Complexity, Agility and Resilience.

I have been thinking about blogs and blogging lately. I have not been blogging in a long time. But I have something interesting to share and I have to present this material tomorrow so…

I have been thinking about something I recently read in John Robb’s timely (and awesome) book Brave New War. In chapter 6 (Open Source Warfare) he talks about swarming techniques both new and old and how disparate groups of “actors” use Stigmergic signaling as a basis for coordinating collective action without central leadership. Essentially stigmergic systems use simple environmental signals to communicate and coordinate the actions of individuals and groups. To quote from the book:

These signals are used to coordinate scalable, robust and dynamic activity. This activity is often much more intelligent than the actions capable by the individual actors.

He further goes on to discuss the possibility of potential for Open Source Warfare networks to exhibit signs of emergent intelligence. He asks the questions – can the interactions of the participants in the bazaar of violence create in their network a form of “macro-intelligence” which could allow the network to tackle strategic goals.

I would tend to think that complex systems like the ones in the Iraq insurgency or like what could be created in correctly created organizational culture could yield greater intelligence than the sum of its parts.

I think blogs (= stygmergic signalling) are a low cost vehicle for coordinating groups using minimal bandwidth with maximum impact and will if used correctly (defined as how they are instantiated in the orientation of the culture they are embedded within) will likely result in a more complex and effective behavior set for the actors in the blogging ecosystem. Furthermore I also think blogs are a fine way to build organizational intuitive competence (expertise).

I am thinking about advocating for the usage of  blogs in my firm for a few key organizational transactions:

• Project status and update – once a week (or more often) asking each project participant and the projects leadership to write a quick post including both qualitative and quantitative project and task information. Examples could be notes about our customers and also upcoming due dates, percentage completes etc. If we established a template(s) then others could easily consume this information when joining new projects or wishing to monitor or gain insights. Furthermore each team member could read their buddies posts to gain a continuous baseline of knowledge. Do this enough and a finger tip feel for project status and state would be developed by all participants. Bonus points for putting it all on an RSS reader.
• Lessons learned, Pre-mortems and technical challenges could be blogged. If you mandated and encouraged both your team affinity groups (for instance all your PMs or Developers) and organizational affinity groups to blog  about their experiences you would share wisdom (refined and effective mental models) which could lead to building collective expertise (yielding organizational intuitive competence in time).
• Organizational alignment could be built by having each level of leadership blog about present intent and focus at each level of organizational structure. Starting at the team level and going up – each level of leadership could be encouraged and required to post timely blog posts which would in aggregate form a running set of intent statements showcasing the ongoing evolution of organizational strategy. Each level of leadership could then easily compare their statements both up and down to verify their present alignment with organizational strategy and goals (defined missions and the current desired future state).

What would it take to make this happen? A blogging platform would need to be installed, each project and/or program would need a blog, each person in your organization would need a blog, some templates would need to be generated and the hard part… the proper incentives would need to be put in place.

Further reading:

Communicating Intent and Imparting Presence

Evolution of Commander’s Intent in the US Military

Multicellular Computing: Stigmergy — the secret of complex organization