(2nd of 2 posts exploring self-organisation and emergence in transport / traffic and the relevance for aid strategies – first was last week’s piece on slime moulds)
Traffic planners are increasingly moving away from signs and regulations to increase traffic safety and address congestion. Rather than legislating for driver behaviour, they are requiring drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists to [...]
Archive for the ‘Organisations’ Category
From traffic management to development management?
Posted in Leadership, Organisations, Public Policy, Self organisation, Strategy, Traffic, Urbanisation on February 22, 2010 | 2 Comments »
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 | 2 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 of [...]
Is Your Job An Open System?
Posted in Institutions, Leadership, Organisations on January 14, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Bill Tate is a leadership specialist who focuses on the use of systems approaches to understand and improve leadership development.
On his new Systemic Leadership blog, he has written about the challenge of writing and fulfilling job descriptions in a complex environments. His ideas have some resonance with a popular November 2009 post on the Peter Principle and [...]
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 of [...]
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 1960s [...]
Urbanisation, complexity and poverty – or why aid agencies should be reading Jane Jacobs
Posted in Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy, Urbanisation on November 24, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Jane Jacobs, renowned urban scholar and grass-roots activist, has recently topped the Planetizen list of the 100 leading Urban Thinkers by an ’impossibly wide lead’.
Jacobs is something of a heroine for many communities around the world, real and virtual, not least the complexity science community. She approached cities as ecosystems and suggested that over time, buildings, streets [...]
From Architects to Gardeners
Posted in Organisations, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience, Strategy on November 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Henry Kissinger held a party recently for his protege, Joshua Ramo Cooper. Speaking about Ramo Cooper’s new book to a New Yorker reporter, he said, “[it] has one basic theme that is a little difficult for me, which is that my generation is sort of a bunch of dodos.”
The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New [...]
How to Organise a Childrens’s Party – Based on the Nature of Systems
Posted in Facilitation, Knowledge and learning, Organisations on November 14, 2009 | 3 Comments »
This short clip sees Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge use the metaphor of a childrens party to present three different kinds of systems, and the organisational approaches relevant to each. His delivery is typically insightful and acerbic.
FYI Dave ran a meeting in 2008 for the aid & complexity community, and will also be keynote speaker at the [...]
New agent-based modelling shows how incompetence spreads around hierarchical organisations
Posted in Meetings, Organisations, Reports and Studies on November 5, 2009 | 3 Comments »
There’s a paradox at the heart of most modern organisations. The “Peter Principle”, named after the Canadian psychologist Laurence Peter who first observed this phenomena in 1969, states that ”in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent [...]
