratulations on the book. We know that’s no easy feat.

****Philip: Thanks for the invitation to chat here. And thanks for having my book cover on IMR’s homepage :-)

IMR: Oh yeah. It’s probably about time we change the image, huh.

You’ve stated in the book and elsewhere that “the business of influence is broken.” What do you mean by that exactly? Some might think there wasn’t much of a “business of influence” in the first place.

Philip: A definition of influence: you have been influenced when you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done, or think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought. There’s influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it doesn’t do, and yet despite this we often apportion responsibility for influence to marketing and PR departments. The 2012 organization looks incredibly similar to the 1992 organization, which is crazy when you consider the impact of social media and related information technologies.

The complexity of influence is a challenge – and an opportunity

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for The Guardian Media Network .]

If media is interesting because it facilitates communication, whether that communication is mediated or disintermediated, then communication is most interesting when it facilitates influence.

You have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done. Simple as, although you wouldn’t think it now that influence is the hot word.

The capacity to change hearts, minds and deeds is considered the mark of the great communicator, the compelling personality, the charismatic politician, and ultimately no one wants to communicate without influence; that wouldn’t be a good use of the communicator’s time and energy, or indeed that of those on the receiving end.

The focus on making sure you’re influenced back is vital too. Individuals (and organisations) that best absorb the zeitgeist are heuristically more able to respond in ways their audiences (stakeholders) might well appreciate.

Influence is complex, and I mean that in the full “complexity science” sense of the word. Complexity is the phenomena that emerge from a collection of interacting objects. The interacting objects could be molecules of air and the phenomenon the weather. It could be vehicles and the phenomenon the traffic.

Influence... it's a numbers game

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Andrew Smith tickled my fractal with his post yesterday “Where are the PR Numerati? ” (and here on MarCom Professional). Why? Because he’s right and I’m numerate and I’m in PR. His post was prompted by the August 2008 book “The Numerati ” by senior Business Week writer Stephen Baker.

Public relations had been boiled down to a very simple process by the end of the 1990s. Journalists write the papers and magazines the public reads. The PRs know the journalists. The clients retain the PR professionals.

That simple world is no more. I don’t mean that traditional media relations no longer exists, only that it is now just a sub-set of a far more complex map of exerting influence. The best PR professionals will:

You're in IT

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Marketing communications has arrived at its complexity inflexion, and that complexity needs IT. Period. From now on, when you say “I’m a marketing communications consultant”, you’ll also be saying “I’m in IT”.

Computers ‘do’ numbers, and they can ‘do’ numbers pretty well. Accounting is about numbers, and so is much of science and engineering, so computers were rapidly deployed in these disciplines in their early days. They helped crunch complexity, and this same capability drove complexity. IT advances have driven today’s advanced stock trading platforms and other financial systems. It has underpinned our analysis and knowledge of genetics. It has driven finite element analysis, fluid dynamics and other engineering modelling technologies. These are just a few examples, but however you cut it, modern accounting, science and engineering is entirely reliant on IT.

In the 70s, manufacturing was about turning out millions of identical products repetitively, cheaply. Retail was about piling them high. By the 90s, mass production had become mass customisation, as IT enabled complex yet efficient supply chains. Each and every car gliding through production can now be any one of a thousand permutations. The number of Zara ’s annual product lines exceeds the volume made of each; all at affordable prices. Retail analytics informs every decision we make in retail design. However you cut it, modern manufacturing and retail is entirely reliant on IT.

These professions, and others, reached their complexity inflexion. You could say that IT was both a cause and the saviour, and now it’s time for marketing communications. Let’s look at some numbers.