The summer of 2012 was crucial in my thesis – I had finished my theoretical framework and a couple of chapters. I was about to tackle the most grounded part of my research: wading through a lake of approximately 40,000 bits of broken pottery. The purpose was to make sense of that material to understand […]
In this second post, I promised to describe the AIMS framework fully, and in doing that, I will also bring in ASHEN in an integrated frame with one of the critical parts of Estuarine Mapping. I first referenced this on the blog in January, but I had already started to use and develop it several […]
I’ve been much occupied over the last week writing the Field Guide to Cynefin (formerly known as the Litte Green Book), some 80 pages and 50k words writing to a highly constrained format. I’m using the Travellers Notebook form which is 8.25 x 4.25 Inch (21cm x 11cm), perfect for carrying around. Open any page […]
In my last post, I promised to address the two elephant metaphors used by Peter Senge. As a reminder we have the idea that if you break an elephant into two you don’t get two elephants and the second is the cliché of blind men feeling different parts of an elephant and seeing different […]
As a warning, in keeping with its title, this post is a rambling one. It sets the scene for more structured stuff that I hope to post daily over the next couple of weeks while on an extended Asia-Pacific tour. It also flags up various public events during that tour a few paragraphs down. One […]
I’ve never liked the whole-body metaphors that are used by Senge and others in Systems Dynamics, especially as they are framed in Cartesian terms with the brain providing direction. It allows people to be placed in the category of muscles and god help us, the heart. I notice the kidney and spleen are less attractive […]
Several interactions over social media have left me somewhat frustrated by the inability of several people who could know better (I exclude the odd attention-seeking troll from this) to understand one of the key aspects of complexity namely managing the nature of a system to encourage emergence. The minute you imply any intentionality they immediately […]
One of my favourite books in the Swallows and Amazons series is Great Northern in which our heroes ultimately save the eggs of a pair of Great Northerns from a malicious egg collector. The final scene in which TItty and Dick return the eggs to their parents is especially poignant. Those two characters are […]
I’ve talked about granularity on many occasions and looking back to my original knowledge management work the idea was there as well – collections of micro-narrative not stories, multiple small projects with coherence rather than a grand strategy and so on. That was during the period when complexity theory was starting to appear on the periphery […]
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