Real Time Organizational Modeling

[John Hellier]

I keep coming back to looking at the whole organization because at
least for me I don't feel comfortable isolating areas. I think you have to
consider the affect of all actors in an organization to understand it.
Of course this can be taken further and say what about the influences
from outside the organization. Don't they have a  significant impact?
Yes, but I think within an organization a lot of actions can be contained.

In reference to your problem #3 about "Making the model changes the
organization that it is a model of.", I would like the model to become in
a way the organization. The model would become the communication
channel for all activity. Any form of interaction: phone, email, verbal,
memo, purchase req, work order, etc. is integrated into this communication
channel.  This speaks to the need to formalize how we communicate. What
we communicate is still free and to a certain degree unrestrained. We just
use more agreed upon language to communicate. Yes, this sounds like it
might be a bit stifling. But as I have seen with apps I have written, the
how is initially resisted but once people get used to it then they are able
to focus on the what.  For the purpose of successful organizational
relationships, I think the what is more important.  I don't think there are any
new environments that people naturally rapidly adapt to. Unless of course
their life depends on it. But then you have a high mortality rate. I on the
other hand allow people more time to adapt when using any software I
create (zero mortality, as far as I know).

All kinds of discussion could erupt on the importance of how we communicate
versus what we communicate.

John Hellier

----- Original Message ----
From: Michael Agar <[hidden email]>
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2007 1:03:44 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Real Time Organizational Modeling

I think John's on the right trail with his opening and closing  
comments about "communication, which could start with notions of  
"tagging" and agent communication languages but then would have to  
dive into the literature on discourse in the workplace. In the many  
projects I've been involved with over the last year or so, the  
problem he describes is the normal situation and difficult to figure  
out how to resolve.

Maybe thinking of the problem in terms of the whole organization is  
in the way here.

The problem with ?the whole organization? is that there are a variety  
of mental models distributed within and linked to it, to some extent  
constrained by shared task demands, to some extent still variable  
within task depending on the variety of biographies brought in by  
individual participants. Then another problem--the tasks themselves  
change in response to changes in the organizational environment, and  
the changes impact differentially on various organizational units  
with different rhythms. A third problem--Making the model is an  
example of Arthur?s self referential ?logical hole? for economics--
Making the model changes the organization that it is a model of.

The more the organization resembles the ?Complex Organization?  
celebrated in the literature, the more difficult these problems will  
be. Maybe the notion of a model of THE organization harks back to the  
old hierarchical command and control steady state etc model that so  
many try to change, except of course in government and the university  
(: So models yes, but of issues that can be reduced and clarified,  
probably not of an actual entire organization.

All of this leaves John's original problem unsolved. It will involve  
communication, but also issues of interests, power, distrust,  
prejudice, and others that also need to be addressed.

Like he said, a WedTech discussion wouldn't be such a bad idea.


Mike Agar
www.ethknoworks.com



On Jan 21, 2007, at 8:41 PM, John Hellier wrote:

