reflections on Kotter’s change model and appreciative inquiry

Change Management process ITIL (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Should organizations be looking at how to change themselves to adapt to an environment or should they look for environments in which their organization is prone to succeed and stay with what they know?

Those who believe in the latter approach, are advocates of the core competency model.

Kotter‘s model is concerned about minimizing error or avoiding it altogether. Can his model be reconciled with the positivist approach of appreciative inquiry?

Kotter’s model seems to emphasize the top-down approach through leadership, beginning with vision and having the leaders drive the change direction and change management. Only after the vision is established does he talk about communicating for buy-in. Does this bypass stakeholders for the sake of efficiency? Is there room in the Kotter model for good ideas from the bottom to dictate the direction of the organization?

Is it reasonable to expect that people at the bottom levels of the organization have sufficient strategic insight to be able to offer good advice on strategy?  In other words, is everybody’s opinion equally valuable?

In the face of resistance, how do we know when it’s time to persevere and push through or time to adapt?  One man’s persistence is another man’s stubbornness.

One of the principles of action research when it comes to making change stick is the importance of making changes in infrastructures and policies. That doesn’t seem to be part of Kotter’s eighth step. Is that an oversight?

When is innovation the enemy of efficiency? How do we know whether to prefer the new change over improving our current process through standardization and eliminating waste?

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weekend report review June 18, 2011

“]

Cover of Sideways [Blu-ray

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxKBpxlGtnE

main themes: playing defense as the bearish trend is now officially strong sdn we are on the boundary of a Volatile Sideways market

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charts of interest link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSJIZMLbD6s charts of interest link

daily report review link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHnn5XepgDw daily report review link

Trading is like shooting…

in rifle marksmanship, we talk about the “natural respiratory pause” the moment of balanced hesitation between the exhale and inhale during normal breathing;

this is when we teach the shooter to squeeze the trigger, when the body is at maximum stability

there are 2 moments: after the inhale is complete, but before the exhale begins; and after the exhale is complete but before the inhale is complete

now, think about the metaphorical relationship between rate/type of breathing and the amount of relative volatility

a bottom tail, then, corresponds to “last gasp”

May 04, 2011: pre mkt notes: silver off sharply overseas

preparing to manage our silver short trade in ZSL, which looks favorable right now with spot silver down sharply in the futures after a night of weakness.

we are already pushing the historical boundaries for corrections over a 5 and 10 day period so at this extreme condition further sharp moves are expected

Sharing my BrainMode power report

wanted to share out my BrainMode power (BMp) report.

BRAIN MODE power for Professional Development for Ken Long

Quite a few folks had expressed interest in learning more about BMp, so I thought I would share mine and how I will use it in my trading practice

As/if you read further, Notice the auditory, visual, kinesthetic language; notice the implicit and explicit beliefs…

===================================================================

I took it this morning, when in a trading frame of mind

To me, the market is a learning laboratory for self-discovery; It allows us to experience its nature thru whispers, glimpses, and nudges in the results we get from our trading.

I have become even more auditory than I was 2 years ago when I first took this instrument; i attribute this to doing more recordings for Youtube for trading and teaching, and to the amount of time I have been spending in my doctoral program reading complex material. As I read, I hear the words and concepts in my head, I see how they connect (or not) to my cognitive/emotional maps, as I try to fit them into my paradigms, worldviews, cognitive  word-nets/cognitive maps.

I conceptualize top-down and then fiddle to see how the eaches fit in, listening for reactions, looking for jagged edges & anomolies, feeling for friction, tension and goodness of fit. I test to see how it works locally and then scale up to listen and look for effects across other domains, and see how the new “whole load” is distributed across my load-bearing members.

I will go thru this report in detail over the next 2 weeks and  use it as a lens to compare to my trading practice, in order to uncover more insights about how I may better plan, prepare, execute and reflect upon my results

The BrainMode Power for Professional Development comes with a series of 14 weekly followups with additional insights  and exercises, tips and recommendations that can be applied, in order systematically deepen my self awareness of learning styles, preferences, my beliefs about them and how they intersect with and are manifested in my trading practice.

