“Here is (roughly), the project management problem I am trying to solve. Say that you have a software development project with coders in multiple countries, time zones, and cultures. How does the project manager direct and control a project without lengthy status meetings at ungodly hours? We need a system that does not require direct communication or direction – this is where OODA helps. Next we need clear ground rules for team participants. This is the theory I am working out. My draft nickname for this system is “Two Yeses”.”

Image by Dalbera.

I am drafting a response for a couple of days now It will not fit in the comment box.

I will need a series of blog posts instead.

“The Project Shrink Information Flow”-series… or if someone knows a more hyped, over-the-top title, drop me a comment.

1. Two Ways Of Communicating: Broadcast And Peer To Peer
2. You Can Decide How You Communicate: Rules Of Engagement
3. Does Transparency Lead To More Ethical Behavior?
4. Purpose Of Communication: What Is It Good For?
5. Filtering Information: Why You Cannot See Everything
6. Quality Of Information: Do You Trust Your Cousin Vinnie?

Before I start, i hope you check out the interesting discussion over at Project Lifestyle.

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. - Solving The Project Communication Problem 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.

By Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

In this part of the Fish Pond Series we will show how people are on a continuous OODA loop going through life. The effectiveness is depending on the amount of solid processed information. While traveling through life you have positions where you have more of the proper information and places where you are lacking information. The road of life in this way becomes flat and spiky.

Projects, organizations and even society in general are all abstractions of the interactions of individuals. When looking at the behavior of a person, we see that from a very high level perspective this is determined by:

• who he is: personal traits of the individual, as gender, age, race;
• how he is at the moment: the emotional internal state of a person;
• what he wants: the desires that drive human behavior, and
• what he thinks will happen: a normal person doesnt jump of a cliff, just because he expects that he will be dead when he hits the beach. A normal person will not slap a very huge and muscular guy, just because he assumes he will get his own butt kicked afterwards. In our everyday life, and in our project life, we are guided by our perception of what we think might happen, our expectations.

When dealing with complex environments it is the last item we have to cultivate to handle situations properly. This is what makes a human complex system adaptive. A complex system is a large collection of interacting parts or entities. In the language of complexity theory, the parts are commonly referred to as agents. These interacting parts create the environment in which they exist. Further, by constantly acting and reacting with one another, the parts continually perturb and modify their environment (source Michael Hugos).

Failing to adapt to change may be fatal and may lead to self-killing without agents being aware of the repercussions of their acts. The fish in a fish pond illustrate these points clearly. Fish in their confined pond space excrete ammonia, which changes the acidity of the water of the pond leading eventually to the killing of the fish! Variation of the temperature of pond water is also stressful to the fish. Truly, some fish adapt to the changing environment in different ways such as by changing color, hiding and schooling yet their respond to changes is not fast enough and may result in the Winter Kill and Summer Kill of the fish.

The OODA Loop And Information Processing

To have a complex system that is resilient to changes, that has a mechanism to transform itself and to be able to adapt to the environment it needs feedback from the environment. Feedback information needs processing and communicating to other agents. To do this an agent has to go through the OODA loop. John Boyd, a famous military strategist, created the so-called OODA loop to give us structure when discussing this subject. The loop consists of four steps: Observe, Orient, Decide and then Act.

This insight was made by Brian Walker et al. These authors ably mention that in general terms, complex systems possess the ability to process information. The systems sense their environments and collect information about surrounding conditions. They then respond to this information by using a set of internal models to guide their actions. The systems may also encode data about new situations for use at a later date. This characteristic is closely related to the adaptation that occurs near the edge of chaos.

When looking at how a cluster of people (organizations, projects, society) adapts to changes, we have created the image of individuals operating on continuous OODA-loops. Observing reality based upon absorbing information from other agents and the environment. The processed information is used for orientation in combination of the mental model a person has of the reality. Based upon the expectations resulting from both previous steps an agents decides what to do. Like a little PacMan we are eating information packages on the OODA highway. The higher the amount of high quality information, the better our effectiveness in adaption.

Long Tail Distribution Of Information

There is another emerging attribute of information apart from the use of OODA loops in processing information. This is related to the uneven distribution of processed information. Information is wealth and wealth follows the Long Tail distribution. Let us first show a graph that is commonly known as The Long Tail Graph.

The long tail is the colloquial name for a long-known feature of some statistical distributions (Zipf, Power laws, Pareto distributions and/or general Lévy distributions). The feature is also known as heavy tails, power-law tails, or Pareto tails. Such distributions resemble the accompanying graph.

In these distributions a high-frequency or high-amplitude population is followed by a low-frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually “tails off.” In many cases the infrequent or low-amplitude events”the long tail, represented here by the yellow portion of the graph”can make up the majority of the graph.

Information is a type of wealth and is expected accordingly to follow the same distribution. Recent studies show that this is the case indeed. The Internet has drastically lowered the cost of stocking and distribution of information (music, news, art, etc.) and physical products. This opened the way for long tail applications (TV spreads out on the Web).

These findings tempt us to conclude that the information landscape is both spiky (large differences between the amount of processed information available to agents) and flattened (everybody has the same amount of information available). Not everyone has access to the same amount of processed information. Every agent has different amounts of information available depending on its location and place in time. As we get more information the spikes will still be their, but the shares of the agents of the long tail might get more flattened.

The information OODA Loop is spiral as on the completion of one OODA loop new loops initiates from a new level and again this loop upon completion initiates a new loop from a different level. The information OODA loop is spiral with spikes and flat zones.

Read part 2: Social OODA Super Speedway

Further reading
A solid study that relates OODA loop to information processing is that reported by Schechtman.

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. - Driving On The OODA Highway is a post from: Project Shrink.