> I am interested in this because of a clear
> problem my group has in communicating.
> This is manifested in an incredible lack of
> understanding of what everyone else is doing,
> even within a small sub-group.
>
> I work in an office of ~100 scientists and
> engineers. The composition of the group is
> broad in functionality and would make an
> interesting test case for trying to capture
> the dynamics of a larger group of scientists
> and engineers.
>
> The project is informal and not quite funded.
> So it is more a pursuit on the side for me.
> But I have been thinking about it for some
> time while working at a variety of organizations,
> all having the same problem.
>
> It may be naive of me but I was thinking of
> approaching this from the top-down with very high
> level actors that evolve over time as the
> model grows. The butterfly effect you speak of
> may not come into play since my initial
> parameters are very general. Initially, the model
> would describe communication channels between actors
> without getting to specific about how to handle what
> is being communicated. Over time the types of actions
> would be fleshed out for each line of communication
> and allowed to change over time. Not sure if
> this makes sense or not.
>
> Going forward I like to be able to create tools
> that capture every action that people do. For
> example, email should not be a stand alone
> application. As a person is creating an email,
> the content of the email should be linking to
> a central repository of organizational knowledge.
> Perhaps email as a tool is wrong for communicating
> in an organization. It just happens to be what
> we have and relatively expedient. A number of
> the applications I have written there replace
> communication channels that used to use email.
> For example, weekly status reports or work orders.
> Both of which were email activities but are
> now formal apps with database backends. These
> kinds of apps could be the start of tracking
> activities.
>
> By capturing all the actions of an organization,
> you could start to encode it. But you would need
> a host of new tools for how people communicate.
>
> A WedTech meeting would be cool.
>
> John Hellier
>
>
>
> --- Owen Densmore <owen at backspaces.net> wrote:
>
>> On Jan 20, 2007, at 5:58 PM, John Hellier wrote:
>>> Is anyone working on Real Time Organizational
>> Modeling where the
>>> model continually evolves based on changes in the
>> organization. All
>>> members of the organization contribute to the
>> changes even down to
>>> the creation of an email, how the email contents
>> affect the
>>> organization and how the recipients respond to the
>> email.
>>
>> Well, this sounds almost like TranSims in its
>> completeness and
>> depth!  Doug might have a suggestion how to approach
>> something quite
>> this detailed and ambitious.  Sounds like LOTS of
>> fun too!
>>
>> One problem in this approach is that it is
>> susceptive to the
>> Butterfly effect .. extreme dependency on initial
>> conditions.
>>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
>> This is not a huge problem, but does mean that
>> parameter scans,
>> design of experiments, and the like are needed to
>> make sure your
>> predictions are stable enough for your purpose.
>> Possibly computing a
>> Lyapunov exponent would be a useful tool, but I
>> confess to never
>> doing so with my models, blush!
>>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_exponent
>>
>>> What I am looking for is the encoding of an
>> organization such that
>>> as someone creates an email, an observer can watch
>> this happening
>>> in the model and see the effect. Maybe the email
>> has little or no
>>> impact or maybe it has a growing ripple effect.
>>
>> I like the word "encoding" here.  We've generally
>> built behavior via
>> algorithms, with a certain amount of stochasticity,
>> but have not, in
>> my mind, been quite formal enough.
>>
>> Carl: do you think policy modeling, and category
>> theory in general,
>> could handle encoding an organization?
>>
>>> This model should have a view of the entire
>> organization including
>>> tracking all actions performed. I realize that
>> trying to capture
>>> everything is a bit daunting but if possible it
>> could yield
>>> incredible insight into how organizations work.
>>
>> I'm curious: what is prompting this?  Is it a
>> possible project you
>> may be working on?  I ask because that might let you
>> do *some*
>> narrowing.
>>
>>> I generally feel that most decisions made in
>> organizations are made
>>> with such limited information that it is amazing
>> that most
>>> organizations don't fail. Or is that they are a
>> lot less brittle
>>> than one might imagine.
>>
>> No doubt about that!
>>
>> That said, one successful narrowing I know of is
>> Steve's
>> visualization of the pharmaceutical industry.
>> Rather than look at
>> the entire organization, the model looked at
>> projects and their life
>> cycle.  Its a very interesting viz and maybe you
>> could drop by the
>> office for a show & tell.
>>
>> A second stunt Steve pulled off was actually a
>> multi-organizational
>> simulation of the entire British criminal justice
>> system, including
>> the police, courts and more.  Not sure if this would
>> apply in your case.
>>
>>> I know that there is quite a bit of work done in
>> more bit size
>>> pieces. I'm mainly interested in the much larger
>> task of taking a
>>> company of 40K and tracking every action and
>> interaction. And then
>>> by extension, actions connected outside of the
>> organization. I
>>> know, huge, maybe impossible. Is there a way to
>> adapt social
>>> networking concepts to an organization to help
>> model it?
>>>
>>> Any ideas?
>>
>> I'd propose a WedTech meeting .. the lunch chats we
>> have at Redfish
>> on Wednesdays.  They often are pretty unformed and
>> brown baggy.  It'd
>> give you a way to talk through the modeling effort,
>> and get good
>> feedback from at least those that have tried such a
>> thing.
>>
>> I'd sure love to think about this a bit more.  For
>> example, one
>> approach might be to accept the bit sized pieces,
>> but then have them
>> interact.  That would make the problem more
>> approachable by
>> decomposition.
>>
>>> Thanks
>>>
>>> John Hellier
>>
>>
>>      -- Owen
>>
>> Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
>> http://www.friam.org
>>
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[David Breecker]

As a business school grad (and in particular, Harvard's), my intuition is
telling me that there are a number of researchers specializing in
organizations and technology who would be interested in these challenges.
So if any of you home in on a research project, it might be worth thinking
about this for collaborators or even (directly or indirectly) funding.
db

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Hellier" <[hidden email]>
To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" <friam at redfish.com>
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2007 8:29 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Real Time Organizational Modeling


I keep coming back to looking at the whole organization because at
least for me I don't feel comfortable isolating areas. I think you have to
consider the affect of all actors in an organization to understand it.
Of course this can be taken further and say what about the influences
from outside the organization. Don't they have a  significant impact?
Yes, but I think within an organization a lot of actions can be contained.

