I asked this question to three Project Managers experienced with agile practices and traditional approaches.

Jesse Fewell, JesseFewell.com

“PMI CEO Greg Balestrero has been talking a lot lately about moving the Project Management field away from performance-to-plan and toward value-delivery. Often the key barriers are stereotypes about Agile (“renegades who do what they want”) and Lean (“doing the same amount of work with fewer resources”).

In the end, every organization wants to “deliver value early and deliver value often”, and that is what Agile is all about. As a result, you find many organizations quickly sign on to experiment with Agile.

The difficulty comes when Agile starts to create transparency and accountability. Most organizations are not used to that, and will go through many “growing pains” that will either slow down or completely stop an Agile adoption effort. For example, the modern Project Manager is called upon to fill many roles at once, which masks a lot of confused responsibilities in the organization.

When the Project Manager starts pushing more decisions onto the sponsor, and more accountability onto the project team, things can get awkward and frustrating. But you have to go through that discomfort in order to grow. “No pain, no gain”.

Convincing organizations to “Go Agile” is not so hard. The greatest difficulty is convincing organizations to “stay Agile.”

Craig Brown, BetterProjects.net

“Project managers can’t convince an organization or senior management to adopt Scrum.

The owners of the project have to want to change. Project managers can simply provide Scrum as an option. Someone needs to have an urgent and important problem that they both see intellectually and feel emotionally.

IT managers and project managers are much more likely to feel the pain and seek help via agile methods than operations project managers or non-IT executives. The IT folk are at the end of the delivery chain and so when things go wrong at any stage of a project it is usually discovered at the IT delivery end.

If you are dealing with IT manager only, you’ll find kindred spirits who want to throw off the shackles of dysfunctional process.

If on the other hand you are dealing with people who don’t usually work on projects, or people who only deal with the front end of projects (initiation, requirement specification, and maybe design) then you’ll have a harder time convincing them of the need for change. They aren’t feeling the pain.

Recently I read a paper by a project manager who implemented scrum at a Queensland government department. It is here (PDF); (discovered here).

You’d think senior execs would want a change, but their business isn’t IT and they have process experts and auditors who are used to working a particular way. Convincing them to change is possible, but you have to be the right person with the right levels of trust and so on.”

Bob Tarne, Zen-Pm.blogspot.com

“I think each organization is different and therefore there could be different reasons for why organizations should adopt Scrum/agile. In the situations I’ve been in the biggest benefit for adopting agile is to increase the speed of delivery. I’ve worked with organizations that get to caught up in analysis/design.

They try to get answers that aren’t available yet and build the system around that, finding that they need to go back and make changes, which slows things down. Since change is inevitable, you need to spend less time trying to lock down the design up front and build your process to quickly identify and accept the changes.”

Image by Army.mil.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - How To Convince An Organization To Go Agile? is a post from: Project Shrink.

In Episode 19 of The Project Shrink Podcast I am talking to Dave Logan about Tribal Leadership. Dave is a best-selling author, an expert in cultural transformation in the workplace, a senior partner at CultureSync and on the faculty of the Marshall School of Business.

He co-authored the book Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization. This book describes a ten-year, 24,000-person study that shows corporate leaders how they can use their tribes.

You can watch the episode below or follow this link.

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Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Tribal Leadership: Build A Great Organization Leveraging Natural Groups is a post from: Project Shrink.

Managing projects is all about finding balances, finding the right touch for the right occasion. Jerry has has identified 6 of these balances and calls them “gray areas”.

He answers the following questions:

• How can one meet the needs of individuals and the needs of the organization?
• How can you maintain a sense of order without compromising productivity?
• How much can you trust the people on your team to do what they’re supposed to do?

You can watch the interview below or follow this link to YouTube.com.

You can find more information about Jerry on his company website, or you can visit his blog.

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Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Managing The Gray Areas With Jerry Manas is a post from: Project Shrink.

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. With change and with projects come the tidal movement of need of labor force. Most projects will be done in times of change, when economic forces are up or down. Times of stability don’t call for much projects.

Hibernation: After Busy Times, Leave Them Alone

Photography by Akk Rus.

