How Intermediation Scales

This is an update to a talk I’ve prepared on knowledge management in organizations.  In a twitter conversation I said “intermediation scales.” When questioned at the time I couldn’t explain. Since then I’ve experimented and discovered how intermediation perpetuates and grows.

I draw upon the work of Michael Roberto’s “Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer” and in my talk show in Slide 18 how his three Cultures, along with the addition of a “Culture of Self,” align with the process learning forms:

Process Learning	Culture	Framing
Manager	Self	Front line
Core Group	Maybe	Transparency
Executive	Yes	Decisions
Shadow Core	No	Secrecy

Organizations skew towards these cultures and the culture amplifies a certain framing of knowledge.  When we remove the Core and Shadow patterns we have a bipolar pattern of “Self versus Yes”. This occurs when knowledge flows freely and feedback is immediate and responsive. This direct and intimate relationship is the elusive Self-Organizing Team.  

Adding time, distance, people and even technology increases complexity.  Scaling up involves communications loss.  Scaling out is more desirable, however we don’t understand complex social systems well enough to understand how.  For scaling up, the mechanism is rather simple:

• ·         Intermediation increases through inattention
• ·         It scales up through norms of inattention (normalization of deviance)
• ·         It is reduced by focusing, which restores context 

Hence overly strong cultures which are fixated on a single purpose may also attend to unnecessary things.  And looser cultures and certain types of competitive cultures can improve focus.

This perspective on scaling supports my claim in Slide 22 that loose coupling is essential to smoothly functioning networks. 

Science and Sense-making and Hype and Promises

I was reading the slides from Dave Snowden's (@snowded) talk at KMWorld this week.  Most unfortunately I could not make the show and his Keynote.

In his talk two slides stand out for me. The first is titled “The nature of the system constrains how we can act in it.”  In this slide, Dave describes an ontological based set of principles for working with Ordered, Chaotic and Complex systems.  In regards to the Complex domain, one of the principles is “Real time feed back for control via modulators”

I think we need to carefully consider the wisdom Dave shares.  Modulators are not algorithms. Modulators are people who have the experience, gained by praxis, to disintermediate the contextual data.  From an anthro-centric standpoint, algorithms cannot sensibly switch the variable links.  For sensible means sense-making, in the manners that Dave describes in the slide titled “How do we avoid the hype and the false promises.”  

I’ve annotated the quadrants with my understanding of philosophy, which is nowhere near the caliber of Dave’s.  The annotation in the lower right (Prediction & high risk Scaling) is drawn from contemporary events. Readers might recognize it more readily by the old adage “History is written by the victors” (Walter Benjamin).  

I also think there is a spiritual dimension in sense-making that needs to be included; for it is the spiritual connections between us that most strongly influence the promises we give and receive.  However I am not at all qualified to describe where the spiritual lies in this framework.