How innovation in the year of 1500 is the same as today

In the November 2010 edition of Foreign Policy, William Easterly writes about his findings on an exploration why some countries prosper and other don't. He observes that:

there was a remarkably strong association between countries with the most advanced technology in 1500 and countries with the highest per capita income today. Europe had steel, printed books, and oceangoing ships then, while large parts of Africa did not yet have writing or the wheel.

In addition to this observation, he asks the questions why technology is so decisive? His answer is that technology is the building block - and in turn, of course, the engine of national economic growth. In other words, innovation is required in order to prosper in the future.

But he gives an example of how innovation can be killed. His example is China. In 1500, China had plow cultivation, printing, paper, books, firearms, the compass, iron, and steel, and yet failed to emulate Europe's Industrial Revolution in the centuries that followed. Scholars have argued that "autocratic Chinese emperors killed off technological progress for domestic political reasons. For example, one Ming emperor banned long-distance oceanic exploration for fear to foreign influence threatening his power, after Chinese ships had already reached East Africa in 1422". On the other hand, fragmented Europe did not have any one autocrat who could kill off technological innovation. In addition, while there was a constant threat of living in a hostile neighborhood spurred the advancement of military technology.

This all started me to think. In particular I was thinking of the edge of chaos. I have been writing about that it is the job of leaders to push organisations to the edge of chaos. Through this staff cannot just fall back on current practices, but should innovate in order to compete better. So the hostile neighborhood of 1500 should is pushing the organisation to the edge of chaos in 2000.

Was KM introduced too early?

I just wrote this down after some reading. I will use it in further blog posts, but it already gives you some ideas what my thoughts are about KM

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The question is being asked every now and then. LinkedIn had a great discussion about it (more than 300 messages) some months ago and lately the website for KMers started a topic about it. And there are not so many people who have a clear answer to it. So neither me. However, I will try to make sense of the question - just like all the others who are thinking - should we have a world without knowledge management?

My answer is NO!

Probably I am not objective to mingle myself in this discussion, as I attended a MSc in KM and work as independent consultant in knowledge sharing and learning. However, I want to use some clear arguments why I think we should continue working with KM.

Cybernetics
For many years organizations have been seen as cybernetic systems. The aim of these systems is that the ability to predict is crucial to the ability to control an organization. Cybernetics is an application of the engineer’s idea of control to human activity by using negative feedback to create equilibrium. Negative feedback simply means that the outcome of a previous action is compared with some desired outcome and the difference between the two is fed back as information that guides the next action in such a way that the difference is reduced until it disappears (Stacey, 2005).

A simple example of a cybernetic system is a domestic heating system. These systems consists of an appliance and a regulator. The regulator contains a device that sense room temperature connected to a device that turns on and off the heating appliance. When the room temperature falls below this desired level, the control censor detects the discrepancy with a positive action - it turns the heat on. When the temperature rises above the desired level the opposite happens. So, the system keeps the room temperature close to a stable level over time utilizing negative feedback.

The key point about all forms of equilibrating systems is that they are regular, orderly and predictable. This means there are clear-cut links between cause and effect. And these links used to be manageable for organizations. For a long period organizations were thinking that they could keep the organization at, or near to, some desired state. That’s why the cybernetics is the science of control, and management is the profession of control. 

However, our environment that gives out the links is changing in a very fast pace (due to Internet and mobile communication) and organizations are increasingly moving from a simple/complicated organizational context to a complex/chaotic organizational context (see Cynefin framework). Cause and effect cannot be predicted and there are no right answers. It is like an emergent instructive pattern. As a result, I do think we should not think of management (as in knowledge management) as a way to control.

To come back to the question I asked in the beginning: should we have a world without knowledge management? As I just outlined, the world is changing in a fast pace. Due to Internet and mobile communication it is easier to stay connected with all the corners of the world. The has lead - among other things - to globalization. Due to globalization organizations are facing more competition from organizations located in the Americas, Asia and Europe at the same time. With such a murderous competition, it is important to be innovative. Being innovative means you should look for territory you never were before and therefore you need the latest knowledge and be able to make sense of new knowledge. This gives you an unique position in the market. But being unique, is that not the opposite of trying to get an equilibrium with the environment. Something we do when we manage in cybernetic systems? Yes! It is the opposite and therefore I think that knowledge management has a hard time to integrate well in the organizations. The organization should redevelop itself. Create a new way of thinking, a new way of working and a new way of designing. If this could be established - to create a way for organizations to make sense of complexity and chaos - the so-called knowledge management practices can be better be implemented in organizations and let organizations becoming cutting-edge with the latest knowledge. So currently, KM means change management - the change to new thinking, working and designing!