Calibrating my practice, as it were

Each of the folks coming to the research weekend and the live trading week have been sent their links to take the instrument and have a chance to play along and learn.

I will be keeping my notes in my learning journal, and will use that to focus my efforts.

My learning journal has 3 columns:

1. The event/experience/insight in rich detail

2. What I think and feel about it, and how it connects to my world view

3. What I will do about it

These reflect the Kolb Experiential Learning Model in a condensed form, one of the leading adult learning models in use these days.

Excellence at work

Image via Wikipedia

I sure wish i had said this:

#6: Malcolm Gladwell is right, it takes 10,000 hours.

I don’t think I ever appreciated what it takes to just stay current and, in hindsight, never comprehended what it takes to become good. I mean really good.

Not to be overly dramatic but. . . blood, sweat and tears.

Most blogs die in 30 days, most Twitter accounts are full of crap and have few followers, most of us never read books, most of us rarely curate a really good list of RSS feeds and then read every post, most of us will never engage in a meaningful online debate, most of us will not start a website and care and feed it and implement 15 tools every single year purely to learn and push the universe known to us, most of us never consider taking a class or two to learn new skills, most of us refuse to work a few hours extra every week, most of us refuse to experiment with what makes us uncomfortable.

And yet it takes all that to be good at what you do.

Do the job you were hired to do as well as you possibly can, regardless of whether it is a dream job or not. Then in small and big ways, figure out how to spend an extra five hours a week on you. Just five.

He is discussing web analytics, but is really discussing right thought and right action and right attitude;  he is nudging his way to excellence, sharpening his tools daily. admirable and inspiring

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An executive summary of complexity theory

Image via Wikipedia

An executive summary of complexity theory

Johnson, N. (2007). Simply complexity: A clear guide to complexity theory. OneWorld Publications, Oxford.

Futurists are in the business of providing a structured vision of the future that includes variables, dynamics, processes, themes and values by which the future will unfold and how we can be successful getting there in our  journey along the way.

Every futurist I’ve encountered describes the increasing complexity of today’s world and the certainty that the complexity will only increase going forward. I thought it would be useful to summarize the best book I’ve found so far that describes complexity theory in a useful way.

Complexity theory is a discipline that ties together phenomenon like: traffic congestion, the collapse of financial markets, avalanches, terrorist attacks and networks, pandemic viruses and cancer.

There is understandably senses definition for a theory which proposes to manage the unmanageable, or cleanly defined the undefinable.  Neil Johnson offers the following working definition which is a reasonable start point for approaching this topic:

[complexity theory is ] “…the study of the phenomenon which emerged from a collection of interacting objects.” (Johnson, 2007, p.3)

The theory is especially concerned with groups of actors that are interacting by competing for resources.

It’s fair to ask of the theory of complexity: will it help us understand, predict and control complex situations?

Emergence is an important topic: it deals with behaviors and or qualities that arise without warning, without apparent central control and are properties of the entire system and environment and not of individual components. The wetness of water can be considered an emergent property or the flocking behavior of a large group of birds. Both have qualities and properties that cannot be found in individual agents.

The idea of emergence includes the idea of emergent design through adaptation to dynamic conditions. Consider the case of DNA versus intelligent design. Evolution by adaptive DNA is without apparent central control and develops without warning and usually in unpredictable ways with unforeseeable magnitudes of outcomes;  intelligent design takes the opposite position in every way: central control according to a pre-established plan that goes according to design with foreseeable and specified outcomes.

Johnson offers the following components and behaviors that seem to apply to most complex systems and situations.

Components:

1. The system contains a collection of many interacting objects.
2. The behavior of agents/objects is affected by memory or feedback.
3. Objects/agents can adapt their strategies based on memory or feedback.
4. Exists in an open system, affected by the environment.