In reference to your problem #3 about "Making the model changes the
organization that it is a model of.", I would like the model to become in
a way the organization. The model would become the communication
channel for all activity. Any form of interaction: phone, email, verbal,
memo, purchase req, work order, etc. is integrated into this communication
channel.  This speaks to the need to formalize how we communicate. What
we communicate is still free and to a certain degree unrestrained. We just
use more agreed upon language to communicate. Yes, this sounds like it
might be a bit stifling. But as I have seen with apps I have written, the
how is initially resisted but once people get used to it then they are able
to focus on the what.  For the purpose of successful organizational
relationships, I think the what is more important.  I don't think there are
any
new environments that people naturally rapidly adapt to. Unless of course
their life depends on it. But then you have a high mortality rate. I on the
other hand allow people more time to adapt when using any software I
create (zero mortality, as far as I know).

All kinds of discussion could erupt on the importance of how we communicate
versus what we communicate.

John Hellier

----- Original Message ----
From: Michael Agar <[hidden email]>
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2007 1:03:44 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Real Time Organizational Modeling

I think John's on the right trail with his opening and closing
comments about "communication, which could start with notions of
"tagging" and agent communication languages but then would have to
dive into the literature on discourse in the workplace. In the many
projects I've been involved with over the last year or so, the
problem he describes is the normal situation and difficult to figure
out how to resolve.

Maybe thinking of the problem in terms of the whole organization is
in the way here.

The problem with "the whole organization" is that there are a variety
of mental models distributed within and linked to it, to some extent
constrained by shared task demands, to some extent still variable
within task depending on the variety of biographies brought in by
individual participants. Then another problem--the tasks themselves
change in response to changes in the organizational environment, and
the changes impact differentially on various organizational units
with different rhythms. A third problem--Making the model is an
example of Arthur's self referential "logical hole" for economics--
Making the model changes the organization that it is a model of.

The more the organization resembles the "Complex Organization"
celebrated in the literature, the more difficult these problems will
be. Maybe the notion of a model of THE organization harks back to the
old hierarchical command and control steady state etc model that so
many try to change, except of course in government and the university
(: So models yes, but of issues that can be reduced and clarified,
probably not of an actual entire organization.

All of this leaves John's original problem unsolved. It will involve
communication, but also issues of interests, power, distrust,
prejudice, and others that also need to be addressed.

Like he said, a WedTech discussion wouldn't be such a bad idea.


Mike Agar
www.ethknoworks.com



On Jan 21, 2007, at 8:41 PM, John Hellier wrote:

