Email Connections - mapping your relationships

My Map from Christopher Baker on Vimeo. has a strange elegance. Watch the whole thing to see the various scales and relationships that are visualized using the data in one persons email history.

Prezi - Creative Communications

Trying to find nonlinear ways to make presentations, talk about emerging ideas, or showcase the rich connections between things can be challenging within some of the more boxy software offerings we rely on.

Among the constantly changing sea of cloud-based software is this one that I recently came across. Prezi is an interesting way to mix words, images, make connections and share ideas. The basic version is free and they have quite a few samples so you can see how other people have used it.

Singing Bridges on Prezi

Slime Mold Wonders

This slime mold video is a great example of simple rules leading to complex behaviour. The slime mold doesn't think - it just iterates a few simple rules over and over again and ends up with a very efficient way of 'exploring' its environment and optimizing that exploration. Look at what happens and if you are amazed and wonderstruck, YouTube provides many other compelling glimpses of slime molds in action. While we like images of soaring eagles, dedicated exploration teams, last-second goals and cute polar bears on shrinking ice-floes, "slime mould" isn't likely to figure in any corporate story-telling. "Hi, we're the R&D guys and we use slime molds to solve our engineering problems." Still, an interesting phenomena worth contemplating.

This post from Aid on the Edge of Chaos is definitely worth reading. The connections between slime mold, civil engineering, public policy and aid is a great run through the complexity theory landscape. Here is the post - Slime Mold, Simple Rules and the Politics of Self-Organisation.

WIRED has a good article on the Tokyo transportation experiment and great images to go with it. You can see it here.

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership - Book Review

I've been waiting months to write this review, mostly because I must, reluctantly, pan it and I'd rather not. Adaptive leadership is the motherland for me. This book may be a radical step for some and that's great. I did not find it useful.

Here is my Amazon review:

Adaptive leadership is very important. In the few pockets of business and organizational life these days that are untouched by the turbulence around us, business as usual is, it would seem, acceptable. The trouble is that there are so few arenas where that is the case. Finding ways to lead in a way that can adjust to rapid and often unexpected change is critical.

I received a review copy of this book from Harvard Business Press. When it arrived I was very excited to dig in and get jazzed by all the great content. The problem was that the book was about as dull to read as it was to look at (I scrawled this on my cover: "Don't judge a book by its cover. In this case you should. This books cover is really boring"). I was twenty pages in when I felt that they were in trouble. It felt like a Harvard Business Press word container with WalMart content inside. My disappointment was that it lacked any real edge. For people who are deeply immersed in complexity theory and related pursuits that examine how systems change over time, there just wasn't any real insight. For people who don't like that sort of thing, it would, I fear, feel impenetrable.

Reading about next things should be engaging, compelling, shocking even. This book wasn't any of that. I felt genuinely disappointed as I worked my way through out. I just couldn't track with the style or flow. It felt like I was at a really dull meeting that was supposed to be important but somehow wasn't. No Wheatley. No Holling. No Stacey. No Sante Fe Institute. No Kauffman. No cheeky Tom Peters feel. No Dave Snowden deadpan humour. Nothing daring.

There were no expeditions into the heart of real, living organizations where the good, bad and ugly was on display and the authors dared to do battle with their adaptive leadership rocket launchers. No biological modelling, computer simulations, real-time adaptations. After awhile, you just start to feel like the book was off, somehow - like when someone is staring past you. If I was Randy from American Idol, I'd say, "Hey, dog, it's a bit pitchy" or something like that.

In chapter 13 you'll find a six page bit on systems thinking but that's it. An adaptive leadership text that doesn't clearly track through the latest research and insight on what informs adaptive leadership doesn't add up. There was insufficient evidence that they have their finger on the pulsing neck artery of past, current, and emerging forms of adaptive leadership. A great topic area like this needs to evidence an awareness of adaptive practices in the very delivery of the content but that doesn't happen at all.

I'd love to give it a thumbs up - the title is definitely compelling - but I just can't. I'm happy to be convinced otherwise but all I can think is that I'm glad I had a review copy sent and didn't have to pay for it. The authors are probably very knowledgeable, interesting, and capable consultants but it just doesn't come through in the book, sadly. These are big players with long track records and tons of cultural cache who perhaps need a better way to deliver what they know than a vanilla-looking book that induces yawns.

There are many other books that are in line ahead of this one for developing my teams and thinking. It reminds me of a corporate comb-over. So disappointing. Next time involve a few freaky friends in the book development process.

New Paper on Complexity Theory and Peace-Conflict Situations

Diane Hendricks has written a working paper that adds another piece of research to the exploration of how complexity theory might translate from the natural sciences to the social sciences. Her area of interest is in peace and conflict studies. Here is a paragraph from the Introduction:

Complexity theory in the natural sciences has brought fresh insight into the nature and working of complex systems and some have hoped that applying this theory to social systems, albeit necessarily in an adapted form, could be equally revealing and useful. I confess to being among their number although the degree and extent of the usefulness and applicability of complexity in these areas is not yet clear to me. I am, however, convinced of the potential to, at the very least, facilitate a more realistic (i.e. closer to the reality of how the social world works) and open approach to analysis and action for change. This working paper is an exploration of ideas, opinions and attempts related to the application of complexity theory to the field of conflict transformation and some early reflections on these.

These are important explorations and we are only beginning to understand how complexity theory might apply. We need to carefully work through whether there is something of substance in this approach or whether it is a fad that turns out to lack real explanatory power for organizing and designing human institutions and the resulting interactions. I am, like Diane, optimistic that there is indeed significant fruitfulness in researching these applications.

Parrot AR.Drone + SensorFly = Real-Time Artificial Flocking

This is among the most cool flying things I've seen in a while. I grew up designing, building and flying various types of airplanes form the kind with wires to freeflight to full-feature radio controlled craft.

The iPhone-controlled Parrot AR.Drone is wonderfully imaginative and, combined the autonomously controlled SensorFly from Carnegie Mellon, opens up new worlds for small flying applications. Complexity theory will play into how groups or flocks of SensorFly devices interact and move.

Interactive genetic algorithms allow users to provide input on software-generated outcomes and such an approach would work well with a Parrot device + multiple SensorFly devices. The flock finds its way with nudging from an operator who might want to search a certain area.

Inspiring.

Andrew McAfee from MIT and Web 2.0

Technology impacts us socially and culturally long before we understand what that impact is. Given that business and organizational life of all kinds is deeply cultural, it is no surprise that changes in how we communicate, share ideas, collaborate and assess value will not leave our enterprises unscathed. Many aspects of our current thinking, many inherited 'common sense' defaults, and assorted default habits need to be reconsidered.