Can you handle the truth - part I
Can you handle the truth - part I
Last year I read ‘The Ghost of the Executed Engineer’ by Loren Graham. The book focuses on Peter Palchinsky, a Russian engineer, who served both the Tsarist and Stalinist regimes. Using Palchinsky as a proxy for the Soviet Union, Graham proposes that it was the Soviet’s lack of appetite to receiving (negative) feedback that lead to a paucity of innovation in the centrally managed economy, and its ultimate failure.. In CE terms, solutions to complex problems were always treated as fail-safe, rather than safe-to-fail. The claim may be exaggerated, but should not be dismissed too quickly. Peter Palchinsky loved presenting damming conclusions, but did so too gleefully. He seems never to have read the body language of the recipients of the feedback, and this lack of interpersonal awareness eventually cost him his life.
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Simon Luntengineering, feedback loops, science, stress inoculationComment
Praise the Lord! We are a musical nation
Praise the Lord! We are a musical nation
In business we spend a considerable amount of time discussing where we are going. Yet when we introduced to other homo narrans, we seem to spend a lot of time navigating toward an understanding of the each other through references to aspects of personal history. We display metaphorically our geographic, social, intellectual, even spiritual roots. As Snowden points out, we re-establish extended familial bonds at births, deaths and marriages through the re-telling share (and sometimes embellished) family sagas. It seems to give us context about the range of conversations we can going forward; they can launching points for oral adventures, or traffic lights preventing collisions. It can of course lead to initial mis-conceptions, but I find course correction easily obtained. For example; I am Welsh, but I don’t sing. Or rather I do sing, but lustfully, not tunefully. My race does not have a genetic disposition for singing, but my culture does engage itself and identify itself through this medium—and there can’t be too many nations whose pop musicians complete their concert by leading the audience in hymn singing.
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Simon LuntComment
Can using complicated tools to solve a complex problem make you ill?
Can using complicated tools to solve a complex problem make you ill?
My initial contact with Cognitive Edge was stimulated by a question; does anyone out there have experience of applying a complex adaptive system approach to business? The root of the question arose from an earlier one of “how do you build bodily health” and curiosity as to whether the answer to that question had insight for building organisational health. I had developed an understanding of the physiology of the human body through research and self-experimentation, and came to conclusion that our bodies are non-homeostatic open systems, but was surprised that a big chunk of medical science is derived from model of closed-loop steady state. Thus we manage this Complex system with Complicated and Simple tools (to our detriment) , and the analogy to Business seemed worthy of further investigation.
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Simon LuntComplex, cynefin, genotype, healthComment
Dots and patterns: how to make your competitors colour blind
Dots and patterns: how to make your competitors colour blind
An alternative title for this piece could have been “Narrative research—a practical introduction.” As stated previously, most of my clients are hard-nosed and commercially-orientated, and typically prefer to see a cause-and-effect relationship between spending and a return. They often have a science or engineering background, and have a predilection for anything that can be measured and spreadsheeted—preferably with error bars. They have huge intellectual horsepower and readily assimilate the concepts around complex adaptive systems, but less readily want to deal with the attending implications of managing ambiguity.
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Simon LuntCustomer R&D, NPS, dots and patterns Comment
Create the demand to participate
Create the demand to participate
I’m not sure if I always get the whole ‘change management’ thing. I have been in full-time employment for over 30 years, and I have seen basic problem-solving or simply getting stuff done, be cordoned off for execution by a recipe-following, jargon-laden club whose membership have derailed or even prevented business improvement. I have seen real movement, real change and genuine heart-felt challenge ignored, overrun or dismissed—to the detriment of many organisations. Let me be blunt. I have seen some ‘Change Management’ projects snuff out feedback loops; I have seem them absolve leaders from explaining weak decisions; I have seen Change Managers override warning signs, and even driven creaky transactional processes into chaos. Yesterday I heard a Change Management professional decrying a group of lathe operators who had successfully developed and implemented an improved manufacturing workflow by ‘chatting over tea,’ instead of forming a guiding coalition and then adhering to the remaining 6 or 7 steps—as per the CM manual issued in February. I kid you not.
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Simon Lunt Comment
The Price is Right?
The Price is Right?
It will be difficult to apply ‘probe-sense-respond’ in business because the environment subconsciously prohibits experimentation. That would be my conclusion based on fifteen years of encouraging clients to practice safe-to-fail problem-solving.
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Simon LuntComment
How to manage Chaos appropriately - a case study
How to manage Chaos appropriately - a case study
I was asked recently to provide an example of how to deal with problems in the Chaotic domain. The attached 12 minute documentary* provides a vivid contemporary case study. The video focuses on the use of watercraft to aid the removal of hundreds of thousands of people who were stranded on Lower Manhattan at the time of the attack on the Twin Towers. Within less than an hour of the attack, none of the common commuter escape routes were available. The subways, bridges and tunnels had all been closed, and for office workers pushed to the extreme edges of Manhattan by collapsing buildings, escape by water seemed the only option.
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Simon Luntchaos, complexity, problem solvingComment
Business Functions have brains too
Business Functions have brains too
Business Functions (IT, Legal, HR,Communications etc) sometimes feel like poor second cousins to the Commercial Unit when asked to participate in the corporate strategy process. This should not be the case. Functions should be vigorous and confident when communicating the value they can bring to business performance. But in so doing, they need to be clear on the impact they have upon their clients, and their strategic thinking should be as lucid and incisive as their commercial colleagues.
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Simon Luntcoherent, functions, leadership, problem solving, strategyComment
Clarity and Simplicity: the essential requirements of strategy
Clarity and Simplicity: the essential requirements of strategy