Businesses go in cycles and each cycle demands a different caliber of staff; like each season imposes different demands on fish ponds. Fish hibernate during winter and it is not recommended to feed them during hibernation. At water temperatures below 50 degrees fish become almost motionless, hibernating in the deepest and warmest part of the pond.

Businesses go into hibernation and for long spells sometimes. Do we expect employees to hibernate during this people? Some employees will have low resiliencies and will tend to hibernate any way. Fish hibernate for purpose.

Many fish pond managers make mistakes that are repeated by many business managers.

“During their hibernation period fish should not consume food at all. Too often an odd ball day occurs where the pond water warms a bit with a spell of unseasonable weather. The fish get a little active around the surface of the pond so their owners feed them. The net effect is when temperature returns to normal the fish begin to float on their sides on the pond surface in an attempt to process the food that their bodies cannot handle.” (source)

Transient time may tempt some managers to make the wrong decisions and actually to kill their businesses. Employees are more stressed during change, during projects the intensity of work is increased. True project people know the cyclic effects of projects and take that into consideration. They go full throttle when needed, because they know they can rest later. Management should know: after busy times, leave them alone. Don’t keep them busy with stupid tasks, give them leisure, pleasure and relaxing time. Everybody will win this way.

Recruit During Economic Winters

Photography by FiskFisk.

Before you can make use of employees, you first have to recruit them. Stocking your pond. Timing of populating a fish pond is a crucial factor for the survival of fish in a pond. Stocking a pond in mid-summer should be avoided. High water temperatures and low dissolved oxygen may weaken fish being transported. Sudden temperature changes can cause fish to go into shock and die. When stocking fish, transport water and pond water temperatures should be equalized by slowly adding pond water into the transport container. It is the conditioning of fish that adapt them to the new environment. Better still, is to add the fish to an experimental tank for some time before transferring them to the fish pond to ensure that the fish are healthy. An unhealthy fish is not expected to interact with other fish and its environment in a healthy way.

The economic conditions under which you are recruiting can have a large impact on the quality of the new employees. Fish can be conditioned into being adaptive. The conditioning of employees is not different and should follow similar steps. “I think that conditioning your employees to expect change, to live in an era of change, and to embrace it in a positive way rather than fight it, is an important theme in almost every industry,” Marc Hebert, executive vice president of Sierra Atlantic, said.

These facts and the image provided by the Fish Pond Metaphor prompt us, the authors of this article, to propose a different recruitment and keeping pattern of staff. When business goes down it might be a better idea to recruit or keep staff that have been conditioned for hard times. Experiences in meeting suffocating problems are highly desirable in such situations. This conclusion is reinforced by the observation that the single constant in business is resistance to change. We are all creatures of habit and will continue doing the things that we are doing unless those habits are reformed in some manner. People who have the ability to survive hard times and business downturns are always needed because no business will avoid occasional lengthy downturns.

The idea of placing fish in a tank prior to their transfer to the fish pond suggests another dimension for time management. We need enough lead time to select the appropriate employees and to put them under test to monitor their healthiness and readiness for the job. Rather than adding employees directly to projects or business we may consider putting them first in a simulation chamber to monitor their behavior. Only candidates who perform well may be later added to the “work pond”.

The key to successfully developing such a program is to follow a proven recruiting process for the positions you need to fill in a timely manner and in a way to prove that performance of recruits would meet future challenges.. Resist the temptation to omit steps, because shortcutting the process can shortchange your results.

Questions

These are two lessons we see in The Fish Pond. But what is your opinion on this matter?

• Do you hibernate or do your people get rest between jobs?
• What is the best time to recruit?
• How do you “condition” new employees?

Please share your thoughts and opinion. It is highly appreciated and helps us to make the material more valuable for everyone.

Ali Anani got his PhD in chemistry in the UK (1972). As of 1981 Dr. Anani got interested in applying scientific approaches to economic and social issues.

Bas de Baar works as a Project Manager for over a decade. Since 2001, he has been the editor of SoftwareProjects.org, a popular website dedicated to Software Project Management.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Lessons From The Pond For The Project Workforce is a post from: Project Shrink.

