Employee Engagement By Dave Snowden

COGNITIVEEDGE

Employee engagement London 17th February 2009

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Life cycles Effectiveness of the paradigm

Mass collaboration, pervasive social computing and 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

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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 Copyright © 2007 Cognitive Edge. All Rights Reserved.

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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 ... Copyright © 2007 Cognitive Edge. All Rights Reserved.

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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 Copyright © 2007 Cognitive Edge. All Rights Reserved.

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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 Copyright © 2007 Cognitive Edge. All Rights Reserved.

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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 Copyright © 2007 Cognitive Edge. All Rights Reserved.

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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 not by experts not by computers

Qualitative & quantitative in one

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Staff patronise children too much to see and its overwhelming rushed from place to place missed things

staff are too child like and pathetic not enough to keep me interested

too much time in one place

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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 children

Too much to see and its overwhelming

Rushed from place to place missed things

Staff are too child like & pathetic

The museum stinks I was embarrassed to be there Not enough to We never got to do anything keep me interested When were in the insect house I Why can’t I have a go? wanted to use the models. Mr We were treated like morons Smith kept telling us about them much time in but didn’t let us touch Too them one place until 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: questionnaires, focus groups etc.

New forms of narrative based research, continuous capture and display

Measuring and determine outcomes

Measuring impact, allowed emergence

Scenario Planning

Distributed & fragmented scanrio generation from employees

Matrix based organisations

Crews & hierarchies

Best practice documents

Fragmented narrative based 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.

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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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