Over the past two years in ALNAP, we have been leading work on humanitarian innovations which resulted in a major study, an international conference and a significant investment in innovation processes by a major donor. It is clear to us that the term innovation is being used more and more across the aid sector, whether by senior leaders like Rajiv [...]
Archive for the ‘Networks’ Category
Complexity and Innovation: A Plexus Institute interview
Posted in Innovation, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Strategy on June 15, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Global CEO survey reveals primary challenge as addressing the ‘complexity gap’
Posted in Financial crisis, Institutions, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Reports and Studies on June 8, 2010 | 3 Comments »
IBM recently released the 2010 Global CEO Survey, its 4th such study since 2004, based on over 1,500 face-to-face interviews with private sector CEOs and senior public sector leaders from 33 different industries spread over sixty countries. A concise summary, drawing on work by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, is below. In the past three studies, CEOs consistently said that coping with change was [...]
Latest in “aid net-oric”?
Posted in Facilitation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Networks, Public Policy on April 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
A recent piece of work has led to the coining of the phrase ‘aid net-oric’ (pron: net-er-ik) – a form of rhetoric which applies to exaggerated and bombastic use of the term ‘network’ in the aid sector. Once you start looking, you can see potential examples of ‘aid net-oric’ everywhere, from political manifestos to organisational [...]
Three recent articles on complexity and aid-related issues
Posted in Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Networks, Reports and Studies, Self organisation, Strategy, Traffic on April 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Owen Barder on the coming collapse of the development system and on the need for variation and selection in improving the aid system Bill Easterly on spontaneous order on getting cabs in New York, and the relevance for development. Susan Curran on the complexity of cooperation, drawing from a seminar at the James Martin 21st [...]
Slime mould, simple rules and the politics of self-organisation
Posted in Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Self organisation on February 15, 2010 | 3 Comments »
“Copying nature’s ideas allows people to harness the power of evolution to come up with clever products. Now a group of researchers has taken this idea a step further by using an entire living organism—a slime mould—to solve a complex problem. In this case, the challenge was to design an efficient rail network for the [...]
“There is no such thing as a natural disaster”: crises, complexity and the role of theory
Posted in Knowledge and learning, Natural disasters, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience on February 3, 2010 | 3 Comments »
In the few weeks following the Haiti earthquake, much of our work at ALNAP has focused on getting key operational lessons from previous earthquakes into the hands and minds of operational agency staff, and briefing media representatives on a variety of issues related to the relief and recovery work. As the initial signs of some kind [...]
Social media, complexity science and an age-old information challenge for aid agencies
Posted in Networks, Organisations, Reports and Studies, Technology on January 7, 2010 | 4 Comments »
There is a visible and growing interest in complexity science among social media specialists. This interest is highlighting once again some longstanding flaws in the information approaches of aid agencies. In a recent interview, Arthur L. Jue, co-author of ‘Social Media at Work‘ has suggested that both social media and Open Space Technology share a common basis in the ideas [...]
Bank of England Director uses complexity theory to explain global financial crisis
Posted in Financial crisis, Networks, Public Policy, Resilience, Strategy on December 16, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Andrew Haldane, Executive Director of Financial Stability at the Bank of England gave a speech earlier this year which focused on the idea of the global financial system as a complex adaptive system. In his speech, Haldane focuses on applying the lessons from other network disciplines – such as ecology, epidemiology, biology and engineering – to [...]
Lessons in Distributed Leadership from the Obama Campaign
Posted in Campaigns, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy on December 4, 2009 | 2 Comments »
The Obama presidential campaign owed its victory not to a single charismatic candidate, but to the efforts of a disciplined and motivated organisation whose influences go back to landmark civil rights movements. Many of the principles were consistent with the emerging ideas of ‘complex adaptive leadership’. A recent MIT lecture featured Marshall Ganz, veteran of the [...]
Network analysis and the challenge of emergence
Posted in Knowledge and learning, Networks on November 19, 2009 | 2 Comments »
“…One of the great mysteries of large distributed systems – from communities and organisations to brains and ecosystems – is how globally coherent activity can emerge in the absence of centralized authority or control… in many systems, usually those that have developed or evolved naturally, the source of control is far from clear. Nevertheless, the [...]