In this posting we will 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 will use the process of pond stratification as illustration.

Photography by Cubbie n Vegas.

Stratification of fish ponds (click here for illustration) means having different layers or levels of water type (level of oxygen, density, e.g.). These levels are not fixed as the environment of the fish pond changes during daytime and seasons. Depending on the circumstances this layering will change. The environmental conditions demand differences in layering to create a stable eco-system in the pond. In other words, the stratification serves a purpose. However, if certain circumstances take too long, negative consequences can occur. Also tinkering with the ecosystem to eliminate some layering can have negative consequences.

The management lesson provided: there is no ideal fixed hierarchy or organization structure, only one that should be adaptive to environment.

Unlike sea water, fish ponds do not allow for the free flow of water resulting in the stratification of their water. During summer, the heat and relatively calm weather causes pond water to stratify into layers. There is a less dense, warm, upper layer that is exposed to the sun and atmospheric oxygen, a very thin layer where temperature and density changes rapidly, and a cold, denser, lower layer that receives little sunlight and does not mix with the upper layers. Because it does not mix, the bottom layer has no incoming oxygen to replace what is used by bacteria that are decomposing dead animals and plants on the bottom of the pond. This process is called stratification.

As the summer progresses, the lower layer usually loses its oxygen. If a storm carrying cold rains causes the pond to turn mix suddenly, the de-oxygenated water in the lower layer can reduce the oxygen level of the pond enough to cause a fish kill. This stratification is particularly severe in ponds with dense growths of blue-green or “scum” algae on the surface. The colder water may become oxygen- deficient due to interaction with certain elements in the pond bottom and lack of
photosynthesis by phytoplankton at greater depths.

“Pond stratification with turnovers can become a problem in ponds because the deep bottom water has no to low oxygen levels. When the barrier breaks, the oxygen-rich surface water mixes with the oxygen-poor or even oxygen-deficient bottom water. This can result in severe oxygen depletion with a fish kill. Pond turnovers happen quickly, and you should be prepared to handle a low oxygen situation.” (source)

Too much layering in a small work pond will deny the lowest layer with oxygen.

There are two complementary problems addressed in this case: the lack of oxygen, and the sudden addition of oxygen.

Aeration of fish ponds to supply the lower layer with oxygen to support life, for example by pumping, is essential; otherwise a self-kill phenomenon will be experienced. The worms and bacteria, which help keep a pond clean cannot live and the pond’s nutrients are then recycled from the sediment. This forms a layer of dirt at the bottom which serves as a fertilizer for weed and excessive algae growth. It could also cause large fish kills (source). In this case the lesson is clear: lower level employees need aeration to survive in a work pond much more than they need it in a copious working space. Unless this condition is fulfilled, mass destruction to the organization where they work might happen. By making the analogy to the Filter and Drainage story, too much layering (or shielding the team of from outside influences) disturbs the needed flow of “fresh” trust entering, and the building up of toxins.

Adding oxygen might be beneficial as indicated. But this should only be done if the mixing will not make oxygen deficiency all through the pond. Normally, the bottom layer is prone to oxygen deficiency. Flattening this deficiency by mixing all layers will be counter productive if deficiency of oxygen will make the new emerging homogeneous layer oxygen-deficient. This will lead to mass kill.

This means that we may have multi levels of organizational structures and each level must have assignments in parallel to the prevailing work conditions and their possible changes. The integration of these levels and the flow of information must be initiated to satisfy the prevailing work conditions. The issue is we may tolerate few layers to distribute our resources even though one layer will be deficient. Trying to distribute the resources equally will make the whole organization deficient leading to its killing.

In conclusion, sometimes layering is needed for protection, making sure that deficiencies or not spread all over the place. Sometimes layering is just adding handicaps, like limiting the flow of information and trust.

Ali Anani got his PhD in chemistry in the UK (1972). As of 1981 Dr. Anani got interested in applying scientific approaches to economic and social issues.

Bas de Baar works as a Project Manager for over a decade. Since 2001, he has been the editor of SoftwareProjects.org, a popular website dedicated to Software Project Management.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Stratification: Organizational Structures In A Pond is a post from: Project Shrink.

