Introducing The Fish Pond

The world is changing dramatically, fast and beyond everything we have seen. Globalization and technology have introduced more diversity, more dynamics and more interdependencies than ever before. This provides project management, and management in general, with a challenge. How to survive in this environment? Together with dr Ali Anani, I am taking on this challenge with an attempt to provide some structure and some answers for management practitioners.

We call this effort: The Fish Pond: Complexity of Management.

In essence, we believe the answer to adapt successfully in our new, ever morphing world is to have a flexible mind, a brain filled with many models of the world. We would almost claim that being open minded is the key to survival. To help you create some new and exciting ways to look at the world and business situations, we introduce the Fish Pond Metaphor. We opt to go for the fish pond as a metaphor for the new world.

The Managers New Brain

Every project is unique. Circumstances are always different. Different people. Different goals. To lead a project to success, you need to tailor your approach to the situation. To be able to do this you got to have a flexible mind. One that can switch from one world view to another; one that can use one set of assumptions right now, and an entire different way of thinking in a couple of minutes.

If you are trying to run a country and you have a communist background, you probably are trying to regulate, centralize and formalize as much as possible. You want to control every individual behavior in order to control the whole system. When you are raised with a more laissez-faire world view, you can adopt a reign that is totally governed by the free market. Nothing is centrally controlled, everything will take care of itself. Needless to say that both world views have drawbacks and advantages.

In our world every country has its own customized version of one of the world views, or something on the gliding scale between them. The successful Project Manager can look at his project and assess the situation using different world views, one in which control is the answer to everything, and one where let it go is the holy grail. And if he trains his mind enough, he can even use a mental slider to get to the spots between the two extremes.

Why A Fish Pond

The Fish Pond Metaphor is not one coherent picture of a particular pond. It is merely a collection of narratives and analogies centered around a common theme, the fish pond. We choose the Fish Pond for more than one reason, but mainly because it is an ecosystem. An ecosystem let us describe our main problem with reality called dynamic complexity. In our normal line of thinking, we think about an event A that happens, and that causes something else, say B. The occurrence of B might trigger some event C. A nice linear cause-and-effect chain. With dynamic complexity this is exactly what is not taking place: cause and effect are not close in space and time, and therefor, very difficult for us to see.

Our Postings

Introduction to The Fish Pond at University of California Extension Santa Cruz
Recommended

Complexity of Management
The first post we did in this series, which explains the effects of dynamic complexity, how best practices can become worst practices under changing environments, and how the fish pond illustrates both.

Our Need For Metaphors
To be able to handle change you need to have a flexible brain. Metaphors, like the Fish Pond, are a great technique to train the brain. However, not every metaphor has positive effects.

The Fish Pond Metaphor
In this post we connect the global trends that are taking place in our world to the Fish Pond. What is happening and why does this make a fish pond a proper mental image?

The Big Pond: Global Village
We are approaching projects and organizations as groups of people interacting together. It is a complex adaptive system in which the agents are formed by people. In this article we look at why people interact in the first place, and how this leads to the emerging of groups. The themes discussed are why people behave the way they do, and the creation of economic and social clusters.

Filter And Drainage – Trust Running Through The Team
This is a good sample of a specific narrative surrounding the Fish Pond metaphor. It makes the analogy between the filtering and drainage of a pond, and the need for trust and elimination of toxic employees in a project.

Indirect Control By Just Looking
Just looking at employees or fish can already have an impact on behavior. Again the similarities are striking.

Fish And OODA Loops
This posting is an introduction to the two following articles about OODA loops. It was written after these postings as it was apparent that some additional explanation was needed. We really urge you to read this, and the next two OODA articles carefully as they form an essential part of how to adapt to changes.

Driving On The OODA Highway
Grap a chair and read this one when you have a clear mind. We make the connection between the availability of information and the use of the OODA loop as an essential skill to adapt to the environment. The OODA loop was first conceived by the US military as a way to structure the process to adapt on a battlefield.

Social OODA Super Speedway
In a traditional OODA loop your mental models of the world are used. Your view of a situation, with your experience and history. But because humans are social, a large part of our mental constructs are connected with other peolpe. Religion, economic relationships or even just being married create a shared construct. It is impossible to look at humans as individuals, we have to make connections with the larger groups.

Swimming Upstream The Information Flow
In this posting we are connecting the notion of grouping together (fish schooling) and the flow of information as control and adaptive strategy in the fish pond.

Management And Meditation
This is the first posting that goes into the subject of “How-to”. I tried to avoid it. But in this case I can run, but I am surely unable to hide. I have to make the connection between training your mind for adaption and meditation.

Stratification: Organizational Structures In A Pond
In this posting we introduce a view on organizational structures using The Fish Pond. It provides an alternative perspective in answering the question whether we should have flat organizations, pyramidal organizations or something in between. We use the process of pond stratification as illustration.

Lessons From The Pond For The Project Workforce
As projects start and end within organizations the demand for employees fluctuates. It seems that in certain times the workforce is just too small to handle all tasks, and in slow times many employees are doing nothing. This article provides two insights: 1) Hibernation: After Busy Times, Leave Them Alone; 2) Recruit During Economic Winters.

Go To The Spike And Become Adaptive
The image we like to have of our understanding of globalization is the one popularized by Thomas Friedman, that of a flattened world, in which economic development or potential are equally spread all over the world. Although we would love to believe this, the reality is different. “Globalization has changed the economic playing field, but hasn’t leveled it”, argues Richard Florida is his article “The World Is Spiky”.