> I am interested in this because of a clear
> problem my group has in communicating.
> This is manifested in an incredible lack of
> understanding of what everyone else is doing,
> even within a small sub-group.
>
> I work in an office of ~100 scientists and
> engineers. The composition of the group is
> broad in functionality and would make an
> interesting test case for trying to capture
> the dynamics of a larger group of scientists
> and engineers.
>
> The project is informal and not quite funded.
> So it is more a pursuit on the side for me.
> But I have been thinking about it for some
> time while working at a variety of organizations,
> all having the same problem.
>
> It may be naive of me but I was thinking of
> approaching this from the top-down with very high
> level actors that evolve over time as the
> model grows. The butterfly effect you speak of
> may not come into play since my initial
> parameters are very general. Initially, the model
> would describe communication channels between actors
> without getting to specific about how to handle what
> is being communicated. Over time the types of actions
> would be fleshed out for each line of communication
> and allowed to change over time. Not sure if
> this makes sense or not.
>
> Going forward I like to be able to create tools
> that capture every action that people do. For
> example, email should not be a stand alone
> application. As a person is creating an email,
> the content of the email should be linking to
> a central repository of organizational knowledge.
> Perhaps email as a tool is wrong for communicating
> in an organization. It just happens to be what
> we have and relatively expedient. A number of
> the applications I have written there replace
> communication channels that used to use email.
> For example, weekly status reports or work orders.
> Both of which were email activities but are
> now formal apps with database backends. These
> kinds of apps could be the start of tracking
> activities.
>
> By capturing all the actions of an organization,
> you could start to encode it. But you would need
> a host of new tools for how people communicate.
>
> A WedTech meeting would be cool.
>
> John Hellier
>
>
>
> --- Owen Densmore <owen at backspaces.net> wrote:
>
>> On Jan 20, 2007, at 5:58 PM, John Hellier wrote:
>>> Is anyone working on Real Time Organizational
>> Modeling where the
>>> model continually evolves based on changes in the
>> organization. All
>>> members of the organization contribute to the
>> changes even down to
>>> the creation of an email, how the email contents
>> affect the
>>> organization and how the recipients respond to the
>> email.
>>
>> Well, this sounds almost like TranSims in its
>> completeness and
>> depth!  Doug might have a suggestion how to approach
>> something quite
>> this detailed and ambitious.  Sounds like LOTS of
>> fun too!
>>
>> One problem in this approach is that it is
>> susceptive to the
>> Butterfly effect .. extreme dependency on initial
>> conditions.
>>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
>> This is not a huge problem, but does mean that
>> parameter scans,
>> design of experiments, and the like are needed to
>> make sure your
>> predictions are stable enough for your purpose.
>> Possibly computing a
>> Lyapunov exponent would be a useful tool, but I
>> confess to never
>> doing so with my models, blush!
>>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_exponent
>>
>>> What I am looking for is the encoding of an
>> organization such that
>>> as someone creates an email, an observer can watch
>> this happening
>>> in the model and see the effect. Maybe the email
>> has little or no
>>> impact or maybe it has a growing ripple effect.
>>
>> I like the word "encoding" here.  We've generally
>> built behavior via
>> algorithms, with a certain amount of stochasticity,
>> but have not, in
>> my mind, been quite formal enough.
>>
>> Carl: do you think policy modeling, and category
>> theory in general,
>> could handle encoding an organization?
>>
>>> This model should have a view of the entire
>> organization including
>>> tracking all actions performed. I realize that
>> trying to capture
>>> everything is a bit daunting but if possible it
>> could yield
>>> incredible insight into how organizations work.
>>
>> I'm curious: what is prompting this?  Is it a
>> possible project you
>> may be working on?  I ask because that might let you
>> do *some*
>> narrowing.
>>
>>> I generally feel that most decisions made in
>> organizations are made
>>> with such limited information that it is amazing
>> that most
>>> organizations don't fail. Or is that they are a
>> lot less brittle
>>> than one might imagine.
>>
>> No doubt about that!
>>
>> That said, one successful narrowing I know of is
>> Steve's
>> visualization of the pharmaceutical industry.
>> Rather than look at
>> the entire organization, the model looked at
>> projects and their life
>> cycle.  Its a very interesting viz and maybe you
>> could drop by the
>> office for a show & tell.
>>
>> A second stunt Steve pulled off was actually a
>> multi-organizational
>> simulation of the entire British criminal justice
>> system, including
>> the police, courts and more.  Not sure if this would
>> apply in your case.
>>
>>> I know that there is quite a bit of work done in
>> more bit size
>>> pieces. I'm mainly interested in the much larger
>> task of taking a
>>> company of 40K and tracking every action and
>> interaction. And then
>>> by extension, actions connected outside of the
>> organization. I
>>> know, huge, maybe impossible. Is there a way to
>> adapt social
>>> networking concepts to an organization to help
>> model it?
>>>
>>> Any ideas?
>>
>> I'd propose a WedTech meeting .. the lunch chats we
>> have at Redfish
>> on Wednesdays.  They often are pretty unformed and
>> brown baggy.  It'd
>> give you a way to talk through the modeling effort,
>> and get good
>> feedback from at least those that have tried such a
>> thing.
>>
>> I'd sure love to think about this a bit more.  For
>> example, one
>> approach might be to accept the bit sized pieces,
>> but then have them
>> interact.  That would make the problem more
>> approachable by
>> decomposition.
>>
>>> Thanks
>>>
>>> John Hellier
>>
>>
>>      -- Owen
>>
>> Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
>> http://www.friam.org
>>
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org




============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org