The mental model a person has of the world determines his behavior and therefor his effectiveness within the environment. The agility of his brain affects his resilience to change. Training the brain for flexibility, learning the brain to switch assumptions, move from holistic to isolated views is something achieved by meditation. Despite the joke in the first paragraph, meditation is not a out-of-this-world technique. You can also look at it as an intense form of concentration and reflection.

The benefits are multiple. It helps you to be relaxed. It enables you to focus more, observe the environment without drawing instant stereotyped conclusions. When you have a clear mind, your judgment is far more effective than when you are tired and you cannot stop the chatter inside your head. My suggestion is that you take a look at meditation techniques. Start with simple breathing exercises and crank it up a notch when you feel like it.

Paul Konasewich even goes a little further in stating that the three secrets to peak performance leadership are good eating habits, proper physical condition and meditation.

Before you get all defensive on how this links to complex situations and problem solving with a team, I urge you to download my report on the use of systems thinking to analyze project problems. It outlines a technique to assess complex situations with a team. It attempts to circumvent any bias towards perceived causes by creating a holistic and open minded process.

Ahum! Be all Zen.

Now instead of my Gantt chart I will be using a little brass gong to synchronize the teams flow.

Make jokes about it. It is a good way for technical oriented, difficult-to-show-emotions, work-is-war men that we are, to deal with this issue. Now find yourself a spot where nobody can see you, and float free like a bird.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Increase Your Management Skills By Meditation is a post from: Project Shrink.

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”.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Introducing The Fish Pond is a post from: Project Shrink.

by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

In Fish And OODA Loops we introduced fish schooling as an important part of the Fish Pond Metaphor. Schooling mimics human tendency to organize and view our selves in groups of people. This leaves the question of how individual fish operate within a school resulting in one organic adaptive entity? Our preliminary answer is the topic of this posting.

Photography by Mr. Bologna

When fish pack together in a school their movements are tightly coordinated without one central fish giving orders. The school can make very sharp turns adapting to any threat in the environment. Speed is of essence. Be slow and you are dead. The fish on the outside of the school sense the threats. If enough outside fish make a certain turn the rest follows automatically.

Tightly packed bundles of protruding hairs, called a neuromasts, encased in a jelly-like sheath, are scattered around the head and body. Most are concentrated in two canals along the sides of the fish called lateral lines, which run from the head to the base of the tail. With the slightest change in pressure, the tiny hairs bend. The fish senses the movement of the objects around it, and quickly responds. (source)

The faster information is transferred through the whole school, the better its adaption. However, this is not the entire story. If the fish act upon any piece of information that hits their body the movement of the school gets slow and slight chaotic. By focusing mainly on the fish in front of them, you get this tightly packed movement. The fish seem to swim upstream the information flow.

As a result, the macroscopic behaviour of a school, such as its steering behaviour, is closely related to the transmission of information within the school … In particular, a sharp turn due to the synchronized movements of a majority of individuals in the school is related to the tendency of an individual to receive information about its neighbours mainly in front of it. This kind of synchronized movement is easily observed in natural fish schools such as sardines or herring. Their synchronous behaviour sometimes gives the illusion of a single large organism, which is said to be a defence strategy against attack from predators … Individuals in natural fish schools tend to follow the motion of their front neighbours, a tendency called front-priority … This front-priority tendency means that individuals in natural fish schools tend to receive information from their front neighbours. (source)

Instead of looking at information as some kind of package that is lying around somewhere, we have to view information as a stream.

We have to view information as a flow rather than as a thing. Online learning is a flow. Its like electricity or water. Its there, its available and it flows. Its not stuff you collect. I don’t see myself sitting in my home collecting jars of water. I use the water as it comes. If you think the internet as an environment that is moving and shaping all around you, then you will have a better attitude to be able to handle the flood of information that is coming at you (source)

The constant flow of information is dripping and feeding the OODA loop. If not enough information is flowing in, the image of the environment is incomplete. If too much information is entering the loop one drowns in an overload of information. And finally, the quality of the flow is important to our adaption skills. Poor or false information can be even more destructive than no data at all.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Swimming Upstream The Information Flow is a post from: Project Shrink.

By Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

After reading about OODA loops and Social OODA some of you (yes you!) might have had one big question: What the heck has this to do with fish? In this post we will go back to the Fish Pond and explain the connection. Well, we’ll try.

Fish do not simply float around in a tank. Although they once in a while bump into glass walls, they are able to find food, detect other fish and perform other cases of interacting with their environment. Fish in general can sense changes in the environment either by vision, by smell, sound and by the sensitivity of the skin (changes in water pressure, acidity and temperature). Yes, if fish want to communicate, they blow bubbles.

Photography by Sergis.

In a pond or ocean fish will continuously sense their environment, make something of that information and change their behavior if needed. This is an OODA loop. We can discuss to what level a fish uses a mental model to make explicit decisions. But at some level, conscious or at a more hard-wired biological level, information is processed into action. For fish the speed of which they can make use of the latest information is essential. Be too slow and your a fish stick.

A useful aspect for our metaphor is that some fish are social. They group together for a purpose. They travel in schools.

“Fish travel in schools because they are programmed by evolution to know that safety lies in numbers. Should a hungry predator approach the group, the first line of defense begins with the many confusing silvery flashes or mesmerizing stripes that make it difficult to focus on a single fish. Schools also seem to make finding food an easier task. And some fish schools are more like street gangs, patrolling their territory and running out any trespassing intruder. “

Photography by Suneko.

This does sound familiar to our previous discussion on clustering. We group together for economic reasons: it is easier or even essential to get life’s necessities being part of a mob instead of being on your own. The other reason for forming clusters is social: it determines our position in the world, it is how we make a stand for our selves while protecting our brain against the complexity of the world.

In the metaphor we link the two reasons for schooling (food and protection) respectively to the notion of economic and social clustering.

In our first posting of this series we started out with this question:

Imagine a piece of pacific ocean: the fish, the water, the vegetation, the currents, the depth, the enormous width of it all. And now imagine you put four glass walls side by side in the ocean, to isolate a small column from surface to bottom. What happens?

What happens to schooling if you put a few fish in a more confined space like a tank?

If a pair of schooling fish are kept in a community tank, one of them will eventually begin to dominate, nipping at its companion’s fins, pursuing it mercilessly and bullying it to the point of exhaustion. To find relief, the weaker fish is often forced to hide, especially during mealtimes. After a short time of such torment, the weaker of the two commonly succumbs to disease and inevitably dies. But having only one of a kind does little to solve the problem. The inherently social fish may seem lonely, keeping to itself in a corner or hiding most of the time. Or, it may attempt to play with its tank-mates of another kind, terrifying them or damaging their fins.

Keep remembering this line: Practices perceived as best practices become worst practices under changing environments.

Ali Anani got his PhD in chemistry in the UK (1972). As of 1981 Dr. Anani got interested in applying scientific approaches to economic and social issues.

Bas de Baar works as a Project Manager for over a decade. Since 2001, he has been the editor of SoftwareProjects.org, a popular website dedicated to Software Project Management.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Fish And OODA Loops is a post from: Project Shrink.

By Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

In our previous article we painted the image of people walking on the OODA highway, continuously performing OODA loops, interacting with the environment, in the search for information packages that help them adapt to changes. In this posting we want to extend this notion to the use of social OODA loops.

Image by kk+

Humans are social. A group of people interacting with each other has to be viewed in a social context. (Human) needs are all expressed in comparison of other members of the globe. That is why they are considered social. In this context we also consider the concept of group affiliation. Group affiliation is what it is all about in our lives. During your life you are a member of a lot of social groups, by default, by choice or by force (…) The group memberships determine how we see ourselves in the whole of society, it determines our identity. (source)

If we want to have a proper understanding of how groups of people adapt to different situation, we need to have a look at how resilience is created within a social complex system. Making the system social affects the OODA Highway view at two levels:

• the effects on the mental constructs we use in the observe step;
• as a driving force in our behavior as a goal to satisfy.