We have a statement to make.  

Over the past two weeks we have had a number of requests asking us to provide our view on the distinction between, vision, values, mission, intent etc.

We could provide the definitions.  We have a library of strategy books written by well-informed, intellectually muscular writers, each giving their shade on the rainbow of perspectives.

Here's the problem.  Folks want black and white.

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Simon Luntstrategy Comment
"Are the benefits greater than the cost of the spin-off problem?”
"Are the benefits greater than the cost of the spin-off problem?”
If you resolve a problem successfully, then you generate a spin-off as a consequence of your success. However, the skills and talent necessary for the former may not be the most appropriate for the resolution of the latter. For example, reducing global high overhead costs by consolidating the back office operations may reduce fixed expenses, but it produces the spin-off problem of reduced flexibility in response to local pricing and product opportunities.
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Simon LuntComment
How the French butcher saved the working horse. Why the solution to a spin-off problem might be under your nose!
How the French butcher saved the working horse. Why the solution to a spin-off problem might be under your nose!
For every solution there is a spin off-problem. Horses were once effective work animals. But they were expensive, labour-intensive and prone to sickness. The tractor avoided these problems. But overtime, the tractor too has produced spin-off problems. Tractors have compacted land, are unable to tackle challenging terrain, and issue discharge which compromises environmental legislation on certain crops. Working horses have come to the rescue. Now equipped with GPS, horses do, in certain circumstances, yield higher returns on the land versus tractors. But these breds of working horses would have died out had it not been for the butcher. What are the spin-off problems arising from your success, and how can you manage them, before they manage you?
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Simon Luntleadership, problem solvingComment
When the complicated becomes complex and is treated simply`
When the complicated becomes complex and is treated simply`

Here is a minor but amusing example of what happens when some event disruptes a complicated process and makes it complex.  

A healthy confident organisation responds appropriately. It relaxes,delegates and trusts teams that 'do'. The focus is doing the right thing.

Frightened organisations focus on avoiding mistakes internally. Their response is to tense the corporate body. They become  rigid and more restrictive when they should be doing the reverse—loosening the boundaries (within restrictions), and delegating the capability to front line problem solver.

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LeadershipSimon Luntculture, leadershipComment