Accomplished 1st hurdle in PhD research: back-up from professor

Today I had a meeting with a professor from the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy of the Copenhagen Business School (CBS). The reason why he invited me to come over was because I forwarded him a first draft of a PhD proposal in September.  I have proposed to execute an exploratory research on what the role of leadership is while working on the edge of chaos.  The main conclusion of the proposal is that he is very interested in the research, but - of course - I need to be a little bit more precise in some of my concepts (what is leadership, a complex problem and so on).

The professor and I have agreed that I need to work on the next step: to approach organizations and try to arrange a meeting in which I can pitch the research. If there is an organization interested in the research, I will and can nail down my research better (as the oganization can give me the specific context).  Additionally, it is important to have a specific organization because through that I can apply for an industrial PhD programme (50 % of 3-years research paid by Danish government; the other by the organization).

Below you can find a part of the PhD proposal. It is the chapter 'positioning of the research'. This gives you an idea of what the topic is about:

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Positioning of the research

The research question (what is the role of the leader in an environment where people work across boundaries and are encouraged to be self-organized) is as current as the recent crisis in society: the credit crunch.  Many guilty parties have already been found for the crisis of today, with the financial system as main suspect. However, who had the leadership’s role in this system? Were those the bankers or the governments? One thing is for sure and that is that nine months after the financial markets came to a terrifying standstill, governments rushed with billion of Euros to avoid the financial system’s collapse.

Certainly, the crisis started in the financial market itself. Governments did not construct the bonuses or the complex financial products which pulled the wool over everybody’s eyes.  However, it is the task of governments to lead and interfere if the free market is getting out of hand, by setting out rules which, consequently, should influence behavior. The bankers were taking too much risk which was being made possible by the flexible rules of governments.  Innovations within the financial markets resulted in obscure products and services which governments could not keep up abreast (Wester, 2009). As a result, governments failed as leaders because they did not have the ability to anticipate, identify, and respond to unpredictable occasions (Malloch and Porter-O’Grady, 2005).

This example outlines the importance of leadership in fast-changing and highly competitive environments.  Drucker (1999) argues that many organizations are taking a far too simplistic view of their structure and culture.  Organizations underestimate the size and scale of the “challenge of change” (Drucker, 1999; p. 193) of especially the culture. He stresses that leadership is a key element in such a successful change.  Additionally, Umemoto (2002) stresses that knowledge-creating processes, which are required to generate new knowledge to make sense and decide over new opportunities and problems in a fast and creative way, cannot be managed in a traditional sense of management that centers on controlling the flow of information.

Schneider and Somers (2006; p. 351) argue that “new models of leadership continue to develop, including a model of leadership for the new form of organization, in which leadership relies less upon managerial authority, and a new set of ideas that transcends the physical, biological, and social science”. Thereupon, organizations are moving towards a belief that organizations are not so much machines but, instead, organisms which are based on the “advances in complexity science, combined with the knowledge from the cognitive science” (Snowden and Boone, 2007; p. 75).

One of the preferred characteristics of this new organization is that staff members should become self-organized.  Firstly, because in order to adapt to a fast changing environment, organizations must also make it possible – even desirable – for staff members at all levels of the organization to own the obligation of identifying and responding to the shifting realities affecting their ability to address the purposes of the organization and undertake their own work (Knowles, 2001). In other words, self-organizing is exactly what happened within the financial markets: enhancing innovation by encouraging independence.  However, the danger of self-organizing – that organizations allow people to evolve too independently and thereupon become too loosely coupled to the organization – also happened with the recent credit crunch.

Secondly, the reason why self-organizing is a preferred characteristic of the new organizations is that it results in a blizzard of noise. By purposefully introducing noise, self-organizing systems can increase its ability to survive (Foerster, 1984). Neuroscientists now argue that people should let their thoughts grow in an orderly and predictable way until these ‘piles’ of thoughts just collapse out of nothing. This disorder is actually essential to the brain’s ability to transmit information and solve problems, because being at the edge of chaos allows the brain to rapidly adapt to new circumstances (Beggs and Plenz, 2003).  Beggs and Plenz (2003) argue that this is the reason why people get that particular idea at that particular time without any clue.

One of the existing characteristics of the new organization is that people collaborate across boundaries.  As a result, people are learning from highly diverse individuals and groups within and beyond the organization (Senge et al., 2008).  This means that making decisions of new opportunities and problems is a result of extensive knowledge recombination from fragmentary experiences.  Furedi (2004; p. 64) argues that this makes it “impossible to have a meaningful common standard to evaluate knowledge claims”. If we should believe this statement, it will be also difficult – if not impossible – to know how leaders read signals.

With a move to self-organized environments where people work across boundaries, the leader’s role is crucial to balance the organization between predictability and unpredictability. The credit-crunch example makes it clear that leadership is crucial, but also a complex discipline.  Therefore, the research aims to identify the new form of leadership that promotes self-organizing among people who work across boundaries, and, most importantly, create new knowledge so that the organization can move forward through fast and creative sense and decision making.