Curtis Gale helps us explaining the first aspect by his introduction of social OODA loops. He points out that in a traditional OODA loop the orient phase is assisted by mental models and experiences from the individual person.

Image by PhatIcCommunion.com

But in the context of social systems being affiliated with a certain social group brings a specific set of mental constructs with it. If consider yourself religious, you are guided by a different mental model than when you are a Darwinian. The notion as that these mental constructs are shared among the members of the social group.

Image by PhatIcCommunion.com

The effectiveness of adaption in social complex system can be considered depending on the quality and amount of mental constructs a person has as its disposal. Like people on the previous OODA Highway, who were eating information like PacMan for their survival, our social PacMans must have food too.

We are proposing the concept of social capital as being the central available element that expresses the effectiveness of resilience and adaption within a social system. Although there are a lot of definitions going around for this concept, it provides the notion that a higher value shows better access to other people, to either share, exchange or in an other form influence shared constructs. A definition that comes close in reflecting this aspect: The individual and communal time and energy that is available for such things as community improvement, social networking, civic engagement, personal recreation, and other activities that create social bonds between individuals and groups. This mirrors our observation that people are forming social clusters.

Closely related to social capital are social networks. If you are better connected, you are more likely to have a larger social capital. This turn us to the question on how social capital is distributed among the system. The information OODA Loop and the Social OODA loop interact. E.g. Information exclusion might lead to social exclusion, which in turn affects social interactions. The network effect was ably recorded by Buchanan. This effect leads to the spiky and flattened social landscape, in which agents experience differences in their ability to observe and gather information depending on their location on the landscape network organization. Moreover, a network organization depends only weakly or not at all on the actions or character of their individual members. In other words, your own individual actions have no real impact on the whole, its your place within the network, who you know, that makes the difference.

The question turns into if information is not evenly distributed would they result in uneven social OODA loops? Or, will social networks produce different landscape of interactions than that of the information network? It turns out that social networks behave similarly. If we take a look at how social structures have evolved over the centuries, you can see that we went from a flat distribution to a long tail.

Image by PhatIcCommunion.com

The social network occurs in steps, much like an assembly line. Most systems designed by man are sequential. Branching operations, however, have a more involved structure: they contain feedback loops, branches and bifurcations, and jumps from one linear sequence to another.

Electronic social networks introduce new parameters to the complexity of interactions. The speed of interaction and the removal of the impact of direct feelings are noticeable factors. Feelings impact the quality and frequency of interactions on the network. Good feeling affects actions and these in turn affect outcomes. To get good results you need to create good feelings. A leader who is emotionally intelligent will induce loving feeling among his staff, and this will in turn produce likeable outcomes.

Although we insinuated above a direct relationship between social capital and the level of connectivity in the social network, in reality the dimensions are a little more complex, and we used this sample just for illustration. E.g. the location in the network is a balance between direct bonding and keeping a little distance. Some possible negative effects like too strong bonding, exclusion of outsiders, bullying of deviants and resistance to change are associated with being in a center of a social network and are not contributing to adaptability.

The process of social interactions is complicated and may bifurcate into new directions. These interactions might unfold novel ideas. The Long Tail Distribution is an outcome of these positive interactions. To give one example, a publishing company might have a book that is selling very well (a spike) and another book that does not sell very well. By recommending the low-selling book (flat sales) to the readers of the high-selling book customers might be tempted to buy the book and spur its sales. Social interactions are impacting our economic lives as well. The landscape of the emerging social communities is having an impact on the economic landscape. However; all interactions are based on observing (information collection), which leads to visualization of the new situation (orientation) and then to decision making and acting.

This OODA loop has a long tail distribution, and accordingly social interactions and economic interactions are likely to have the same distribution.

Ali Anani got his PhD in chemistry in the UK (1972). As of 1981 Dr. Anani got interested in applying scientific approaches to economic and social issues.

Bas de Baar works as a Project Manager for over a decade. Since 2001, he has been the editor of SoftwareProjects.org, a popular website dedicated to Software Project Management.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Social OODA Super Speedway is a post from: Project Shrink.