Behaviors:

1. the system appears to be alive.
2. Filled with emergent phenomenon that are surprising and can be extreme.
3. Absence of an invisible hand or central controller.
4. There is a mix of orderly and disorderly behavior.

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Reflections on strategic leadership

Image via Wikipedia

This weekend I really enjoyed a podcast from a current strategic leadership text on the subject of emerging trends in global strategic leadership. Here are the slides: CurrentTrendsInStrategicManagement

I compared the discussion in slide 2 “new realities in the 21^st century” to the military’s formal description of the “Operational Environment” which we use to frame all of our inquiries into requirements for a new warfighting concept, which in turn drives our analysis and assessment of a need for new doctrine, organizations, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, and facilities (which we have artfully named DOTMLPF)

This analytical framework I think is actually “pre-analytical”. It takes the form of an assertion which largely goes unchallenged or, more precisely, unverified. We take it as given with limited real discussion. This is important because it shapes all future discourse, because it creates a framework for understanding the world. When previous iterations of this framing cast the world in terms of digital technology and a belief in the power if information to define and contain the world, we pursued strategies that took these assertions as given, and we launched initiatives that valued technological solutions, and de-valued (therefore under-resourced) things like human intelligence, social networks, and war among the people. Much of our military difficulties of the last 10 years can be traced back to this decision on initial framing.

I say this simply to say that what we take as given becomes increasingly important in the way we choose and then evaluate our strategies. It is normal to decide that deviations from the plan are someone’s fault or a problem with execution, rather than a problem with the initial framing. This is why I find Dr Boje’s use of critical storytelling in narrative inquiry to be so rich with possibilities for understanding and/or appreciating our world.

Back to the comparison of the text to the military Operational Environment (OE). The OE description is the military way of approaching an integration of the elements of national power, which we describe as  DIME (diplomacy, information, military, economics).  We think of strategy as a way to understand and then integrate these sources of power in support of the national interest, which is essentially and ultimately a political decision.

I found that everything in Slide 2 was contained within the OE. What I find in the OE that’s not reflected in slide 2, includes these important pressures, and conditions:

• The importance and reality of AIDS
• The rising importance of Africa as sn engagement area for regional and global economic powers
• The increasingly growing importance of commodities as economic leverage points
• The growth in number, size, and influence of non-state, and quasi-state actors
• WMDs and terrorism
• Issues associated with immigration, free and partially free-trade
• Human rights as a public relations
• Nations developing their own competitive advantages
• The increasing importance of sovereign wealth funds
• Currencies as weapons and leverage points in increasingly tactical time
• Reduction of slack in interconnected digital financial markets
• The use of political events to achieve economic advantage
• Financialization of the  US economy
• Debt bombs in the G20
• Combination positioning of Russia as simultaneously 1^st and 3d world country
• National autonomy in an era of Islamic emigration (Sharia law)
• Evolution of mature counties to entitlement societies
• Increasing urbanization of the world

Some recent readings that I found pertinent to this presentation include Nicholas Taleb’s discussion of the Fourth Quadrant (available upon request) which discusses the region where conventional statistical and probabilistic reasoning breakdown and become harmful. I also found Clay Shirky’s discussion of societies that have evolved a degree of complexity that cannot be rolled back to simpler times. Reminds me of the problem of growing a business too fast, to the point where it cannot “un-scale” effectively in a world of increasingly volatile conditions. I have been thinking of this as a need for a strategy of modular scalability

Finally, I like the idea of leadership and visioning as an offer to “subscribe” to a potential future, which can provisionally attract capital, loyalty, customers in waves with degrees of commitment and confidence. Apple seems to be built on this model; we’ll see how important “Antenna-gate” is to their core constituency, and the degree to which Apple is a cult of personality vs a robust business model

Overall I really liked the podcast and think it gets a lot of things right in the speculations about the importance and consequences of the rise of complexity and uncertainty

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