Learning in the Intelligent Complex Adaptive System

1
Leadership in Todays World

• Dave Bennet
• Mountain Quest Institute
• dhbennet_at_prodigy.net

August 14, 2002
2
The Environment

• Accelerating change
• Increasing uncertainty
• Growing complexity
• Shrinking world
• Information explosion
• Rise of the Knowledge Organization
• The changing nature of reality

3
Knowledge workers point of action

• Every knowledge workers action should have a
  line of sight to their individual goal and to
  their organizations mission.

4
Knowledge workers point of action

• Improving the efficiency, quality and coherence
  of every daily action taken by knowledge
  workers throughout the organization bootstraps
  enterprise performance.
• The sum of all action is the organizations
  performance.

5
How work gets done?(the four major processes)

• Creativity or innovation
• Problem solving
• Decision Making
• Taking action--implementation

(The point of action)
Accomplished by individuals and groups
6

• What is Knowledge?
• Knowledge is the human capacity (potential
  actual ability) to take effective action in
  varied and uncertain situations.

7

• Knowledge is made up of
• Facts, beliefs, truths laws
• Concepts, methodologies
• Relationships, leverage points
• Context situation
• Know-how, Know why
• Judgments expectations, insights
• Intuition feelings
• Meaning and understanding
• ???

8
The Intelligent Complex Adaptive Systemone
organization for the future

• Living system metaphor for the next generation
  knowledge organization.
• An intelligent techno-sociologically and
  ecologically adaptive organization.
• Emergent characteristics support adaptation and
  survival
• Individual and organizational learning are the
  foundation of the ICAS

9
ICAS Emergent Characteristics

• Organizational intelligence
• Unity and shared purpose
• Optimum complexity
• Selectivity
• Knowledge centricity
• Flow
• Permeable boundaries
• Multi-dimensionality

Learning is integral to each of these
characteristics
10
The challenge to
leaders How do we create, maintain and nurture
an organization so that it makes the best use of
knowledge to achieve Sustainable High
Performance /or Sustainable Competitive
Advantage ?
Who has this responsibility?
11

• The future leader
• Knowledge Knowing
• Mindfulness
• Sensemaking
• Learning
• Flow
• Empowering

12

• The future leader
• Knowledge of
• Oneself
• Others
• World knowledge
• Metaknowledge

13
Mindfulness

• Instant awareness
• Creation of new categories
• Openness to novelty
• Sensitivity to context
• Awareness of multiple perspectives

It is by logic that we prove, it is by intuition
that we discover.
Henri Poincare
14
SensemakingI dont know

• Leading by the compass
• Get people moving
• Improvise
• I dont know
• Authentication
• Learning
• Why didnt I know?
• Why didnt I ask?
• Why wasnt I told?

15
The learning environment

• Organizational
• Learning
• Core competencies
• Yellow pages
• Knowledge
• Repositories
• Communities of
• Practice
• Ba Spaces
• Storytelling

• Individual
• Learning
• Thinking is good
• Brownbag lunches
• Moving people around
• Information literacy
• Learning how to learn

• Team
• Learning
• Open communications
• Equal participation
• Diversity of backgrounds
• Effective groupware
• Dialogue not discussion

16
Flow

• New people into the organization
• Moving work around people
• Moving people around work
• Invisible technology-open architecture
• Teams capable of flow states
• Continuous incoming information
• Creation application of ideas
• Knowledge Management

17
Empowering

• Knowledge to act
• Freedom to act
• Courage to act
• Awareness of limits
• Risk acceptability
• Self-organizing
• Organizational support

18
Leadership

• Institutional capacity to energize and
  synergize to take effective action
• Boundaryless, virtically horizontally
• Emerges from individual group behavior
• Based on relationships, knowledge values
• Sets direction, takes initiative
• Emphasizes coherence and agility
• Supports the new social contract

• A quality of the organization

19
The New Leaders

• Are confident yet uncertain
• Have strong egos, but not big egos
• Continually reinvent themselves
• Trust the compass, not the map
• Focus on direction, context and action
• Create, nurture leverage knowledge
• Do not try to control or direct
• Help others help themselves

Have a different point of view!
20
The New Leaders(actions that lead)

• Respect their knowledge
• Find a common interest
• Defend against the bureaucract
• Be their sounding board vericatee
• Provide a worldview for their work
• Coach them on metaknowledge
• Manage KM for their use
• Champion their innovation and needs
• Provide the best infrastructure
• Coordinate risk-taking
• Support/ provide their learning systems
  thinking etc
• Explain meaning, culture, values, purpose
  vision
• Encourage collaboration, questioning, openness,
  doubt and trust
• Show them that you care, and know more than
  they do in some areas that will improve their
  performance

21
The New Leaders(the seven seas of influence)

• Compass
• Character
• Caring
• Connecting
• Communicating
• Collaborating
• Co-creating

22
The New Leaders

• Manage themselves, leverage information and
  knowledge, and nurture others
• Build intuition, judgment and reflection to
  help sensmaking and decisions.
• Live values, relationships, compassion and
  learning
• Think differently about their organization

• The essence of leadership is character!

23
The true leader

• A leader is best
• When people barely know he exists
• Not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
• Worse when they despise him.
• But of a good leader, who talks little,
• When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
• They will say
• We did it ourselves.

Lao Tzu