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COGNITIVEEDGE

Employee engagement
London 17th February 2009

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courses see www.cognitive-edge.com

Life cycles

Mass collaboration, pervasive


social computing and
Effectiveness of the paradigm

globalisation

Focus on total
experience & power
through connections
Mass customisation, scalable
& reliable technology &
communication

Product focused
organisation or matrix &
control through information
Mass production,
automation &
commoditisation

Functional organisational
structure & control
through resources Time

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The greatest loss of time is delay and
expectation, which depend upon the
future. We let go the present, which we
have in our power, and look forward
to that which depends upon chance,
and so relinquish a certainty for an
uncertainty
Seneca

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The nature of systems

Key language
A system is any network that has coherence
it may be fuzzy, it may or may not have purpose
An agent is anything which acts within the system
individual, group, idea etc.

Three types of system


Ordered: system constrains agents, reductionism & rules,
deterministic, observer independence
Chaotic: agents unconstrained & independent of each
other ,studied through statistics & probability
Complex: system lightly constrains agents, agents modify system
by their interaction with it and each other, they co-evolve
(irreversibility). Operate in far from equilibrium situations, system
effects are emergent not aggregative

A simple metaphor ...


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Traffic Control

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an aerial view

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the ordered alternative

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Aspects of complexity

Characteristics
Highly sensitive to small changes
Proximity & connectivity of agents has high impact
Meaning emerges through interaction
This of coalescence not categories
Hindsight does not lead to foresight
Shift from fail-safe design to safe-fail experimentation

Consequences
Use of distributed cognition
wisdom but not foolishness of crowds
Work with finely granulated objects
information and organisational
Disintermediation
Putting decision makers in direct contact with raw data
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Distributed cognition

The jar of jelly beans at the county fair ...


... the average of the group is more accurate
No one must be aware of the guesses of others
So don’t confuse this with prediction markets
Mass consultation of citizens & interest groups
A simple test to prove the point
Three students with white shirts & three with black playing
basket ball
Count the number of times those with white shirts pass the ball
There are two balls!
To avoid argument: if it leaves the hands of someone in white
and arrives in someone else's, no matter how, it is one pass

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it seems that whatever we perceive is organised into


patterns for which we the perceivers are largely
responsible...
As perceivers we select from all the stimuli falling on our
senses only those which interest us, and our interests are
governed by a pattern-making tendency, sometimes
called a schema. In a chaos of shifting impressions each
of us constructs a stable world in which objects have
recognisable shapes, are located in depth and have
permanence.
As times goes on and experience builds up, we make
greater investment in our systems of labels. So a
conservative bias is built it. It gives us confidence
Mary Douglas Purity and Danger 1966

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Mapping evolutionary possibilities

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Fragments, signified

Fragments: transcripts,
audio, video clips,
URLs etc
Any language
Signified at the point
or origin Staff patronise staff are too child
children like and pathetic
not by experts
not by computers too much to see
not enough to keep
and its
me interested
overwhelming
Qualitative &
quantitative in one rushed from
place to place
too much time
in one place
missed things

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Current example

Other examples
Co-evolutionary approaches to service
product development
Employee engagement in scenario
planning
Children of the World
Company
Impact measurement & reporting
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Impact measures & monitors

Staff patronise Staff are too child


children like & pathetic

The museum stinks


Too much to see
I was embarrassed to be there
and its
overwhelming
We never got to do anything Not enough to
keep me interested

When
Why can’t I have were in the insect house I
a go?
We were treatedwanted to use the models. Mr
like morons
Smith kept telling us about them
Rushed from place
to place missed
things
but didn’t let us touch Too
themone place until
much time in

the end and there wasn’t any time.


He can play with them anytime and
I missed my chance because of
him, its not fair.
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Fitness landscape 1

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Current paradigm New paradigm


Periodic techniques requiring analysis: New forms of narrative based research,
questionnaires, focus groups etc. continuous capture and display

Measuring and determine outcomes Measuring impact, allowed emergence

Distributed & fragmented scanrio


Scenario Planning generation from employees

Matrix based organisations Crews & hierarchies

Fragmented narrative based


Best practice documents knowledge management

Practice informed theory Theory informed practice

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What you need to do

Conceptual shift (1)


From idealistic statements of future states to
managing the evolutionary possibilities of the present
Conceptual shift (2)
The radical shift in understanding complexity; from
fail-safe projects to safe-fail experimentation
Map the ideation culture
create real time monitoring & shift from measuring
outcome to measuring impact
Co-evolution
forced evolution between customers, staff &
management
Copyright © 2007 Cognitive Edge. All Rights Reserved. 17

For to say that, assuming the earth moves and the


sun stands still, all the appearances are saved better
than with eccentrics and epicycles, is to speak well;
there is no danger in this, and it is sufficient for
mathematicians. But to want to affirm that the sun
really is fixed in the centre of the heavens and only
revolves around itself
(i.e., turns upon its axis ) without travelling from east
to west, and that the earth is situated in the third
sphere and revolves with great speed around the sun,
is a very dangerous thing.

Cardinal Bellarmine Letter to Foscarini April 12th 1615

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