At an emotional level I feel pleased that a behaviour that I find natural (i.e. to dip into different work groups or areas of study and share ideas between them) and feel to be one of the more useful of my talents is shown to have measurable benefits. If anything it prompts the networker’s perennial question – “which groups haven’t I tapped into yet?”

In a similar vein, serendipitously this comes into view: Caves, Clusters, and Weak Ties: The Six Degrees World of Inventors on the way that researchers can bring in new ideas to a company through their weak ties with other technologists.

Traditional models of group thinking seem based on me trying to cement my well-formed brick of thought to your well-formed brick. Increasingly, I find much more satisfaction in sharing the less-formed ideas and responses I have to conversations. I sense that by doing so, it’s possible to create some sense of joint intelligence that can get beyond existing mental models.
I suppose that my blogging process tends towards bricks, as I write down ideas and get to tweak and edit them and improve them, to make them more palatable to the outside world.

For me this is the nub of why I need a blog plus me-writable and world-writable wikis.

Blog posts by their nature are a snapshot at a point in time and therefore imply some form of stasis. Wiki pages however are timeless and hence never finished, always open to flux.

I’ve found the writing style that has started to evolve since I had this combination of tools is to scatter thoughts around the wiki-spaces until some juxtaposition forms that is sufficiently clear to create a blog-entry. The blog-entry becomes a picture of my thinking at a point in time and therefore essential to mapping out some kind of path. The state of the wiki pages continues to evolve – by looking where there is activity you can see which parts of my mental associations are currently to the forefront of attention.

This reminded me of the work published by Chris Argyris, Peter Senge and others on the [bliki]LadderOfInference[/bliki] . I wonder how we could encapsulate this thinking into the world of the blog?

This is 123 pages, so I’ve only just started to work through it, but on first reading it’s fascinating – you know the “ah ha” moment when someone codifies stuff that you’ve been doing intuitively…

Certainly I recognised many patterns here as things I and others have learned the hard way as ways of introducing our ideas into the daily life of the organisations we work with – and I think many of us will also be able to learn from it.

The patterns are grouped into the following categories:

* Roles
* Events
* Keeping the Idea Visible
* Dealing with Sceptics
* Early Activities
* Reaching Out
* Convincing Others
* Teaching and Learning the Idea
* Long-term activities

I’m sure this will be a great resource for coaching – an inherent assumption of the NLP approach is that if you can identifiy the patterns under a successful piece of behaviour you can teach it to others.

1. Focus knowledge and learning systems on ‘know-who’, not ‘know-how’
2. Introduce new social network enablement software and weblogs to capture the ‘know-who’.
3. Keep only selected, highly-filtered knowledge in your central repositories.
4. Don’t overlook the value of plain-old ‘data’.
5. The bibliography may be more valuable than the document itself.
6. Don’t wait for people to look for it, send it out, using ‘killer’ channels.
7. Create an internal market for your offerings by giving valuable stuff away.

The entire CRT(Current Reality Tree) so far can be seen in this PDF

Having discovered the Twiki Draw plugin, I think a wiki with a drawing tool could well be the perfect tool for developing this sort of exchange…

In other words by extracting the key concepts from the book into a CRT it should be possible to graphically display and test the book’s argument at the same time as comprehending it.

In the first chapter Argyris gives some strong clues about the sort of Undesirable Effects (UDEs) we might see in the real world…

Argyris gives examples of seven symptoms commonly seen in organisations:

1. Actions intended to increase understanding and trust often produce misunderstanding and mistrust
2. Blaming others or the system for poor decisions
3. Organisational inertia: The tried and proven ways of doing things dominate organisational life
4. Upward communications for difficult issues are often lacking
5. Budget ganmes are necessary evils
6. People do not behave reasonably, even when it is in their best interest
7. The management team is often a myth

He then suggests that for rational, well-meaning human beings to consistently create these sort of problems there must be something wrong with their thinking processes, especially when dealing with business issues that are embarrassing or threatening – they must be using what he calls “Defensive Reasoning” – the three symptoms of which are:

• Individuals hold premises the validity of which is questionable yet they think it is not
• Individuals make inferences that do not necessarily follow from the premises yet they think they do
• Individuals reach conclusions that they believe they have tested carefully yet they have not (because the way they have been framed makes them untestable)

Using the terminology of the TOC thinking processes I’m going to take these as the initial UDEs
Argyris states that the causes of this defensive reasoning are four-fold:

1. The human programs held by the people concerned about dealing with embarrassment or threat
2. The fact that they use those programs skillfully
3. The organisational defence routines that result
4. The organisational “fancy footwork” used to protect the defensive routines

We can use those UDEs and causes to start making a skeleton CRT.

At the moment the the logical jumps between the entities seem too large to start plotting cause-effect arrows; as I work through the following chapters of the book I’ll develop the tree in line with Argyris’s argument.

Earlier articles:

* Invisible dogma and learning organisations
* Learning Organisations and TOC pt 2

Confirmation that my intuition may have taken me down a fruitful path comes from Chapter 1 “Puzzles”:

“The players in these studies also take for granted policies and practices that are contrary to their managerial stewardship. They bypass root causes. They equate being realistic with being simplistic. They make all these actions undiscussable. They thus wind up creating a world in which the bad is tied up with the good so that producing the latter guarantees the former. Finally all of this is done with the best of intentions”

Which also sounds like the sort of situation a CRT was designed to explore!